Sam Harris is Nuts

I mean, when James Dobson sounds more rational than you do, how irrational are you?

"We are at war in this country with an enemy who wants to destroy us," [Dobson] said. He stressed that only a small minority of Muslims believe that their faith justifies violence, "but let's say 4 percent of Muslims want to kill us ... . That's 48 million people who want to bring us to our knees."

Robert McCloskey redux

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

Or the Alberto Gonzales version:

The Justice Department backed away Wednesday from a denial by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of responsibility for the treatment of a Canadian who was seized by U.S. authorities in 2002. The man was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned and beaten.

Asked at a news conference on Tuesday about a Canadian commission's finding that the man, Maher Arar, was wrongly sent to Syria and tortured there, Gonzales replied, "Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria." He added, "I'm not aware that he was tortured."

The attorney general's comments caused puzzlement because they followed front-page news articles of the findings of the Canadian commission. It reported that based on inaccurate information from Canada about Arar's supposed terrorist ties, U.S. officials ordered him taken to Syria, an action documented in public records.

....

Asked about Mr. Gonzales’s remarks, Mr. Arar said in an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio that American officials had sent him to Syria despite his protests that he would be tortured there.

“The facts speak for themselves, you know,” Mr. Arar said. “The report clearly concluded that I was tortured. And for him to say that he does not know about the case or does not know I was tortured is really outrageous.”

"Land where my fathers died/Land of the pilgrim's pride/From every mountainside/We should be ashamed."

Dodging the Bullet

We may be spared the worst after all:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist signaled yesterday that he and other White House allies will filibuster a bill dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of detainees if they cannot persuade a rival group of Republicans to rewrite key provisions opposed by President Bush.

Frist's chief of staff, Eric M. Ueland, called the dissidents' bill "dead."

With Congress scheduled to adjourn in nine days, delaying tactics such as a filibuster could kill the drive to enact detainee legislation before the Nov. 7 elections, a White House priority. Bush faced still more problems in the House, where GOP moderates Christopher Shays (Conn.), Michael N. Castle (Del.), Jim Leach (Iowa) and James T. Walsh (N.Y.) publicly threw their support behind the bill opposed by the White House. The four Republicans told Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) that any House bill must maintain the dissidents' principles.

As Holden points out, there is a serious criminal liability issue here for W.

Last one out of the Administration, please turn off the lights.

"Them thats got shall get

Them thats not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news"

The Bush administration's faith-based initiative is reaching only a tiny percentage of the nation's black churches, most of which have limited capacity to run social programs, hampering the initiative's promise of empowering those congregations to help the needy, according to a study to be released today.

The national survey of 750 black churches by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that fewer than 3 percent are participating in the program, which funnels at least $2 billion a year in federal social services spending to religious organizations.

"Mama may have, papa may have/But God bless the child thats got his own":

While many of the churches surveyed had an interest in assisting those in need and frequently offered small-scale programs such as food pantries or used-clothing giveaways, most had neither the money nor the expertise to do more -- or even to seek more resources.

WaPo sets it up as a "liberal v. conservative" issue, and leads with what black churches aren't doing. But that isn't really the issue:

"The thing is that the churches that are most likely to actually do social outreach or social ministry are liberal churches, they are not conservative churches," said David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the center who conducted the study. "Those churches may have significant reservations about the program. But if the money is there, they are going to take it. They are the ones who have the capacity and the infrastructure to get grants and administer them."

Now, this happens to be right, but right for, I think, the wrong reasons.

"Liberal" churches tend to be white, upper-middle class, and well off. "Conservative" churches tend to be dominated by lower income people, and this is true even in mega-churches. It's no coincidence that the volunteer training in Houston last fall, to prepare people to help with the New Orleans residents then living in the Astrodome, was held at the biggest and most politically influential Southern Baptist church in town, or that the main organizing body arranging and placing volunteers, was supported primarily by the Southern Baptist Convention. It's not that the Southern Baptists are more concerned with social justice issues than the much smaller UCC, or than the non-denominational Lakeway Church: it's that they have the resources to do the job. Even with the huge campus Second Baptist in Houston has, the volunteers had to be trained in shifts, and the training went on across several days. Almost no other church in town, or any facility, could have handled so many people so eager to help.

Second, government money comes with strings; lots and lots of strings. Unless you have the clout of Halliburton, accounting for that money is a very serious task. Wealthier churches, which may not be large but are likely to be populated with managers comfortable with the accounting procedures that please a government agency, are more likely to take on the task of applying for and accounting for government grants than a working-class church. It isn't that the latter can't do it; only that they are logically quite less likely to. As the article says:

Most of the nation's estimated 50,000 black churches are led by pastors who work other jobs full time and have little more than administrative help in running their churches. The survey found that more than one in four black churches had annual revenue of less than $100,000 and half had revenue of less than $250,000. Only 12 percent reported taking in more than $1 million a year.

"The survey reveals for us the breadth of churches in the African American community, and it shows how churches that already have capacity have a leg up on churches that may do some good things" but are not in a position to do them on a larger scale, said Harold Dean Trulear, a professor of religion at Howard University who was an adviser on the study.

I can tell you from my own experience that a church with a budget of less than $100,000 cannot afford a full-time pastor, and those below $250,000 can only afford a pastor, and little more. And the pastors I know were all too busy with their own flock to do much more than hope the bills got paid every month. It really is a matter of "facts on the ground," not of theology, or will, or even political philosophy.

Too true to be good

The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away:

Seeking a deal with Senate Republicans on the rules governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects, the White House has dropped its insistence on redefining the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Conventions, members of Congress and aides said Tuesday.

....

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican on the Armed Services Committee who has supported the president’s legislation, said Tuesday morning that the White House had agreed to work within the War Crimes Act to refine the obligations under Common Article 3.

“There’s agreement on the goal,” Mr. Cornyn said, “that is, that we continue to comply with our international treaty obligations and all of our domestic laws, but at the same time not tie the hands of our intelligence officials.”

