The New Reagan

It is a mystery to me how a party that touts its populist credentials as heavily as the GOP does can still be so utterly devoted to hero worship. Perhaps it has something to do with the general penchant for worship within the party, but that’s neither here nor there. The quintessential example of the hero of the right has been and continues to be President Reagan, though by now I would hope that even the most devoted followers of his will have realized that he was not the conservative hero they think. Not unlike how conservatives ignore the parts of the bible where Jesus scorns the wealthy and commands his followers to live a life of service to the poor, they seem to ignore the tax hikes, more open immigration policy, and lack of hatred for gays that were at least part of the Reagan reality. And although there is no stopping the crusade of naming everyone and everything after Ronald Reagan, the right seems to have found a new crush.

I don’t know exactly what it is about men with over inflated egos, but the Right really does have a type. They like ‘em white, “strong,” authoritative, and manly. I guess when you consider that it shouldn’t be all that shocking that the Right has fallen head over heels for Vladimir Putin. And before you correct me and show the countless articles of conservatives claiming that Putin is a villain, let me explain what I mean by their love for this odd little man. Because, not unlike the way that people sometimes refer to god, the conservative movement fears and loves Putin in almost equal measure.

Perhaps it’s just a simple case of the grass is always greener and in this ever more diverse world the right just has fewer choices. They hate Obama so everyone else looks like a better leader in comparison, but they can’t like David Cameron because he’s too posh, they can’t like Angela Merkel because she’s too feminine, they can’t like Francois Hollande because he’s too socialist, and they can’t like Stephen Harper because who’s ever heard of Stephen Harper? But then from across the windswept Siberian tundra comes the man of their dreams, a man who might bring us back to the good old days, the Cold War. Putin represents a return to simpler, see primitive, values.

Most of the world rightly thinks of Putin’s shirtless escapades as something to be laughed at, but if you squint your eyes he almost looks like a cowboy riding off into the radioactive sunset. And maybe it’s more than just the surface stuff that makes him so appealing to the Right. Maybe it’s the way he is much better at enacting hate laws targeted against homosexuals. Maybe it’s the way he acts unilaterally damn the consequences that harkens back to the days when America could just nuke some islands in the Pacific as if to say, “what are you going to do about it?”

The right has been so dogged in creating this image of Obama as an effeminate, intellectual, cowardly dandy that of course they feel the need to go along with this inflated image of Putin as some strongman. And let’s not forget that at 5’7” Putin is not only about half a foot shorter than President Obama but the same height as Napoleon, so perhaps inflated is just the way some people roll. Nonetheless the right has seen this propagandistic version of Putin and continually ask, “why can’t you be more like that, Obama?” As if simply talking with a gruff voice and spitting at the ground gets things done.

The reason why the Russian people keep electing him has been because the economy has generally gotten better under him, but there are some confounding factors that need to be looked at that paint a less than rosy picture for Putin going forward. The gap between the richest and the poorest in Russia is about as bad as the US, but unlike the US this isn’t the result of long-lasting issues but a very recent phenomenon. Putin’s policies have lifted some out of poverty, but more than anything it has funneled money up to a few plutocrats. Oh wait, maybe this is why the Republicans love him alongside Reagan. And although this is a source of some division in Russia he has maintained a pretty decent level of popularity, but the increased effect of international sanctions is chipping away at his image as a bringer of wealth. This leaves only the cult of personality that he has been grooming, something that the Right is only too willing to get behind.

So much of the Republican platform is devoted to the idea that America was once a great superpower in the world, and that we need to return to this state of supremacy über alles. One of the foundations of this place in the world was the enemy behind the Iron Curtain that made an inflated military, distrust of the Left, and general xenophobia necessary. In Putin, I think, many on the right see a new Stalin or Khrushchev that they can fight. In the rhetoric leveled against Putin by the Right they call him the next Hitler, plotting his ambitions of world domination. His invasion of Crimea is the annexation of the Rhineland, and now he’s preparing to anschluss the rest of the former Soviet states because the rest of the world won’t do anything.

This all makes for wonderful rhetoric, but the reality paints a slightly different picture. As much as Putin would like the world to believe that he is the man in charge right now, he doesn’t have much to work with. Compare his economy to the US or China or the EU or even Japan and you realize that Russia isn’t that big of a player. The only reason people in the rest of the world do business with Russia at this point is because they need oil, but every year this becomes less and less crucial as countries develop alternatives to fossil fuels. The state of the Russian military is always something of a mystery as the Kremlin has long been the master of hiding the reality of a crumbling infrastructure. But I could be wrong, Putin may well be set to start a grand crusade to reclaim the former Union, but something tells me it’s all talk.

And yet Putin is routinely labeled as the single greatest threat to America on the Right. I have heard quite a bit recently that conservatives are saying Mitt Romney was a prophet in declaring Russia as the single biggest geopolitical foe we face in America, fortunately like his binders full of women, this is imaginary. It’s true that in the immediate aftermath of the annexation of Crimea there was a sudden rush of nationalist fervor in Russia in Putin’s favor, but it is short lived. Putin does have the benefit of state run news to keep people from hearing the truth about what goes on in the world, but it can’t live forever in this world of drastically changing media. The bizarre conspiracies that float around in Russia are entertaining in their own right, but I just don’t believe the Russian people are so dumb that they won’t inevitably recognize the wool that he has tried to pull over their eyes.

