If This is a Christian Nation, We're Doing a Crappy Job of It

It seems lately that everything's going to hell. We've got a gusher of oil spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico, We've got major flooding in Nashville, and the state of Arizona has lost its mind. If there was ever a need for divine intervention, now would be an excellent time. Luckily, we had a National Day of Prayer yesterday, which cleared everything all up. We're good now.

Nah, just kidding. While the devout prayed for grace from on high, some clown crashed the stock market by trying to type with xylophone mallets. Turns out our economic well-being rests in the ability of some Wall Street wizard to type an "m" instead of a "b." Yay for the power of prayer.

I know I'm going to lose some of you here, but I've always said the only difference between praying and doing nothing is intention. If yesterday was an example of what a people can accomplish when they all get together and pray, then my advice is to knock it off -- you aren't helping. Want to get something done? Get up off your knees and do something.





Still, if there's one thing that religion teaches us, it's to believe in something despite all evidence to the contrary. This is why praying is a good thing, while not praying is a bad thing. It has nothing to do with effectiveness, that's just the way things are... because religion says so, that's why. And, since not praying is a bad thing, a ruling that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional is the worst thing ever. Hands down. So, despite the fact that this particular National Day of Prayer was an exceptionally bad day, it must be defended. And who better than those two luminaries of religious and political thought, Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly:



Yeah Bill, you walk into the Supreme Court and you see the Ten Commandments, so that means we're supposed to be all Judeo-Christian. But you also see the Prophet Mohammad, so I guess that means the founders wanted Sharia law too. And the image isn't exactly of the Ten Commandments, it's of Moses carrying the tablets -- you can only see Commandments six through ten [PDF]. So I guess breaking the first five was cool with the Founding Fathers. Finally, the frieze was created in the twentieth century, so pointing to it as evidence of what the framers of the Constitution wanted is complete BS. You can shut up now, Bill.

But let's pretend that the Horsecrap Twins here have a valid argument, that all evidence points to the Ten Commandments being the basis of our law, thus making us the most Christian nation this side of Vatican City. How good a job are we doing in this Christian nation business? How many of God's laws -- the Ten Commandments -- are our laws?

Let's look, shall we?

There are actually fourteen or fifteen commandments, but they were boiled down into a handy decalogue because the first one is just a statement ("I am the Lord your God") and a couple of the rest are redundant. Different religions break them up the redundant ones in different ways, but the main idea of all of them is the same.

First up, "You shall have no other gods before me/You shall not make for yourself an idol." I don't claim to be an expert, but I don't think that either of those is a violation of federal law. In using the Ten Commandments as the basis of our law, we fail here.

Next, "You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God." Again, seems pretty God damned legal to me. So far, no good.

"Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy." I seem to have noticed people working on Sundays without the cops arresting them. Totally legal. We're really starting to suck at this Christian nation stuff.

"Honor your father and mother." Please... there are TV sitcoms that revolve around breaking this one. Ray Romano remains at large.

"You shall not kill." OK, now we're getting someplace. Murder is totally illegal. War and capital punishment however...

"You shall not commit adultery." This one will get you in a court of law, for sure. But is it a violation of federal statute? It is not.

"You shall not steal." OK, I'll give you that one. Some would argue that there are forms of legalized theft, but that's another story. By legal definition, theft is a crime. Score one for God.

"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Perjury? Totally illegal. Lying in other circumstances? Usually not.

"You shall not covet your neighbor's wife." There's an entire industry devoted to coveting women. Hell, you're on a porn delivery machine right now. Set Google image search to unfiltered and type in "ass." You're not going to see a lot of donkeys. Thinking your neighbor's wife is hot? Totally legal.

"You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor." Not just legal, but actively encouraged. It's called "consumerism."

All told, if we're using the Ten Commandments as a basis for our law, we're doing a pretty crappy job of it. Only one is always illegal and most are always legal. Now how do you think Bill and Sarah would react to a piece of legislation outlawing covetousness or war? And if lying became illegal, they'd both need to find new lines of work.