And here's where the whole thing turns into kabuki:

Common Article 3 guarantees humane treatment to combatants seized during wartime. The two sides agree that the article’s language prohibiting “outrages upon human dignity” is too vague and leaves military and C.I.A. personnel uncertain about what techniques they may use in interrogating detainees.

I think if there's a question, maybe the techniques shouldn't be used, huh? No mention of that, however. No mention of the fate of habeas corpus, either. Missing, must be presumed dead, I'd say.

Of course, it has to be said, that this has been tried before, and the Supreme Court neatly disposed of the attempt in an almost off-hand manner in the Hamdan decision. Having already extended habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees, I don't see the court allowing Congress to remove it again. But such are the moves of this kabuki dance where our leaders seem determined to destroy the Republic in order to save it.

Of branches and logs and bonfires of vanities....

Sam Harris has gone completely off the rails. Call it the curse of writing a best-seller; but his fame has gone to his head:

You believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you think they are true. Before I point out some of the problems with these beliefs, I would like to acknowledge that there are many points on which you and I agree. We agree, for instance, that if one of us is right, the other is wrong. The Bible is either the word of God, or it isn't. Either Jesus offers humanity the one, true path to salvation (John 14:6) or he does not. We agree that to be a true Christian is to believe that all other faiths are mistaken, and profoundly so....

I have written elsewhere about the problems I see with religious liberalism and religious moderation. Here, we need only observe that the issue is both simpler and more urgent than liberals and moderates generally admit. Either the Bible is just an ordinary book, written by mortals, or it isn't. Either Christ was divine, or he was not. If the Bible is an ordinary book, and Christ was an ordinary man, the history of Christian theology is the story of bookish men parsing a collective delusion. If the basic tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim surprises in store for nonbelievers like myself. You understand this....So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.

Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 3-5.

And if you think that is arrogant, you haven't read the foreword:

While this book is intended for people of all faiths, it has been written in the form of a letter to a Christian....In Letter to a Christian, I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms....I have little doubt that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian Right to be as troubling as I do. It is my hope, however, that they will also begin to see that the respect they demand for their own religious beliefs gives shelter to extremists of all faiths....Even the most progressive faiths lend their tacit support to the religious divisions in our world. (pp. vii-ix)

You have to let this sink in to truly appreciate it. There are two kinds of people in Harris' world: those who believe in the cartoonish version of Christianity he describes, and those who believe nothing at all. The rest are just fools who delude themselves into thinking the world doesn't cleave into such a simplistic dichotomy. It's a weltanschaaung that can't even be labeled sophomoric. It's a thesis that would get him dropped from Philosophy 101.

On the same day I saw that book, I shelved A Significant Life, a book with a foreword by Joel Osteen. That should tell you all you need to know about it. In a celebrity besotted culture, we all (presumably) long for "a significant life." Many of the reports I hear about mothers of suicide bombers indicate they are young men (mostly) who want: yes, "a significant life." It's no accident Osteen's bestseller was titled: Your Best Life Now. We no longer want to be just happy: we want to be important. We want to matter. We want to be significant.

Kierkegaard saw this coming almost 200 years ago. He saw that we would long for meaning, significance, importance, attached not to our lives, but to our existence. Thoreau touched on it when he said "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." There is a spiritual hunger in human beings, a need that is not satisfied by power or wealth or comfort or even physical security. You don't need to agree with Augustine that "our hearts are restless until they rest [in God]," to agree that humans have restless spiritual hearts. So when Sam Harris says he thinks he's got the answer, and yet he makes no reference to Kierkegaard, or Sartre, or Henri Nouwen, or even the sociologist Robert Wuthnow, excuse me if I'm lump him in with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (company he would welcome; their recent books on religion are the first two of his 10 books he recommends for further reading), and dispense with the whole lot of them, none of whom seem capable of forming a coherent argument. In fact, there's a parable about that; about seeing the splinter in your brother's eye, and ignoring the log in your own. As I've mentioned before, objects reflected in a convex surface are much closer than they appear, and if you are close enough to see a speck in someone else's eye, what you are probably seeing is simply something in a very tiny mirror (Jesus was a subtle one, wasn't he?).

So I discard them all. Hitler didn't kill 6 million Jews because he was on a religious mission. He didn't turn Europe into hell and drive Stalin's troops to the gates of Leningrad because God told him to, and Rommel didn't drive deep in to Egypt in his zeal to make it Christian again. Osama bin Laden doesn't urge his minions on with assurances that he's just gotten the word from Allah on what their next mission should be. He justifies his attacks as a defense of Islam, but in his mind, he is reacting to injustices done against his beliefs and his sense of right and wrong. That doesn't justify a thing he does, but he doesn't act because he thinks God tells him to destroy the infidel wherever the infidel might be, or because only Muslims who kill will make it into the afterlife. And even George Bush didn't go to war so he could destroy non-believers and non-Christians.

I know how Harris puts his theories together, but they are pasted together with spit and short pieces of string. He takes the most absurd and ridiculous positions possible, and then posits them as the only ones either possible or viable. His ridiculous "either/or" about the validity of Scripture and the consequences of Christian belief or non-belief don't even pass the laugh test. It is a reductio ad absurdum that is an insult to anyone with a passing knowledge of world religions or just of Christianity or even simple logic. Like Dennett and Dawkins, when it comes to the subject of religion Harris simply seems incapable of applying the simplest principles of logic to his reasoning. Worse, he ignores the real problems of modern life in favor of advocating a solution that can never be imposed, and charging entire nations with crimes simply for the way they think. He tries to conflate the two subjects in his introduction, which makes the entire argument even more farcical. Thomas Merton may have found profound similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, but Sam Harris hasn't even figured out what Christianity aspires to, much less does he present credentials equivalent of Huston Smith's which make him knowledgeable enough about world religions to generalize about them as he does.

There are profound problems in the world, and many of those problems are the result of modernity, especially of the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the physical results of empiricism (technology prime among them). But rather than address those very real human problems, problems my Pastoral Care teacher reminded us were "messy," just as human life is messy, he creates a straw man of his own delusions and proceeds to beat it into fragments. It reminds me of another line from Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Except Harris isn't even hitting the branches; he's just flailing away madly at the air.