But I get the feeling the GOP is putting all of its money on Putin. Is it because they love his “manliness,” because he offers the possibility of a simpler MADer world, because they think anything’s better than Obama? I don’t know. What I do know is that Mr Putin and his fans at home and abroad need to seriously consider seeing either an optometrist or a psychiatrist because between their eyes and their brains, something ain’t right.

Do Nothing

For those who haven’t noticed, the 113th Congress of the United States is set to be the least productive legislative body we’ve ever had. There’s been a lot of finger pointing about who precisely is to blame, and although it is clearly the fault of the extremist wing of the House GOP, most journalists tend to just kind of say everyone has their piece of guilt in this problem. Alright if I’m going to be fair the Democrats on the Hill as well as the moderate Republicans are not exactly blameless, but anything they’ve contributed to the obstructionism in Congress pales in comparison to the damnable dam that has been erected by the Tea Party loyalists. And yet there are some who ask the question, “is it really a problem that Congress isn’t doing anything?”

Well let me put it this way, unless you think that the government is already doing the best job possible you want Congress to do something, and judging by poll numbers and general opinion I doubt there is a person alive who believes that. I’ll grant you that people want Congress to do very different things, but I’d say there’s a near total consensus of people who believe that the government needs to make a few changes. Democrats generally believe that we need to fix the problems of government programs and Republicans generally believe we need to get rid of government programs that have or cause problems. In fact Boehner’s response to critiques about how little has been done by this Congress has been, “We should not be judged on how many new laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.” Well if that’s his position then he is either disingenuous or myopic to the point of stupidity. And so I’ll grant him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s just a liar.

If you are the kind of conservative who believes that government needs to back off, that regulations are too onerous, that we need a smaller government, then you want Congress to get off its ass and do something to scale things back and perhaps even repeal something. But Congress hasn’t repealed anything as far as I can tell. The House GOP has tried about 60 times to repeal the ACA, but that would have seemed to be a failed effort some 55 tries ago. How about other repeals? Nothing really? Well then what about tax reform, isn’t it too complicated and needing some kind of simplification? Well apparently the House GOP doesn’t think it’s important enough to get off their asses about. Regulations are too much to bear, need them cut back? Well too bad because there’s been zero effort to repeal anything unless you mean Common Core or the ACA, which is not going to happen so long as the Democrats have the Senate and the White House. So why don’t they try to repeal things that might actually get through, and help the people that voted for them under the pretext that they fight to control government overreach?

The simple answer is because they are, to use Senator Franken’s turn of phrase, lying liars. The House GOP has no interest in limiting the scope of government or even governing. Their one goal has been to stop President Obama, and they’ve failed at every turn. This has given them the chance to rethink their strategy in how they want to work with the president to get things done. But that sounded like too much work so they decided to throw a fit and ensure that if they can’t get everything they want then no one can get anything they want. This petulance is what keeps even the most basic functions of government from being conducted, and I assure you that you won’t like the results.

The funding for the Highway Trust has become yet another pawn in this battle to get government to do anything. The House GOP wanted to make a payment scheme that would keep our highways working through May, but only by allowing companies to stiff their employees of their pensions. The Senate, in a bipartisan move, put forward a different bill that would keep things moving in the meantime, until December, but wouldn’t resort to that kind of unfair payment at the expense of workers. The House GOP has become obstinate in its own version of how to pay for it threatening to essentially let the money run dry unless the Senate agrees to shaft the workers. It seems unlikely at this point that either side is willing to budge which means that we will likely be driving on unfinished and/or dangerous highways for the five weeks that Congress will have off.

Now what about the rest of us who don’t particularly care what size or shape the government takes so long as it gets its job done. I can’t speak for everyone, but I am more than a little pissed off that these clowns that each rake in a six figure salary, not to mention under the table donations, from their jobs can’t do them. That’s not entirely fair, the majority of representatives do want to get work done, but the system has been taken hostage by right wing radicals who would rather our credit rating decrease, our government shut down, and our roads close than let the president have a win or compromise even the slightest bit. The good news is that the coming mid-term elections will likely see the last of the Tea Party leave the house, even though a few will remain in the Senate. The bad news is that we have to wait until January for the next Congress to begin, meaning we’re stuck with these children until then.

Because here’s the little thing that people seem to be forgetting, the government keeps going even if Congress decides not to enact or repeal any legislation. Everything that is already in place will continue to do so, but some of the essential things that need re-authorization every so often go under or unfunded meaning the job that is done is crap. It’s the worst kind of self fulfilling policy when you elect people to government who are convinced that government cannot work. I want government to work, I want government programs to be funded and government employees to be paid. I want the GDP to continue growing, I want unemployment to keep shrinking, I want consumer confidence to continue to grow but all of these good trends are threatened by a dogmatic few who seem set on making America fail.