So, can we get by without a National Day of Prayer? It doesn't seem to be working and it can't get any worse. Right now, the only purpose it seems to serve is to allow Christians like O'Reilly and Palin to pretend we're a Christian nation. Otherwise, it doesn't actually seem to accomplish anything at all. This Christian nation can't even manage to put together a system of Christian laws, what makes you think we'd have any better luck with prayers?

-Wisco


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Lieberman Tries, Fails to Save McCain from Himself

53 hours after Faisal Shahzad tried to set off a bomb in Times Square, he found himself in custody. This was on May third. On May fourth, The Hill ran the headline, "McCain: 'Serious mistake' if car bombing suspect was Mirandized." Neither the arrest nor the over-the-top reaction from the right took very long. At this point, it's pretty clear that -- no matter how successful an investigation into terrorism is -- some rightwinger is going to have a problem with it, because President Obama can't do anything right. The president could've sent a team back in time to take out Shahzad before he committed his crime and John McCain would complain that he was allowed to be born. The Republican Party's strategy has been to oppose everything and anything this president does and none have taken this strategy more to heart than John Sidney McCain. A man of irrational temper, McCain holds a grudge the way Gollum held his Precious. So, if Obama does anything, it's automatically the wrong thing. And it's John McCain who knows what's the right thing.

Except, as is so often the case, McCain's idea of "the right thing" is stupid beyond words. "Obviously that would be a serious mistake... at least until we find out as much information we have," McCain told Don Imus of Mirandizing Shahzad. "Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about."

See, here's the problem: being read your rights doesn't actually give you any rights you don't already have. Reciting the Miranda text -- "You have the right to remain silent..." -- merely informs you of your rights. So McCain's argument about "giving this guy his Miranda rights" is just plain dumb. Or is McCain arguing that there's no way for Shahzad to know his rights without being informed of them by the arresting officer? Because that would require us to believe that an American citizen never watched TV. Everyone knows their Miranda rights. Except, apparently, John McCain. Withholding the Miranda text would accomplish exactly nothing... Well, other than make sure that any confessions Shahzad gave would be inadmissible in court. I'm pretty sure that's a bad thing.





So, if McCain -- in the middle of a tough reelection fight -- said something dumb, that would be bad. McCain has a tightrope to walk here; he has to be just crazy enough and seem just ignorant enough to win the wingnut purity test of the Arizona Republican primary, but not so crazy or ignorant that he winds up spending most of his time in the general distancing himself from it all. Even in Arizona, the voters in the general election aren't as goofy as the voters in the primary.

To the rescue rides McCain's best campaign buddy, Joe Lieberman. John McCain makes a valid point, Joe says, people have way too many rights. The Supreme Court ruled in the Miranda case that not informing people of their rights was akin to denying them. And, since the Fifth Amendment protects you against having to incriminate yourself, clearly this is the problem. Maybe we ought to take away terrorist suspects' citizenship -- then they wouldn't have all these rights.


Which, of course, is wrong. Here's the text of the Fifth:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

So, unless you want to argue that only American citizens (and corporations) are "persons," Lieberman's idea solves absolutely none of the problems Joe and John want fixed. And never mind that, Mirandized or not, Shahzad's been singing like a bird, a problem doesn't have to actually exist in order to be fixed.

That fix comes in the form of legislation that would allow the US government to strip citizens of their citizenship. This way, they won't get those pesky rights -- which they have regardless -- and we don't have to worry about trying them in court -- which we would still have do. According to Greg Sargent, "You would still have the right to contest this in court. And if you did, the burden of proof would be on State -- not on you -- to persuade the court that your involvement with a terror organization is sufficient to justify taking away your citizen status."