By the way, on p. 85, Harris asserts that all adherents to Islam are dangerous, crazy, and violent. His support for this sweeping generalization that encompasses over 1 billion people? I will quote his explanation: "Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith." The emphasis is in the original. Reflect on the fact that, were this statement made about Jews, or African Americans, or even Asians or Mexicans, he would be vilified as a racist. The difference here is...?

I'll be glad when this kind of nonsense has run its course.

Follow the Bouncing Non-Sequitur

Res ipsa loquitor, as the lawyers say:

"The sense outside of the U.S. is that the United States is responsible for many of the failures in Iraq, first by going in mostly alone and then by incompetent administration," said Jon Alterman, a Mideast expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"The problem with the way he's talked about democracy in the Middle East is not that people see it as undesirable," Alterman said, "it's that people see it as naive. He needs to persuade cynical people that not only is he sincere, but it's achievable, and here's what they need to do to make it so."

Interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America" Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked about increasing indications of hostility toward the United States and the Bush administration in other parts of the world.

"We've had to do some difficult things," she replied. "We've had to make clear that the war on terrorism has to be fought, has to be fought on the offense."

"While people may not always agree with our policy, they love the United States," Rice said. "This is still a beacon of hope for the world."

Why do I imagine a flustered housewife trying to distract her guests in the living room from the family crisis in the kitchen by offering more donuts?

Speaking of the terms of debate

The Senate bills would still gut things like habeas corpus (the right to be brought before a tribunal and charged publicly with a crime, and so to challenge one's detention).

It isn't just torture or Article 3. The pending bills would remove habeas corpus. That isn't even a matter for compromise. And where are the Democrats on that? Once again selling our birthright for a mess of pottage? I have no doubt the Supreme Court would return it, eventually. But this issue is not just about who wins and who loses, or who's calling the tune of the dance.

This issue is about justice. Equal protection. Due process. Habeas corpus. That last goes back to the Magna Carta, it is part of the great golden thread of Anglo-American jurisprudence:

Throughout the web of the English criminal law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt subject to ...the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception’.

This famous statement of the nature of the legal burden of proof in criminal trials is, in effect, simply a restatement of a fundamental presumption that underpins our criminal justice system namely, that a person is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty. In McIntosh v Lord Advocate [2001] 3 WLR 107, Lord Bingham of Cornhill referred to the judgment of Sachs J in State v Coetzee [1997] 2 LRC 593 where the significance of this presumption was explained. The learned judge said:

‘...the more serious the crime and the greater the public interest in securing convictions of the guilty, the more important do constitutional protections of the accused become. The starting point of any balancing inquiry where constitutional rights are concerned must be that the public interest in ensuring that innocent people are not convicted and subjected to ignominy and heavy sentences, massively outweighs the public interest in ensuring that a particular criminal is brought to book...Hence the presumption of innocence, which serves not only to protect a particular individual on trial, but to maintain public confidence in the enduring integrity and security of the legal system’.

And without habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence is completely useless. Without it, we have no reason to believe in our legal system. Without it, we have no legal system at all; just a system of fears, driven by ideologies and opinions.

This is why it is about justice, and the debate must only be about justice.

Change the terms of the debate

And start here, because this will be all over the news today, simply because the Canadian government said it:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

Ooops. The US government, of course, has no comment.

But simply Google "Maher Arar" and you find a wealth of information, and realize this story is 3 years old, and it touches on the concept of "extraordinary rendition" (which is itself a violation of international law). (And here is a link to the Canadian Commission itself). There are several ways to look at this, not least of which is how the US relates to foreign nationals and to other countries:

“The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion,” Justice O’Connor wrote in a three-volume report, not all of which was made public. “They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.”

It also shouldn't be lost on anyone that Mr. Arar was suspect because he was Muslim.

The police described Mr. Arar and his wife as, the report said, “Islamic extremists suspected of being linked to the al Qaeda movement.”

The commission said that all who testified before it accepted that the description was false.

If this is a "clash of civilizations," we seem to be the ones determined to make it so. And why is that? Because "9/11 changed everything." No, seriously:

According to the inquiry’s finding, the Mounted Police gave the F.B.I. and other American authorities material from Project A-O Canada, which included suggestions that Mr. Arar had visited Washington around Sept. 11 and had refused to cooperate with the Canadian police. The handover of the data violated the force’s own guidelines, but was justified on the basis that such rules no longer applied after 2001.

It gets worse. The US sent Arar to Syria because we knew the Canadians would be "soft."

[I]n an interview last year, a former official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria had been based chiefly on the desire to get more information about him and the threat he might pose. The official said Canada did not intend to hold him if he returned home.

Turns out the threat was he spoke to another man about where to get used ink jet cartridges. You can't make this stuff up; at least, until Kafka, you couldn't imagine this stuff would come true.

The issue is justice. Pure, simple, plain. We can drop all the quibbling about safety and torture and secret evidence. The issue is justice. We do justice to others, and we expect justice from them. World War II was fought because the Japanese unjustly attacked us at Pearl Harbor, because the German unjustly attacked Europe. That's what we tell ourselves, anyway. We helped draft and adhere to the Geneva Conventions because we stand for justice. We participated in the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals because we stand for justice.

It is about justice. Nothing more, nothing less. It has to be. That's the ground, terms, and boundaries of the debate: what are the requirements of justice? Say it; repeat it; insist on it. It is about justice.

Because without justice, what do we have to offer the world?

What Keith Olbermann Said

Well, here's where we are now, and it takes a former sportscaster to tell us the truth. Keith Olbermann on the President's press conference last Friday:

The President revealed this last Friday, as he fairly spat through his teeth, words of unrestrained fury directed at the man who was once the very symbol of his administration, who was once an ambassador from this administration to its critics, as he had once been an ambassador from the military to its critics.

The former Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

This President's response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?