This is why President Obama has set on this whole “telephone and pen” policy, which incidentally stills puts him behind the curve in terms of executive orders. President Obama has worked day in and day out, taking less than a third of the vacation time as his predecessor, to keep the government working even without the Congress. Now if the GOP wants to convince people that there are things the government needs to scale back on I don’t think there would be too much push back, but they can’t even convince themselves on what to tackle. Instead they’ve decided to create a problem of obstinance and then attack President Obama when he tries to fix it, or at least work in spite of it. His executive orders have been limited in scope because he understands that as the executive he doesn’t have the right to enact sweeping legislation, but if the people who do have that right forfeit it what’s he supposed to do?

Friday is the last day before this woefully inadequate Congress goes on a vacation of their own and in that time there are many bills that they need to pass and countless more that they should, but we’ll be lucky if our bridges are still standing by the time they reconvene. Luckily we live in a democracy that allows us to fire our employees that can’t get the work done, and we’ll have that election soon enough. Except it isn’t quite soon enough for those of us who do drive on the highway regularly and will need to between now and September. It won’t be soon enough for the children waiting in limbo at our border. It won’t be soon enough for any others in this country who expect the people who lead this country to lead this country. But we don’t need to follow in their example and do nothing.

Write to your representatives, show up at their houses while they are on vacation, demand that they listen to you the people and do something. Get organized and ensure that your voice is heard and make dead sure that you know where and when you will be voting in November. Pay attention to what your representatives are doing, or not doing, and call them out on it either through demonstration or the ballot box. This is the price of freedom, if you see your representatives doing nothing, do something about it.

I Like Obama

I find it surprising how much hate President Obama gets on the internet, especially from people who by all rights should absolutely love him. I mean, I get it, the guy who’s in charge is always going to be the target of criticism because that’s where the buck stops. During the Bush administration it wasn’t unheard of to see an effigy of the Commander in Chief with a Hitler mustache, but there is some next level hate with President Obama. His approval ratings are going down the tube, but by all indications everything is getting better for the US, and I just don’t understand where the hate is coming from. Whether you are a fiscal conservative or a die hard liberal, even though there are many things to criticize a person for, he’s doing a pretty good job.

Let’s start with the economic numbers, unemployment is as low as it’s been since 2006, before the Great Recession. Critics will argue that this doesn’t take into account people who have had to settle for part time work, but then they are the ones forgetting that for many of those people doing part time it is because they are supporting a kid and need someone home at least part time while the other partner does full time work. The social safety net ensures that both parents don’t both have to do full time jobs to make ends meet, in part because of Obamacare. I’ll get to the ACA in a bit though. People are getting back to work, even and especially in areas that have boosted the minimum wage. Although there hasn’t been a national push to raise the minimum wage to the $10.10 that has been suggested, we’ve seen many communities that have done that are getting more people employed than areas with lower minimum wages.

People are still overworked and underpaid in many circumstances, but is this some new trend? Did we forget that unemployment and underemployment existed long before the Obama administration? At least now things are moving in the right direction. And it is apparent in basically every meter of the economy. Construction is up, GDP growth is up, the stock market is way up, consumer confidence is up, and the deficit is down. Yes President Obama is not inflating the deficit, though we are still running one as is usually the case. He has done so by limiting spending and in terms of net taxes he’s actually cut them. I would argue that the government should raise taxes on the extremely wealthy to take a little burden off the shoulders from the middle class, but that’s another thing altogether.

I am a critic of the ACA, but it is working and people recognize this, even if it doesn’t make them like President Obama anymore. More people have access to healthcare than ever before, and it is healthcare that actually covers their treatments. There are still some problems that are being worked out, but the fact that people can finally afford preventative medicine will save us a fortune in a short amount of time. What’s more, hospitals are actually liking the lower compensating Medicaid plans, because even though it’s less than they might receive from private plans it’s more than the $0 that they would usually expect from the same patients. And lest we forget, “pre-existing conditions” are a thing of the past. And although I’m still in favor of a much larger change to the system to ensure that quality healthcare is the right of all people in the US, I cannot deny that we are much better off now and polling numbers suggest that I am not alone.

If your biggest gripe with President Obama is that he’s coming after your guns then take solace in knowing that gun rights have expanded under the Obama administration because he has done literally nothing on that front. What’s more gun sales have skyrocketed during the Obama years, which makes President Obama the best friend that gun manufacturers have ever had. And see this is one of those issues where things are completely backwards. Conservatives should be kissing President Obamas ass and we liberals should be disappointed that he and Congress have done absolutely jack when it comes to background checks on all sales and provisions to help the mentally ill, but there you have it guns for all.

In terms of marriage equality, President Obama is the first sitting president to show support for the cause, but has done little to advance it himself. His presidency will be long remembered for the great strides made in favor of marriage equality from the Supreme Court decision, to the great swell of states that have seen it become a fact over these years, but he himself has done little to enact it. I mean let’s face it, as a president he can’t really do anything to make Texas accept marriage equality, but I get the feeling his soft power has a lot to do with why these movements have become so successful. And for the religious out there, not a single house of prayer has been forced to conduct these civil marriages, though of course the ones that do actually care about love do it anyway. This on top of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” makes the Obama administration among the best things that ever happened to equality in America since the 60s.