"Bottom line: Lieberman's law can't keep you out of court against your will if you want to contest efforts to strip your citizenship," Sargent continues. "And chances are that if you were already facing other charges -- plotting or executing a terrorist act -- you would be simultaneously tried for that in civilian court, too, even as State continued to try to revoke your citizen status."

So there's your solution, a big pile of nuthin'. It wouldn't take away any rights, it wouldn't keep anyone out of court, it wouldn't even solve the made-up problems identified by Lieberman and McCain. The only problem it solves it solves by putting a fig leaf over McCain's kneejerk idiocy. But at least the wingnuts in the Republican primary will be mollified.

Or not. Lieberman's legislation gives the power to the State Department to do all this citizenship-stripping; i.e., the executive branch. John McCain and Joe Lieberman will be giving Obama -- who the Republican base thinks is a  Communist/Fascist Kenyan/Indonesian Pretender to the Throne intent on destroying America and is maybe even the Antichrist -- the power to strip people of their citizenship because someone says they're a terrorist. The teabaggers have convinced themselves that Obama thinks they're all terrorists, so you can imagine all the lunacy this would unleash. This doesn't seem to have occurred to the teabaggers yet, but they're slow on the uptake. Give them a minute. It'll come to them eventually. Someone like Sarah Palin won't catch it, but someone like Michelle Malkin will.

And how will this play in the Arizona Republican primary? You don't have to be a genius to figure that one out. You just have to be smarter than Joe Lieberman and John McCain.

-Wisco


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The Media, Neo-Nazis, and Arizona

The "papers please" law in Arizona has brought a lot of attention to the state. The media, always with an eye out for conflict, has spent most of their time looking at what both sides are saying about it, but very little time looking at the law itself. Someone in charge of the teevee machine decided to invoke the "equal time for nutjobs" rule. So we get one side saying one thing, another side saying something completely contradictory, and close to zero factchecking to see which side is right. So for the sake of argument, if one person points out that the law is unnecessary, while another says that illegal aliens are stealing peoples' brains to build a robot army, the TV media would treat these as equally valid points -- because that's "fair" and "unbiased." Television journalists must never allow themselves to be biased by the facts.

So, we don't find out that the law is, in fact, most likely unconstitutional. Or that the concern is about the rights of legal citizens, immigrants, students, and tourists -- not about protecting criminals from the consequence of crime. See, those things aren't as much fun as boiling the story down to two simplistic points of view, casting it as a difference of ideological opinion (rather than a difference in independent fact), and putting the whole thing across as a war of personalities, in the form of talking heads yelling at each other. So one side says one thing, the other says something completely different, no one bothers to point out what is and isn't true and, by the time the segment is over, you're just as uninformed as you were before you watched it. Oddly, watching two people with contradictory talking points isn't all that enlightening.

But if the media is doing a crappy job of reporting what's actually in the new law, they're also doing a bad job of showing who both sides actually are. The Republican Party itself is torn on the issue, making the left vs. right/"he said, she said" reporting more than a little dishonest. It's not left vs. right, it's left vs. half of the right, with the rest of the Republican Party running away from the issue as fast as they can. One reason for this is that many Republicans see the Hispanic vote slipping away rapidly. Another is that they know who a lot of the people behind the law are -- and they don't want to have anything to do with them.





If there's a center to the nativist universe right now, it's Arizona. Nativists are English-only, "America for Americans" types on steroids. In fact, in large part, they're white supremacist thugs. Hero of the nativist movement Joe Arpaio has a large fan base in the neo-nazi crowd. In fact, there's evidence of a working relationship between Arpaio and a supremacist group known as United for a Sovereign America. Likewise, the author of the bill that would later become the "papers please" law, Russell Pearce, also has a close relationship with the group's leader, J.T. Ready.