“If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic,” Bush said. “It's just -- I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

Of course it's acceptable to think that there's "any kind of comparison."

And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary.

Even if Mr. Powell never made the comparison in his letter.

Some will think that our actions at Abu Ghraib, or in Guantanamo, or in secret prisons in Eastern Europe, are all too comparable to the actions of the extremists.

Some will think that there is no similarity, or, if there is one, it is to the slightest and most unavoidable of degrees.

What all of us will agree on, is that we have the right -- we have the duty -- to think about the comparison.

And, most importantly, that the other guy, whose opinion about this we cannot fathom, has exactly the same right as we do: to think -- and say -- what his mind and his heart and his conscience tell him, is right.

All of us agree about that.

Except, it seems, this President.

With increasing rage, he and his administration have begun to tell us, we are not permitted to disagree with them, that we cannot be right. That Colin Powell cannot be right.

And then there was that one, most awful phrase.

In four simple words last Friday, the President brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five-and-a-half years - the way the terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.

“It's unacceptable to think," he said.

It is never unacceptable to think.

What is most disturbing is that it takes Keith Olbermann to point this out. Not David Broder, or Tim Russert, or any of the other self-appointed guardians of our national discourse. It is disturbing because Mr. Olbermann is stating the obvious. It is disturbing, because he has to; because no one else with such a platform, seems capable or willing to.

It now shows us a President who has decided that of all our commanders-in-chief, ever, he alone has had the knowledge necessary to alter and re-shape our inalienable rights.

This is a frightening, and a dangerous, delusion, Mr. President.

If Mr. Powell's letter -- cautionary, concerned, predominantly supportive -- can induce from you such wrath and such intolerance, what would you say were this statement to be shouted to you by a reporter, or written to you by a colleague?

"Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Those incendiary thoughts came, of course, from a prior holder of your job, Mr. Bush.

They were the words of Thomas Jefferson.

He put them in the Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Bush, what would you say to something that anti-thetical to the status quo just now?

What would any of us say? We have long forgotten how revolutionary words are. "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?" What would the social order be if we followed that simple dictate? "A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you are to love one another." Or if we treated that with the gravity with which we reverence the "Great Commissioning," and "one another" meant everybody, without let, without limit, just as we preach Jesus did, just as we proclaim God does.

Justice is the revolutionary kerygma of the basiliea tou theou. Blessed are the poor; blessed are the mourners; blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. Justice is the plea and demand and requirement of the prophets. But justice is so revolutionary, justice makes us so vulnerable, that in order to save the Republic our President wants to destroy our justice system. But injustice is the base struggle of the world. What is the violence about in response to the Pope's speech? Is it inherent in Islam? Or is it a sense of injustice? Even World War II is understood as arising from the unjust armistice of World War I, which is why Germany was rebuilt after the second war, not punished again. Justice, justice, justice!, should be the cry. But justice may be just what this President fears:

On this newscast last Friday night, Constitiutional law Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, suggested that at some point in the near future some of the "detainees" transferred from secret CIA cells to Guantanamo, will finally get to tell the Red Cross that they have indeed been tortured.

Thus the debate over the Geneva Conventions, is in fact not about further interrogations of detainees, but about those already conducted, and the possible liability of the administration, for them.

That, certainly, could explain Mr. Bush's fury.

Perhaps. Despite my pessimism yesterday, and Olbermann's pessimism in his essay, John McCain is showing signs of being will to talk to the White House, but no signs that he is weakening in his position. Perhaps there is still reason to hope this country will not decide torture is preferable to justice. But in the name of justice, and as a demand for justice, this much, at least, must be insisted on:

Apologize, sir, for even hinting at an America where a few have that privilege to think and the rest of us get yelled at by the President.

Anything else, Mr. Bush, is truly unacceptable.

UPDATE: On the torture issue and who will blink first: apparently Bush did.However, the devil is in the details, and this law is about more than Article 3:

An administration official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity surrounding the negotiations, said the new language only addresses a dispute over the nation's obligations under the Geneva Conventions, which set the standard for treatment of prisoners taken during hostilities.

So we shall see. Not even sure that's light in the tunnel, yet.

Of Xenophobes and Texans

This is almost a throwdown from Pastor Dan; at least, it stimulated me to look into this question.

My personal experience with this extends to the immediate aftermath of Katrina. As people were pouring into the Astrodome, I went to training to work there as a volunteer. I never had to go to the 'Dome (it emptied out before my turn came up), but the outpouring of concern and desire to help evident just at the multiple training sessions was truly overwhelming (almost as much so as reliving some of it just wandering through my archives from last September. You want to really get up close and personal, you have to go back to Scout Prime's work.). I did have a slight experience with crime, probably attributable to people from New Orleans, at one of my jobs. Many people from NO were moved into West Houston (a neighborhood, not a city, mind you), and there was some tension in the schools and in the neighborhoods; but it all pretty much ended by the spring, as many of the displaced left to go back to NO, or just moved on, or were even assimiliated.

This issue, in other words, is old. This MSNBC article is from March, and I think it's an exaggeration. Consider, for example, the impact of 150,000 people on an SMSA of over 5 million. Frankly, who notices? In the '90's alone Houston added 950,000 people, and that growth rate is expected to continue. 150,000 more, some of whom have already left, is chump change.

And where are all these "evacuees"? Well, let's just say they aren't in River Oaks or the Memorial Villages:

The southwest corner of this city is one sprawling low-rise apartment complex after the next, a once-hot real estate area that died with the 1980s oil bust only to be reborn in the '90s as a low-income, high-crime neighborhood. Now it's Katrina turf.

Note, again, that article dates back to February, 2006. And are they really wrecking the quality of life in town?

And now, police say that southwest Houston, long recognized as a problem area, is facing another manifestation of the Louisiana exodus: Katrina crime.