And yet in spite of what may be the most moderate presidency he is still labeled as an extremist who is ruining the country, or perhaps it is because of it. President Obama has gone out of his way to try and be everyone’s friend even spending a whole term and more trying to get the GOP to meet hi half way with anything. The ACA is a conservative healthcare plan, and although I am not in favor of it 100% that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize that it is an improvement from the nothing that came before it. I want to feel safer, but the rise of the gun nut has basically gone unchecked because Obama didn’t want to give them any ammunition to attack him, pardon the intentional pun. He has tried so hard to avoid the unpopular issues like addressing social security, the relocation of Guantanamo detainees, and inequality in all its forms. In doing so he hoped to give no one a reason to hate him, but many already did, and because he didn’t take a firm stand on many issues he gave many others no reason to like him.

President Obama has done much in his tenure and will likely do much more in these last years of his presidency, so I get the feeling posterity will be much gentler on him than we are now, but damn I just keep hoping he’ll do something more. The “phone and pen” bit is a great start, you can tell it’s good because conservatives are angry that he’s actually doing something in response to their inaction. But at the end of the day all I can say about Obama is that I like him. He is a good guy and a hard worker, but he is unwilling to make the unpopular decisions that need to be made and at this point he’s in an odd spot.

There is nothing he can do now, short of being assassinated, that will boost his favorabilities above 50% before the end of his term so he has nothing to lose in taking some big stands and making big changes. But at this point he has let his clout in the government get so weak that any long-lasting change would seem impossible unless the Democrats get a big win in the mid-terms. I want so much for this to be a great presidency, a presidency that shows history in spite of all the implicit and explicit racism, in spite of all the garbage he was handed when he took office that he made a huge and lasting difference to the US. But he is human and isn’t walking on water, he’s just keeping his head above it. In the mean time though, I just wish that everyone else would take a breath and give the guy a break, because he has done an incredible job. I just hoped for more.

No Middle Ground

So let’s talk about the issue that has been on everyone’s mind lately, the crisis between Israel and Palestine. Or rather, let’s talk about the way people talk about this issue, because I defy you to find a pundit who hasn’t already made up their mind on this issue and it is leading to a somehow even more unproductive atmosphere. For about a third of the pundits there is nothing that Israel can do that will make them even consider the plight of the Palestinians, for another third there is no level of obstruction that can be made by Hamas that would undermine the cause of Palestine in general, and the final third want to say that there is a middle ground to be reached which is instantly destroyed by the other two thirds.

Let’s start by being clear that the pursuit of a middle ground is not an ignoble pursuit, but when you do so in the safety of the United States you lose a little credibility. In some ways objectivity or the act of seeking it is a luxury of distance from the issue. The crises in this region go back so far that people quote the bible story of Isaac and Ishmael to try and hone in on a starting point, and since then there has been so much tit for tat violence that no one can really expect to claim the moral high ground. So in a sense the battle is really for the moral highER ground, as well as for survival. And in these debates the hosts of news programs do their best to stand back from the arguments or to see both sides of the issue, but at some point you have to realize that although compromises need to be made on both sides, there is no hope of being right in the middle. And it is alluring to think that you can say “a pox on both your houses,” or let’s all just meet each other half way, but I don’t think that any of the people involved actually appreciate the search for the middle ground.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. It does its best to kill as many people as possible, as cheaply as possible and use the conflict to get more local power and authority. They build weapon launchers in schools and hospitals to make sure that innocent civilians will be killed when the Israelis respond with deadly force. They stop every attempt at negotiation because they realize their war rhetoric has no value if the region ever reaches a long term peace settlement. But at the same time they only grow in popularity as these conflicts continue because they are seen as the only group in Palestine willing to actually confront Israeli aggression. They serve their war torn community and embody the struggle to reclaim a Palestinian state.

Israel is an aggressor as well, though not in quite the same way. People like to justify the most recent Israeli actions by saying that we would never tolerate the amount of violence that they endure, but at the same time those rockets did not emerge out of a vacuum. There is no local industry to speak of in Gaza because Israel, whether justly or unjustly, essentially has monopolized the trade of every commodity from concrete to toothpaste. They have created what has been called the largest open air prison in the world and are somehow surprised that the inhabitants are unhappy about the arrangement. Their civilians, though under constant threat of attack, are quite safe from the primitive rockets Hamas puts together thanks to their overwhelming military dominance that we fund. And although there are many reasons why the death toll in Palestine is what it is right now, it is at least in part because the extreme right wing in Israel and the US have been gunning for a big fight to put an end to Palestine.

There are few “good guys” in this conflict, but many victims. The charred remains of someone whether blown up by a rocket, a mortar shell, or an IED look pretty much the same to me. And it’s only more tragic when you consider the parallel paths these two cultures took to get here. Israel is the story of a people not wanted by the world trying to find a homeland. The escaped Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria before spreading all throughout the world to find new homes. Those new homes turned against them time and again as they picked up all manner of hateful names: Marrano from the Spanish Inquisition, Kike from Ellis Island, and of course Der Ewige Juden in the Third Reich. Having lost faith with even the supposedly tolerant Western world the chosen people returned to Zion to try yet again to find a place in the world.