But it's much harder to put across the media narrative of an issue that's merely a difference of political opinion when you show who the sides in the argument actually are. On no cable network anywhere will an interviewer get caught dead saying, "The neo-nazi has a point. What's your response?" to a lawyer for the ACLU. So that whole "neo-nazi" thing becomes not so important. Without the conflict, you don't get the ratings. And, in an argument between self-avowed racists and just about anyone on the planet, the racists lose by default -- no more conflict. So we'll just keep this little skinhead thing under our reporter's hats. No sense in distracting everyone from a good, telegenic fight with a lot of facts.

And facts would be these people's deadliest enemy. One of the big catalysts of this law was the murder of a rancher in southern Arizona. Illegal alien drug smugglers killed Robert Krentz, because that's just what illegal alien drug smugglers do. Footprints led from the scene to the nearby border. Krentz death became the flag they rallied around, whipping up a "no one is safe" attitude. Rightwing blowhards went from claiming that illegal aliens "killed a rancher" to saying that they're "killing ranchers." Undocumented drug smugglers were everywhere and, if you didn't pass this law, they would kill you -- guaranteed.

But, again, the facts aren't the friend of the supremacist:

Arizona Daily Star:

The killing of a Southern Arizona rancher that sparked an outcry to secure the border was not random, and investigators are focusing on a suspect in the United States, the Arizona Daily Star has learned.

High-ranking government officials with credible information spoke to the Star, citing a desire to quell the fury over illegal immigration and drug smuggling set off by the shooting death of longtime rancher Robert Krentz on March 27.

So there actually isn't any evidence that the killer was illegal and the trail to the border wasn't the trail of the killer. In fact, at no time did authorities say they suspected an illegal immigrant -- everyone else did, to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria. But, as I say, facts are the enemy of the supremacist, so facts are out of the conversation.

On the other hand, another crime by someone not unknown has been getting a lot less attention.

Southern Poverty Law Center:

The relentless demonization of immigrants by hard-line nativist groups was punctuated by murder last year, when the leader of Minuteman American Defense (MAD) and two followers were accused of shooting a Latino man and his 9-year-old daughter to death in Arizona. The crime set off a firestorm of mutual recriminations among nativist leaders — but it did nothing to slow the movement’s growth.

The double murder took place near the town of Arivaca last May, when MAD leader Shawna Forde and two of her confederates allegedly stormed into the man’s house before being driven away by shots fired by his wounded wife, who reportedly later identified Forde as one of her attackers. Officials say that Forde wanted money to finance her group and believed her victims were cash-rich drug dealers.

Again, if this were to become part of the conversation, the weight would fall down against the pro-"papers please" side. So we'll just keep that to ourselves. Did I mention that Forde was also associated with Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), another group that backed the "papers please" law? I probably should.

So the "he said, she said" reporting going on right now requires a great deal of willful ignorance on the part of the media to sustain it. Illegal aliens probably didn't kill Krenz, but nativists did kill a father and a daughter. And, while the anti-immigrant side argues that undocumented Hispanics are invading America and taking over, Forde's motive in the killing was to help fund "a revolution against the United States government" and, one would assume, take over.

But hey, that's not what keeps the narrative going. The media has no interest in seeing a fight ended. There are no ratings in that, so there's no money in it. If the argument were suddenly to be revealed as "nazi vs. not-a-nazi," it's pretty obvious who would win here. So you just ignore all the nativism and supremacism and present the whole thing as an honest difference in policy. That's not to say that for some it isn't a legitimate policy issue. It's just to say that, for others, it's all about hate. You should know that, but you aren't being told.

Remember, the job of the TV talking head isn't to inform you. The job of the TV talking head is to get you to watch TV.

-Wisco


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Sophistry, FOX News Style

Greg Sargent calls it one of the "Great moments in Fox News." Others call it a straw man. FOX ran the headline "White House Fends Off Specter of Katrina in Federal Response to Oil Spill" yesterday -- for a story that included no real comparisons to Katrina. FOX is famous (or infamous) for their use of the rhetorical straw man "some people say" -- as in "some people say President Obama is a Communist" or "some people say President Obama was born in Kenya." Of course, it's not untrue, some people do say these things. But those "some people" are ideologues, lunatics, and rightwing media blowhards. Some people also say that the sun orbits the Earth, but no one gives a damn what these people think, because they're crazy.