Crime, of course, is crime. The article goes on to note most of the suspects and victims of this "crime rise" are former residents of Louisiana. Sad the crime is up; but let's keep it in perspective, shall we? In fact, except for the story Pastor Dan has from the LA Times, everything I found in a quick Google search dates from the beginning of the year. The rise in crime, in other words, is already old news. But it's being exploited by very nasty people for, shall we say, obvious reasons? And need I say, they speak for very few of us? That "Texas" still derives from "Tejas," and means "Friendly"? Because we may have our faults, but turning guests into scapegoats is not one of them.

Just to note

one seldom sees it said this bluntly:

Used boots fetch $3 and old salt-and-pepper shakers bring in a buck at a makeshift flea market along Highway 27, presumably not what President Bush and Republicans have in mind when they herald a vibrant economy.

Times are "very good for the rich and very, very bad for the poor" who "can't afford to live," laments Larry Mitchell, 43, a now-and-then merchant peddling his wares recently in a submarine sandwich shop parking lot. He says the middle class is "having a hard time."

In the Ohio River Valley, where people decry high gas prices, stagnant wages, lost jobs and factory closures, many don't buy the claim that the economy is humming along.

I'm sure the Dow Jones is up overall, and housing statistics are good, and the unemployment number is being trumpeted somewhere. But Mr. Mitchell is right, and he says all that needs to be said. All I can say is: where are the Democrats on this? It's being handed to them on a platter, and they insist on treating it like the head of John the Baptist.

Maybe if they'd quit acting like Salome....

He says that like it's a bad thing

Although the Pope has now realized that terms like "evil" and "inhuman" are not universally recognized as the language of reason, the full text of his lecture at Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg (via The Mad Priest), is worth reading, if only to see how distorted many of the news stories were about it.

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the Logos". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, (Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.) John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands. Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone ; nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul, worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

There is a lot to chew on here, especially the concept that the Reformation itself was inherently unreasonable because it introduced "dehellenization" into European culture. Honestly, I had not idea the Pope was such a Nietzschean (not the philosopher, the scholar; Nietzsche was a philologist, a fascinating scholarly area, thoroughly German, IMHO, and deeply tied to yet another "recovery" of Greek thought, the kind of thing that runs through European culture like an alternating current, sometimes as the "artistic" impulse, sometimes as the "humanizing" impulse, almost always in an effort to control or ameliorate the "Roman" influence in Europe's culture; you know, the one that just wants to build things and run the world.) . I also have my problems with putting too much faith in the logos. That is a bit too Greek for me, although I understand its importance especially in the teachings of Aquinas and Augustine. Perhaps I just prefer Francis ("Preach the gospel to all the world. Use words, if necessary.") and remember that, toward the end of his life, Aquinas had a vision which, he said, made all he had written look like straw, and he never wrote another word. And I ponder long and hard on the end of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which is, for me, the end of the logos, but not its telos. And I consider that the logos also leads to the works of Samuel Beckett; so it is hardly, itself, the final safe harbor of human existence.

Which is not to say the Pope is wrong. It is to say his thought is actually quite interesting, and actually has been quite poorly reported. One can be forgiven, after reading this, for at least wanting to agree with the Most Rev Thomas Flynn, Bishop of Achonry, who "said yesterday: 'Muslims appear very sensitive about issues when it suits them. This was a lecture given to the staff and students at the University of Regensburg. It was a very intellectual, in-depth analysis of the situation in the world today. I am not quite sure that, if it was studied, there would be any offence found in it.' ...He added: 'Basically, I think the solution to the Muslim problem is that we should talk to each other.' " But perhaps we should start without calling the other side "evil" and "inhuman." Ya think?

Per the NYTimes article, there was concern in the Vatican before this lecture was delivered that:

it might be negatively received by Muslims or be misconstrued by the news media as an attack on Islam. And for many conservatives here, fearful of terror attacks in the name of Islam and rising Muslim immigration in Europe, the remarks of the pope — despite his own denial that he meant to criticize — amounted to a rare public discussion of a delicate question: whether, in fact, Islam is at the moment especially prone to violence.

There's also a concern, perfectly reasonable especially in the light of events, that the Pope's speeches aren't being properly vetted. I think the answer to that last concern, about Islam being prone to violence, has been answered in the affirmative. And the concern about what the Pope is saying as the Pope, not just as a theologian, is a legitimate one. It's a very different thing, to back a particular point of view and to speak, effectively, as the head of state. Ironically, that's a lesson George Bush has only belatedly learned, if at all. And, considering the context of the times, with Israel's invasion of Lebanon, its repressive maintenance of something resembling order on the West Bank, and of course the invasion of Iraq and saber rattling about Iran coming from the US, it's once again a chicken or egg question as to "who started it." And an even more legitimate question to ask: "Who cares?"

I'm fascinated by the notion that Christian humility stops at any possible threat to Christian institutions. NPR reported that the Pope fears a diminution of Christianity in Europe (in some ways the Pope is a few centuries too late, one has to say). An odd lack of faith in God, it seems to me, to be worried about the state of Christianity in Europe, as if that condition were solely dependent on human activity. This, indeed, is where I wholly part company with the Pope and perhaps with the Roman Catholic church (I know this worries them): is the church dependent upon God, or dependent upon humans? If, like the Desert Fathers, it is my responsibility to be faithful (not an entirely Protestant position, in other words) apart from the actions of the Church (which, as I say, is not an entirely Reformaed stance), is it my faith that saves Christianity, or Christendom (which the Pope seems concerned about preserving)? Or is it God who sustains all things, and my responsibility is merely to remain faithful to God? Seems to me the latter takes enough effort without my also shouldering responsibility for faith on earth by preserving an institution. But perhaps that is the ineradicable Protestant in me, that faith and the institutions of faith can ultimately part company, and one can survive. But, as I say, that was also the position of the Desert Fathers, so I think I am in good company.

Here is the text of the Pope's apology, and here is the statement the Pope's apology refers to. Despite the NYTimes coverage that emphasied how extraordinary this "apology" was, there are reports this morning it is not being universally received as a mea culpa. Draw your own conclusions.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Something too good to be true....probably is:

The Bush administration and three prominent Republican senators opposing its effort to codify broad standards for terror-detainee treatment gave signs of seeking compromise today, as both sides face intense political pressures over their positions.