And the Palestinians, like the Jewish people, have a history of being hated and ignored. Some who wish to discount the lives of the people living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip say that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. This comes from the long history of neglect of the Arab people who lived in that region. They picked up the mantel that was left after the Jewish Diaspora from Judea, and became the target of hatred from Crusaders, from other Arabs, from Turks. They were ignored by all the people who conquered them in much the same way that the conquerors of Ancient Israel. And in the early part of the 20th century, when England and France were drawing up all the borders of the Middle East, there was some small hope that they would finally be able to find their own home. It’s just an unfortunate truth that their home was the land promised to those hoping to rebuild Zion.

These two cultures ignored by everyone, hated by everyone, fighting in a land beloved by everyone find themselves combatting a mirror image. There are those who compare modern Israel to the Nazi state they escaped, but this is an unfair comparison to make. Israel is constantly under threat of being “driven into the sea,” by essentially all of its neighbors. Because of that odd happenstance that allowed them to decide their own country’s fate they set up a secular state that did not come attached to a dictator, a breath of fresh air in the desert. Through the sweat of their own brow, through the combined work of their communities, through their own ingenuity, and yes some Western aid they made the desert bloom. And they did so all the while fighting off invaders. But this comes as little consolation to the people who had once lived where they live now, whose livelihoods were ripped up, who were cast out without any connection to resources such that they too might build. And here’s the thing that people too often forget, Palestine has no friends, only people who hate them that much less than Israel. The aid they get comes only in the form of weapons to fight, or else food and medicine to subsist, but Israel’s occupation has made sure that they will never be able to thrive like Israel.

What middle ground can be found here? You have two cultures, each trying to survive and one has the high ground now. It sounds all well and good that we tell Israel to back down and let the Palestinians rebuild, but the extremists of Palestine have no intention of letting the fight end. It sounds all well and good that we tell Palestine to stop their fighting against Israel, but they are running out of options. On top of all the other hatreds and unsettled scores, there is yet one more confounding factor. There is an unfortunately large group of conservative Christians, particularly in the US, that funds Israel in the hopes that they might fulfill doomsday prophecies and hasten the second coming of Christ. So all the Abrahamic religions have a stake in keeping this fight going.

There is no objective stance to be taken on these issues, there is no perfect middle ground. In the end each side will have to give up something and one side will have to cede more. It’s not fair, and it never was. This is yet another subject without clear answers, if there even are correct answers to be found. What we need now is service to the wounded, service to the bereaved, service to the dead on all sides. I can only hope that Israel, as the state with the means to do it, can show that it is willing to set up a peace table even if it means turning the other cheek. Israel’s Iron Dome makes it far more capable of surviving an attack without fatalities, meaning it would be easier to resist retaliation. It isn’t fair to ask Israel to do this, but surely if it offers the hope of peace it is worth a shot. And to the Palestinians I can only say that Hamas and violent resistance can never be the harbingers of peace and stability.

There, now no one is happy. It isn’t so much a middle ground as it is a no man’s land trying to find compromise in a conflict such as this.

The Plea

There are many reasons to reconsider how we conduct our justice system. White collar crime essentially goes unpunished and although corporations are given increasingly greater rights they never seem to take the same level of responsibility we mere mortals accept. The justice system, as a result of the war on drugs, unfairly incarcerates more racial minorities, especially blacks, and other “tough on crime” policies only exacerbate the problem. The United States, the land of the free, incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth, though I will concede that part of the reason for that is we don’t kill as many of our prisoners right off the bat. But today I’m going to talk about the problem that arises from a system that puts unfair weight on conjecture, the plea deal.

In the absolute ideal case a guilty person pleads their guilt, which avoids costs and time of conducting a full trial and removes the risk of that guilty person avoiding sentence. But this isn’t always the case and even if it were it comes with so substantial problems of its own. Instead this feature of our justice system gives an unfair advantage to people with the means of affording a lawyer, and worse causes innocent people to go to jail. The law comes down hard on perjury except when those people are poor and innocent, in which case the law comes down hard on that obstinate person who assumed that not committing a crime wasn’t a crime. I know it is a little tricky with that double negative.

You rarely see a CEO pleading guilty to crimes they clearly committed because they have the luxury of affording lawyers who have experience in these kinds of trials, affording lawyers who can take the time to focus on this particular case, affording lawyers who do not have incentives of their own in advising a plea deal, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, if you can only afford a public defendant, regardless of how well intentioned that attorney may be, he/she is saddled with countless cases to distract him/her from the details of one particular case and he/she is probably more than a little worried about the number of cases that go to court in likely case of a final guilty verdict. So more often than should ever be necessary, the public defendant will advise their client to take a plea deal in order to avoid some jail time, regardless of whether the accused is actually guilty or not.

We already have a predilection for assuming the guilt of someone who is accused of a crime, even though we know that the law is supposed to presume innocence. This is a frightening truth to a person on the wrong side of the bench who may be looking at a long sentence, and in the case of the worst crimes in some states, death. Fear is not a good source of calm and rational thinking, and if you are really caught off guard because you didn’t do it then you will likely be more willing to take the advice of a person who seems to know what they’re doing, even if it means accepting guilt for something you didn’t do.