That word you may be trying to remember from your school days right now is "sophistry." Sophistry is -- in a broad sense -- the use of rhetorical tricks or near-logical arguments with the intention to mislead or deceive. Some people do say that the oil spill in the gulf is Obama's Katrina, but those people work for an organization called "FOX News."

This is another little trick FOX pulls -- FOX News interviews FOX News and confirms for FOX News that FOX News agrees with what FOX News is reporting. Huckabee, like Hannity, hosts a FOX News show. It's at this point that "sophistry" may be leaving your mind and that "circle jerk" is probably entering it.





"Fox claims [the] White House is 'fighting off a growing perception' that the Gulf spill is 'Obama's Katrina,'" Greg Sargent comments, "a perception that Fox is of course doing its best to encourage."

FOX isn't alone here. The entire rightwing media has launched a campaign to get people to think this is "Obama's Katrina." Rush Limbaugh has also made the comparison -- that'd be the same Rush Limbaugh who said that the chaos following the flooding was basically the fault of blacks in the area, not Bush's slow response. Of course, because he doesn't have to defend Bush anymore -- or because he knows his audience has the memory of a goldfish -- he can pretend that he always said the catastrophe was all the president's fault and that Obama is now just as bad as Bush was. It's a minor victory; at least Limbaugh is finally, though indirectly, admitting that the nightmare that was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was Bush's fault. That is, until he needs it not to be again. Conservatives' memories can be very protean that way. One narrative morphs into a completely different one, then back again when re-revisionism is required.

So how true is the oil spill-Katrina comparison? Not very. Unlike FOX, I won't leave you to rely on my say-so by interviewing myself. Media Matters has a good timeline of the oil rig incident, as does Talking Points Memo. But Michael Shear makes the case simply in a Washington Post article:

The gulf oil spill is no Katrina, in which 1,836 people died amid the near total devastation of one of America's great cities. In the case of the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 11 people perished, but the worst impact of the oil on animals and shorelines have yet to be fully felt.

There will be no armed gangs committing racially motivated murders. There will be no incidents of police brutality. Thousands won't be trapped for days in a sports arena without food, water, or medical attention. As bad as this oil spill is -- and it's bad -- it can't compare to the chaos after Katrina. Anyone making the comparison is insulting the victims of that national tragedy, both the living and the dead.

I often say that the right is without shame. And it's propaganda campaigns like this that lead me to that conclusion. Anyone willing to look at the "Obama's Katrina" claim objectively can see that the argument is a hot, steaming bowl of BS. But right doesn't care, because the people they're talking to aren't interested in being objective, they're interested in seeing their biases confirmed. And, if that confirmation requires an astonishing leap of logic and a complete abandonment of personal and national memory, then so what? It's not like they give a crap about truth. If they did, they wouldn't watch FOX News or listen to Rush Limbaugh. They tune in because they get the lies they want to hear. You want to hear about how Barack Obama is actively trying to kill us all? Great! We've got Sarah Palin talking about Death Panels after the break.

Maybe the White House did screw this up -- I have no problem believing that. But so far, all the evidence I've seen shows that BP was lying every step of the way. If the White House failed to get a handle on this early, it's because they made the mistake of believing a corporation with literally billions of dollars of legal culpability on the line. To say this would be an error in judgment would be a titanic understatement. Corporations, like the rightwing media that serve them, lie -- it's what they do. Expecting them to be forthright about it -- with that much money on the table -- would be a mistake you couldn't adequately describe without a lot of swearing.

But to say this is Obama's Katrina goes beyond hyperbole and exaggeration and into insult. It's an insult to our intelligence and it's an insult to an entire region of this country.

-Wisco


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