“I think we can get there from here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the three senators, all with deep military backgrounds, whose resistance has stymied the Bush administration. Seeming to weigh his words, Mr. Graham added: “I’m willing to compromise. I hope common sense will prevail.”

Apparently common sense is in short supply; at least, the Administration is counting on that:

“I’m getting pounded at home by some people,” said Mr. Graham, a former active-duty Air Force lawyer whose state has a large population of active and retired military people. “The president wants to defend us,” the senator said people would tell him. “These guys are barbarians; why are you standing in the way?”

And Mr. McCain appears to have run a serious political risk. As a presumed Republican presidential candidate in 2008, he has worked diligently to minimize his differences with the Bush administration, and he has outspokenly defended its policy of remaining in Iraq for now. A break with Mr. Bush could carry a high political cost.

This is all starting to look terribly familiar.

The senators have opposed anything that might erode observance of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which bans cruel treatment. The Bush administration has said that it merely seeks to clarify its injunctions, including those against “humiliating treatment” and “outrages on personal dignity.”

John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, insisted today that the administration was not seeking to undermine Common Article 3, but wanted simply “to find the clearest and most concise way to implement it under United States law.”

I do appreciate the rather odd idea that torture can, in any sense, be labeled "progressive." I've been wandering through the archives, by the way. This issue has a reach far beyond CIA agents and mlitary personnel. For a history lesson, follow these links: "Torture is such an ugly word;" "Power Corrupts;" "Is it Safe?". Does, as Mr. Negroponte implies, torture even work? No. But let's not bring that up in this discussion, eh?

And of course, the Administration can always count on Senator Arlen "What Part of Spineless Quisling Don't You Understand?" Specter:

...the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said his staff members were meeting today with McCain’s staff and would meet on Monday with the staffs of Mr. Warner and Mr. Graham to seek a possible agreement with the administration.

“What I am looking for is a way to accommodate both interests,” Mr. Specter said on CBS, “and I believe that is possible.”

Torture on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, then?

Politics is set to triumph once again, because it will be long after the November elections before the courts declare any "compromise" a joke under Hamdan. In the meantime, in the immortal words of Bette Davis: "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

John Yoo Speaks

It's just too bad it didn't come sooner, so we could have better assessed his intellectual shortcomings. But this is an amusing argument. Watch carefully, as the shells move around and the pea is never revealed:

FIVE years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That’s because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals, and other aggressive antiterrorism measures, on a sounder footing.

Try as you might, you will never find a reference to the substance of the proposed legislation. You will never, for example, find an answer to Mr. Graham's question:

"Where in American jurisprudence do you find support for the concept that a person accused can be tried and convicted on evidence which that person has no opportunity to see, confront or rebut?” Mr. Graham wrote [to Condoleeza Rice].

Mr. Yoo can't be bothered with such trivial Constitutional issues: he has bigger firsh to fry:

But the president has broader goals than even fighting terrorism — he has long intended to make reinvigorating the presidency a priority. Vice President Dick Cheney has rightly deplored the “erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job” and noted that “we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years.”

Thus the administration has gone to war to pre-empt foreign threats. It has data-mined communications in the United States to root out terrorism. It has detained terrorists without formal charges, interrogating some harshly. And it has formed military tribunals modeled on those of past wars, as when we tried and executed a group of Nazi saboteurs found in the United States.

Remember: these are all good things. There is no basis for them in the Constitution, but such is the extraordinary power of the President in time of war, that not only should they be permitted, to deny them is to let the terrorists win! And what is the precedent for these extraordinary powers?

To his critics, Mr. Bush is a “King George” bent on an “imperial presidency.” But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive. Harry Truman sent troops to fight in Korea without Congressional authority. George H. W. Bush did not have the consent of Congress when he invaded Panama to apprehend Manuel Noriega. Nor did Bill Clinton when he initiated NATO’s air war over Kosovo.

The settled doctrine of Constitutional jurisprudence that Constitutional rights and privileges cannot be waived, and that non-Constitutional powers cannot be created, be damned! Two Democrats and W.'s Poppy all got to wage war as they saw fit, so W. gets to wage war on the American people as he sees fit! And just as W. thinks it's his goal to right the wrongs of the Baby Boomers of the '60's (it's Clinton's fault!), so must the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate be expunged from the national memory. No, I am not making this up:

A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a system of judicial or congressional supremacy. Perhaps this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that views the presidency through the lens of Vietnam and Watergate. But the founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress.

It is simply breathtaking to see such an analysis: it is without a shred of support in law, or history, or even jurisprudence. "[W]rong headed or obsolote legislation and judicial decisions" are to be "checked by presidential action"? What case of precedent, pray, does Mr. Yoo offer for this incredible and literally unprecedented legal theory?

Answer comes there none. Except it's Congress' fault for reacting to Vietnam and Watergate with the War Powers Act. Apparently that clause about Congress declaring war really meant war creates a Roman diktator who is given all power he thinks he needs to protect the country until hostilities have ended. Note there is no refernce to FDR anywhere in Mr. Yoo's "analysis" (one must use the term loosely here).

There is one reference to the Hamdan decision, but you'll be surprised to learn that was aimed at Congress more than the Presidency:

(This is why the Hamdan decision was less a rebuke of the presidency than a sign of frustration with Congress’s failure to update our laws to deal with the terrorist menace.)

Reviewing the history of the Hamdan case (aside from the ruling itself), this statement is breathtaking int is mendacity. Oh, and the real problem is not with Bush; it's with how the Presidency is perceived. The people, in other words, are the problem (you can't make this stuff up):

Unfortunately, much of the public misunderstands the true role of the executive branch — in large part because today’s culture transforms presidents into celebrities. On TV, a president’s every move seems central to the universe, so he has the image of power that far exceeds the reality. But as the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt, a liberal icon, argued, the presidency is inherently weak, while mythic things are expected of and attributed to it — like maintaining national security and economic growth.