And lest you think I’m just coming up with hypotheticals, how about the case of Michael Phillips, who was finally exonerated today… long after completing his full 12 year sentence. In 1990 he was accused by a Texas court of raping a young woman who pointed out his picture when prompted by police. The victim did not get a clear look at the person who assaulted her, as he was wearing a ski mask. She was able to partially remove that mask and based her testimony on what she could see. An assault kit was administered, but the use of DNA in crime scene investigation and trial wasn’t what it is now. On advice from his lawyer, Mr Phillips was advised to take a plea deal because the case was between him, a black man, and the victim, a white woman, in Texas so there was little chance that there would be any mercy if he got a guilty verdict after trial. He spent over a decade in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and after his release, briefly returned to prison for failure to register as a sex offender. Only now in 2014 did the DNA test definitively prove it wasn’t him, and even gave the identity of the actual rapist.

The reality of just how sad this story gets is even worse when you realize that even now that there is a positive identification of the actual person who committed that crime, the statue of limitations prevents him from being brought to justice for that crime. Nonetheless, Mr Phillips responded with nothing but good feelings from this final exoneration, and not the bitterness that one could understand for being locked up for a crime he didn’t commit. And we all know by now that this isn’t the first case to be overturned after the acceptance of DNA as evidence, but we can only now wonder how many innocent people remain in prison because they took the advice of their counselors to take the safe bet and plead guilty.

I can understand the importance of testimony in days gone by, after all you really didn’t have much more than that to go on, but that is no reason to continue this outdated process today. A single person’s testimony or even that of a group of people is still not substantial evidence. In science there is a phrase that is quite popular, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” And yet in the courtroom, anecdotal evidence can be the single most compelling thing a judge hears, so long as the words he/she hears is “I plead guilty.” This is a total perversion of justice now that we live in a time that we have much more accurate pieces of evidence, because DNA, unlike a person, cannot be compelled to tell a lie.

Now I’m not saying that witnesses should be gotten rid of entirely, but anecdotal evidence simply isn’t that compelling. Memories can be distorted, people aren’t that great at recognizing strangers, and of course some people lie. If we are going to say we have a system that presumes innocence until guilt is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, then we need to seriously reconsider the value we put on the testimony of people. And the first step is to have a serious conversation about the plea deal.

As I mentioned in the beginning, the ideal purpose of a plea deal is to avoid lengthy and expensive trials, as well as ensuring a guilty person can’t use legal loopholes to escape justice. But the reality of the plea deal is that we put in a loophole that makes it so the innocent cannot trust justice, and worse, that provides the actually guilty to evade a full sentence. The answer to the problem of overloaded public defenders is not to give them a reason to avoid seeking justice for their clients, but to lighten the load by hiring more lawyers with better pay. Why better pay? Because right now there is a demand for public defenders, but the smart move financially is to go into the private sector where you can get better pay from richer clients, so to even the playing field becoming a public defender needs to become a smart move as well. And yes this means more spending and therefore possibly higher taxes. So why make the investment?

Because we live in a society that is based on the rule of law, and the rule of law fails if it doles out different “justice” to different classes of people. Because we live in a society that believes that if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you should never fear telling the truth. Because we live in a society that cares about our brothers and sisters, regardless of their bank statement or appearance. Because we are better than that, and sometimes that means paying a little extra to ensure that innocent people don’t go to prison. Because one day it may be you that is frightened and looking up at a scowling judge, threatened with 12 years minimum, and you’ll be comforted to know that how much money you have doesn’t determine your guilt.

The plea deal is a relic of a broken system, and emblematic of why we drastically need to rethink how we treat the accused in this country. And particularly if we are going to stand by as we sentence our own to painful, torturously long executions, as was the case in Arizona on Wednesday, then we better make it our duty to ensure that the innocent are not treated as barbarously as our guilty.

Equality of Speech

One of the proudest facts about living in the United States is that we completely defend freedom of speech, but it can also be something of a source of embarrassment. When someone looks at the kinds of speech that is allowed they are sometimes disturbed that we don’t draw a line somewhere, e.g. WBC protests, KKK rallies, or neo-nazi parades. Of course we do draw a line on speech that would directly cause harm, the quintessential example being the prohibition on screaming “Fire” in a movie theater. However, there is one particular aspect of the freedom of speech that has been getting a bit more airtime recently, and it has to do with political donations.

The conservative leaning Supreme Court has made a series of decisions concerning the rights of individuals and corporations to give money to political campaigns, PACs, etc. Some of the more infamous moments of these decisions have been the declaration that not only are corporations people, but as people they are entitled to the first amendment protected freedom of speech, which in the case of corporations is synonymous with money. Slightly more recently, the Court has decided that a cap on how much an individual can donate in a given year is unconstitutional, though a limit on how much can be donated in specific campaigns is kosher. Whether intentional or not these decisions erode the very purpose of the freedom of speech as it increasingly takes away any sense of equality of speech.

Now at this point I feel the need to clarify something about my argument, because similar to my argument about income inequality, the goal should not be to make everyone completely equal in this regard. Not all ideas are created equal, nor opinions. We are often told as children that there are no stupid questions as a way to get involved, and although that sentiment may have its use in getting the juices flowing it is a lie. There are stupid questions, there are stupid opinions, and there are stupid people; however, that doesn’t mean those ideas themselves must be silenced. Every person should feel free to air their opinions, but if it is stupid they shouldn’t be surprised if others laugh and basically ignore the opinion going forward. In science, not all ideas are treated equally, but every hypothesis merits a test or two on the off chance that although it sounds insane it turns out to be right. After all how many of Aristotle’s incorrect conjectures would still be accepted as fact were it not for someone raising his/her hand to disagree?

So no, I don’t believe that there should be a mandate or something to ensure that everyone who wants to say something gets their allotted time in an effort to make everyone’s speech equal, but neither do I think that people have a right to silence others by making their own voice so much louder that it is the only one heard. This is the flaw in the decisions to make political donations so utterly lacking in any kind of oversight. What we are approaching is a world where there may be a technical right to free speech, but practically only the select plutocrats who can afford to make themselves heard above the din actually have it. And this is not a new trend, I mean it’s not like the senators of Ancient Rome cared about what the plebes thought… unless they were in the form of a mob.

As it stands right now the individual voice of a normal contributor, the kind of person who donates $5 online to a campaign, is essentially throwing their money away, but the big wig who donates millions to campaigns and PACs has a seat at the table in deciding the platform. This fundamentally undermines the principles of democracy, or a government of the people, instead favoring a plutocracy, a government of the rich people. This too is not such a great leap from the government that was originally conceived by our pseudo-aristocratic, land-owning, founding fathers. But for the greater part of our country’s history the effort was to make the government more inclusive of people of all classes, races, ethnicities, genders, etc. Whereas since the dawn of the Cold War, at least, there has been a concentrated and successful effort to make the government more exclusive again.

This is what troubles me when I hear a specific type of person saying that they want to bring us back to the government that the founding fathers created, because they’re not exactly wrong, just wrong-headed. And I’m not going to sit here and pretend that J.D. Rockefeller didn’t have a big sway on politics in his day, but when the first income taxes were enacted they focused exclusively on the people who had a ton of money, whereas since the end of the Second World War, we’ve seen an effective effort to lower the top tax rates and raise the rest. In and of itself, this is not necessarily the worst thing that could have happened, but emblematic of a larger problem nonetheless. But now on top of the understood, but generally ignored, under the table lobbying efforts, we are seeing an effort by a select few at the top to make it acceptable for them to have as much influence as they want at the direct expense of people incapable of being so “persuasive.”

Individuals without great means are never going to have as much power as those with, which some would argue makes a good incentive to get people to work harder, but the absolute lack of concern for those at the bottom and even the middle is disturbing. The lack of any idea of equality of speech means that opinions are only as valid as the pile of money that backs them up, which incidentally has something to do with why climate “skeptics” are treated as standing on equal ground with the scientific consensus. If you put enough money behind creationism you can afford a museum and even sponsor debates to make it sound reasonable. It will still be wrong, but many people will pretend that it is just as valid as any other hypothesis. But now I’m veering off track.

I’ve said before that the right to free speech does not imply the right to be heard and I stand by that, because we have a right to ignore the terrible things that the WBC spout off; however, the system we have set for ourselves now makes a normal voice nearly impotent in the face of the far more compelling voice of cash. Money is not speech in its own right, it is a bullhorn for speech, one that does not care if the speech is inaccurate or hurtful. And the system we have now guarantees that only those with the loudest megaphones will be heard even if they are simply amplifying white noise.

And individual efforts to amplify your own voice have their limitations. The internet brings with it the great promise of the equality of speech, because there’s only so much money you can put into a blog, for example, to make it more compelling without actually having some legitimate content. The unfortunate side to the freedom and equality of the internet is that more often than not users don’t look for news or political opinion, though that may occasionally end up on the list of things to do on the web. The primary focus of the internet is much more trivial, and I’m as guilty as anyone else. I watch videos on the internet and they aren’t all documentaries. I waste time on social networks and look at cute pictures of baby animals. And let’s not even get to that other part of the internet where an inordinate amount of time is spent. But this is again the problem of the average voice being drowned out by the din. So we may hope that this kind of equality might bring out the best voices, the term best has much more to do with quantities of hits than quality of content.

This is another of those issues that I don’t have a hard and fast solution to. I don’t know how to balance freedom of speech with a concern for equality of speech, but I do know that the latter is completely ignored. I don’t know how to fairly keep people with great wealth from dominating broader discussions without at some point impeding on their right to freely speak as individuals as well, but I do know that pretending it isn’t an issue worth addressing is dangerous. I don’t know whether there is an actual answer to these questions or if we need to just keep trying new things until we run up against the boundaries of justice and equality, but I do know that we need to try searching for these answers because looking at pictures of kittens may be gratifying but if it is done at the expense of our rights then it is simply a gratifying delusion.

The Voice of God

In politics there are so many sacred cows, but the most dangerous one, in my opinion, is the deference we give to beliefs that come with a supposed blessing from god. This deference to a very specific type of religious belief both wanes our legitimacy as a country based on principles of equality and the rule of law. Perhaps more disturbing is the way that it allows certain people to usurp the community, the good will, the service that religion offers to many people in order to give validity to a point of view that is neither coherent or even pious. Today I’m talking about the use of god as a prop for political discussions.