How did we ever get that idea? And what is the solution? Trust him; he's the government:

Today many pundits and political scientists seem to want the president’s power to be the sum of his communication and political skills, his organizational ability, his cognitive style and emotional intelligence. It is almost as if any president who uses the constitutional powers allocated to his office to effect policy has failed, not succeeded.

But the presidency, unlike Congress, is the only office elected by and accountable to the nation as a whole. The president has better access to expertise from the unified executive branch — including its top secret data — than the more ad hoc information Congress develops through hearings and investigations.

I'm only surprised it doesn't end with: "Let Bush be Bush!" Although it practically does:

Congress has for years been avoiding its duty to revamp or repeal outmoded parts of bygone laws in the light of contemporary threats. We have needed energy in the executive branch to fill in that gap. Congress now must act to guide our counterterror policy, but it should not try to micromanage the executive branch, particularly in war, where flexibility of action is paramount.

So there you have it. The Idea has not failed; only the little people who keep getting in the way of the Idea. Governance by Ayn Rand is what is called for, and the sooner it is accepted, the better. The military, by the way, is having none of it. Start first with what Seymour Hersh said:

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom.

Here's what the NYT is reporting:

It was a stinging defeat for the White House, not least because the views of Mr. Warner, a former Navy secretary, carry particular weight. With a long history of ties to the military, Mr. Warner, 79, has a reputation as an accurate gauge to views that senior officers are reluctant to express in public. Notably, in breaking ranks with the White House, Mr. Warner was joined by Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a rare public breach with the administration he served as secretary of state.

I think it's a reasonable conclusion that the Pentagon is moving as far away from Bush as it can. At any rate, the CW in D.C. is slowly being left behind:

The thinking was that Mr. McCain, who was tortured as a Vietnam prisoner of war, would not budge, nor would Mr. Graham, a military lawyer and zealous guardian of military standards. That left Mr. Warner as the best potential target for the White House. But as he considered the consequences of the proposal, the chairman decided to stick to his guns, saying he believed the nation’s reputation was at stake.

“He is a man of the Senate,” said Mr. Graham, arguing that Mr. Warner’s stance spoke volumes because it went against his nature to have so visible a conflict. “He is also a military man and has thought long and hard about this.”

The only good thing that can be said about Mr. Yoo's legal advice: it is already in the dustbin of history. Which "May say 'Alas,/but cannot help or pardon."

Does anyone miss New Orleans?

NYT:

As billions in housing aid begins to flow here in the next few weeks, most of it will go to homeowners, who have been appointed by city officials as the true architects of this city’s recovery, despite the fact that roughly half the city’s residents rented housing before Hurricane Katrina.

Three guesses as to the race and socio-economic status of the majority of those renters, and the first two don't count.

“I want to come back, but who’s going to help me build my life?” asked Lionel Smith, 46, a longtime resident of the Lower Ninth Ward and a driving school instructor whose apartment building was destroyed by the floodwaters. “There’s this plan in place to take care of homeowners, but I’ve heard nothing about helping renters. Where are we supposed to live? Will they help rebuild apartment buildings?”

From a renter’s point of view, New Orleans has become off-limits to all but prosperous tenants, as rents have increased significantly in the pockets of the city that did not flood. Before the storm, the fair market rent for a two-bedroom unit in the city was $676; it is now $940, according to the Brookings Institution.

Before the hurricane, it would not have been unusual to find a two-story, three-bedroom house in Gentilly, a solidly middle-class neighborhood, renting for less than $1,000 a month. Today, that area, north of downtown toward Lake Pontchartrain, does not exist as a functioning neighborhood.

Obviously the same people helping Baghdad have been helping New Orleans.

Interestingly, Garrison Keillor's Homegrown Democrat is out in a revised edition. I suspect this is some of the new stuff:

"Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo. Secret prisons in the Middle East that our torture victims were outsourced to. One prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahatani, held naked in isolation under bright lights for months, threatened by dogs, subjected to unbearable noise, held underwater, and otherwise abused, so that he begged to be allowed to kill himself. When the Senate approved the Torture Convention of 1994, it defined torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." The administration defied Congress to enforce the law and Congress harrumphed and turned away. And so young American men and women, under pain of court-martial, are ordered to do disgusting things to helpless prisoners that might, should circumstances change in a few years, get them hauled up for war crimes, and if they are, they will not be joined in the dock by Secretary Rumsfeld or President Bush.

"The only word that describes this is evil.

"A career based on creating low expectations keeps sinking lower and lower. The national disgrace that was Katrina. The famous headline that said, BUSH: ONE OF THE WORST DISASTERS TO HIT THE U.S. Hungry black people huddled together in the Superdome, stretched out asleep between the goal lines, and a 911 operator broke into sobs telling what it was like to talk to little kids in flooded houses and tell them help was on the way when she knew very well that it wasn't--that until they realized it would be shown on national television, the administration didn't give a rip what happened to New Orleans." (Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat (New York: Penguin 2006), pp. 26-27. Emphasis in original.)

Clearly, they still don't.

Bottom looks like up

Kind of hard to read this and not think: "New Orleans. Gulf Coast. FEMA."

And also to wonder: "Have we hit bottom yet? How long until we get there? And just how low is that?"

Inquiring minds want to know; and are afraid we'll find out.

Of Houston and New Orleans and Katrina

Yesterday Democracy Now! was in Houston, talking, of course, about Katrina:

BRODERICK BAGERT: Well, the main issues we're dealing with today is a mode of operating on the part of FEMA. FEMA's theory of how people get back on their feet is that what they need is the maximum amount of anxiety and pressure for them to be sufficiently motivated to find housing and jobs. And since the month after the storm, when through the hard work and organizing of a whole leadership team from New Orleans that we started organizing in the Astrodome, we've been able to have housing in Houston. In fact, the largest and most successful public housing system set up in the shortest period of time was right here, under the -- with a lot of organizing going on and the direction of some local political leaders....

[O]ur country knows how to handle this kind of situation. We do so every year with foreign political refugees. And so, if people are from a war-torn area and are registered as foreign political refugees, then they have guaranteed housing for up to 18 months, job placement, case management, people who are coming from incredibly difficult situations and who don't speak English. And we do that for 50,000 to 100,000 people every year. We know how.

Now, unfortunately, that is not the program that's been in place for our own citizens. And so, what needs to happen is to move to a resettlement model, where people are given the same benefits, the same rights, the same kind of support that have been proven to be successful for the program that exists under Health and Human Services, the federal government, for foreign political refugees. It's a program that's so successful that it's invisible and seamless.

But FEMA is set up for a three-month disaster recovery model and has no capacity, has never had capacity, to deal with a disaster that doesn't fit those sets of rules. So what we have been pushing for and organizing for is legislation at the federal level, first of all, just to make sure that people don't lose housing, and in the medium to long-term, legislation at the federal level that creates this resettlement package for evacuees, where people are given guaranteed housing without this constant anxiety, job placement and job training programs, and healthcare, so that all the pieces are in place for people to gain sustainability and self-reliance. The majority of people who are here from New Orleans were employed back home: 67%. And now only 23% are employed, due in part to the kind of circumstances I’ve described, in part to some very direct and explicit discrimination around jobs that’s going on in the labor market right now.

Broderick Bagert is with The Metropolitan Organization, a Catholic church related entity, which gets local churches and other groups involved in social justice issues. It works with churches and local governments, volunteers and people, to make things better for its community. I did some work with them when I had a pulpit. It is hardly a "radical" or "fringe" group. When they speak, I listen. The entire interview with Amy Goodman is worth listening to.

Just worth noting

But this is how you call the Vice-President a liar:

[LARRY] KING: Your reaction to Vice President Cheney's assertion that the criticism of Iraq, the Iraq war, emboldens United States enemies and makes allies doubt American resolve.

[JIMMY] CARTER: Well, the vice president unfortunately has been consistently very careless with the truth. He still maintains some preposterous comments and attitudes toward the origins of the Iraqi war, the circumstances in Iraq now and he's had a policy in my opinion of deliberately trying to mislead the American people by making untrue statements and there's no reason to give any credence to his ridiculous claims that you've just described."

The God Delusion

If ever a book was aptly named to reflect the personality of its author....

Richard Dawkins is trumpeted on the cover of his new book as "the world's most prominent atheist," a title he presumably inherits now that Madalyn Murray O'Hair is dead (honestly, I didn't even know there was a ranking in this field). Neither a theologian nor a philosopher of religion, he spends 80+ pages on the arguments for the existence of the God of Abraham (the Hindu pantheon and other gods of other world religions need not apply, apparently). Neither an anthropologist nor a psychiatrist, he devotes 70 pages to the "roots of religion" and a discussion of whether morality is possible outside of religion (I'll save you the money: yes. That's me. Ignore Dawkins.). Not trained as a scriptural scholar (not all of whom are either religious nor Christian), he devotes another 40 pages to scriptural criticism. The rest of the book is devoted to making clear his straw man is actually a version of Christian fundamentalism, one that exists largely in his fevered perceptions.

Skimming the index, I find no reference to any philosopher of religion outside of Immanuel Kant (and he merits only a page; thus does Mr. Dawkins apparently dispose of both Kant's Idealism and Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). The chapter on the proofs of God references Aquinas (whom Dawkins deigns to declare a thinker with an "eminent" reputation. Yeah, and Shakespeare was a pretty good writer, too.) and Pascal. The index betrays no reference anywhere in the book to St. Anselm (creator of what Kant later labelled the "ontological proof"), nor to modern philosophers like Charles Hartshorne (The Logic of Perfection, his updating of Anselm's argument) or Alvin Plantinga. If you want to read a thorough discussion of all the important proofs of the God of Abraham that have been considered in Western culture, you'd do better to turn to Richard M. Gale's On the Nature and Existence of God. So would Mr. Dawkins, who obviously didn't.

Nowhere in his index, indeed, does Mr. Dawkins reference any important philosophers of religion or even of phenomenology. Kierkegaard's argument against proving existence (from the Philosophical Fragments) is not even considered. Mr. Dawkins gleefully sets up his straw men, and proceeds to knock them over, for several hundred pages.

He does, I noted, give ample space to Daniel C. Dennett. Birds of a feather, and all that, I suppose. This is all too familiar.

It isn't that I object to Mr. Dawkins' conclusions. What he believes or doesn't is of no importance to me whatsoever. I must admit a weakness, though: I do not suffer fools gladly. I know more about the arguments against the arguments for the existence of God than Mr. Dawkins has, apparently, imagined. The arguments from free will; omincscience-immutablity; ontology; religious experience; even the pragmatic arguments of Pascal and William James. A very long book can be devoted to this issue alone, if not several books. Mr. Dawkins jumps from an elementary school version of Aquinas' five proofs to Pascal, with just a passing reference to Anselm's argument and no mention of either the Saint or his modern-day defender, Mr. Hartshorne. (Hartshorne's argument is so complex that even Mr. Gale declines to include it in his book, saying it needs separate consideration). What Mr. Dawkins clearly goes after is a caricature of religious faith drawn from his impressions of fundamentalist Christians and, like Mr. Dennett, Mr. Dawkins imagines that all the religions of the world are basically Christianity, of this peculiar and very narrow nature (and one that doesn't even resemble most of the doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity). Small wonder then there are no references in the index to Huston Smith, Jaroslav Pelikan, or even Martin Marty (Fundamentalisms Observed). Mr. Dawkins has so clearly failed to do his homework that, were this thesis to be presented to me as a completed research paper, I'd fail the student for failing to do any real investigation of the subject.

Were I as ignorant of science as Mr. Dawkins is of theology and philosophy of religion (as well as psychology, sociology, anthropology, to name a few fields), I'd be embarassed to write a book about the philosophy of science and put my ignorance between hard covers and then ask people to pay good money for it.

But perhaps that's why I'm not a prominent anything.