Now let me begin with some clarification at the onset, because I am not against people using their religion as a way of clarifying their political beliefs nor am I the kind of person who believes that everyone could or should become agnostic in the voting booth. I was born into a Christian family and so I grew up with the bible. Readers of this blog might have noticed that I use allusions and quotes from the bible even though I know longer consider myself to be religious. As a piece of literature it contains many great phrases that have become so engrained into our culture that it is unavoidable to use some of them in discourse. More to the point, although there are many things that I find abhorrent in the bible, there are also great moral teachings in it as well. And I recognize the vast good that religion can do and does in the real world. I participated in mission trips growing up, rebuilding parts of the Gulf Coast that were hit by Hurricane Sandy for example, so I know the good that religions do not simply in building communities, but rebuilding them in times of trial.

Religions have also been at the heart of many conflicts throughout the world, and it would be naive to ignore the role it plays in the conflict now in Israel, just as it would be naive to think that religion is unique in this regard. Strict adherence to an ideology in the face of reality, reason, and compassion is one of the greatest mass murderers in history. And perhaps ironically, religion can also be a source of comfort and solace in those same terrible events. Although I maintain that the healthiest thing a society can do is to make a stark separation between church and state, I do not believe that it should be the goal of secularists to try and rid the world of religion. However, there is a particular trait of a certain type of ostensibly religious people that I find truly troubling, and no one seems to be addressing it.

Or rather, there are occasional mentions of this problem, but they seem to fall on deaf ears. In the TV show “The Newsroom,” in preparation for a potential GOP debate one of the characters phrases a question that should be asked of then candidate Michelle Bachmann, who had earlier claimed that she was called on by god to run for the presidency. The question is pure Sorkinian simplicity, “What does god’s voice sound like?” It gets an appropriate laugh from her coworkers but though it eventually is dropped entirely her point was well put. If people are going to claim higher authority, why does no one call them on it?

Because it is one thing to say that you have troubled over an issue for some time, to say that in your pondering you read and reread the bible, to say that you found certain parts of that text illuminating, and to say that ultimately you decided that you should run for president. It is quite another to say that you know the existence of a very particular god to be true because you have heard him speak directly to you and among the words uttered by the being than which no greater can be conceived was that he directed you to run for office. Setting aside the fact that if she were to claim this prophetic status in a theology she would likely be stoned to death for heresy and that she is quite lucky to live in a secular society, why is she allowed to say this without the crowd at least asking, “are you feeling ok?” Because it has been my general experience that those claiming to hear voices should be seeking medical help and not elected office.

And although her famous Newsweek picture may lead you to a contrary opinion, Michelle Bachmann is not actually insane. She knows her base is particularly religious in its conservatism, but instead of being insulted that their god has been turned into a political tool to prop her up they cheered and everyone else kept their mouths shut. How demeaning must it be to know that your candidate thinks so little of you that they think(know) that they can wave their hands and say a few pseudo-religious phrases and be assured that she will be praised for it. And Michelle Bachmann is not alone in hearing the voice of god among this conservative sect. And it’s a good thing that god said to her that she should run and not that she would win, because wouldn’t that be an awkward conversation when she didn’t even win her party’s nomination. Surely this was just god telling her to run and get her voice out there, and make a pretty penny, and not to say actually be successful in her pursuits.

But set aside all of the other candidates that claimed that god told them to run for office: Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Pat Robertson, and Sarah Palin to name a few: let’s look at some other claims made by the last two about their conversations with god. Back in the 2008 campaign, Mr Robertson alluded to another conversation he apparently had with the lord on high about the outcome of the election. He claimed that the lord told him what the results would be, but so as to avoid ridicule he would keep the details to himself. Now this is both genius and ridiculous, because after the fact regardless of the result he can claim that it was what had been predicted. But more to the point, in this case he’s not even using this religious claim to give justification for his actions or validity to his predictions, he is doing it solely in the hopes of convincing people that he is in god’s good graces. And yet in spite of such clearly pandering and demeaning moves as this, he still has a decent sized audience that believes he isn’t either insane or a charlatan. His snake oil is apparently still being swallowed by some who are genuinely convinced by their own religion, which comforts them, that they are blind to the clearly disingenuous perversion of that religion by one such as he.

But this was all years ago, surely now people wouldn’t dare take the lord’s name in vain to make a political point. Except just recently Sarah Palin decided to become god’s mouthpiece yet again, because god the omnipotent apparently can’t speak for himself. Now I’m not one who believes that rights are given from on high, but it is a popular view and one I generally don’t care to fight about; however, if you are going to claim that because your interpretation of god gave you rights, therefore you must impeach someone whose greatest sin is not invading foreign nations, then I’m sorry but something is wrong. This is how god gets transformed from a source of peace and wisdom into a tool or weapon to be wielded against others.

I am not a fan of how our national motto was changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “in god we trust.” I am not a fan of hearing politicians constantly claiming that their opinions just happen to be that of god, because guess what that is exactly backwards. These few were not selected to bear the weight of holy decree, and yet they are literally applauded for claiming to do so. They see that pandering on this despicable level, far from receiving scorn from the devout, receives accolades from the masses. And no Pope, no Bishop, no Imam, no Rabbi, no person who carries any weight of any religious authority stands up to demand that their religion not be slandered in such a callous way. Instead we all sit around waiting for the next self-proclaimed prophet to make his or her speech and be praised as a false idol it is. We all nod along as they claim to be persecuted when one person does stand up to hold them to account for the ridiculous things they claim, when there are people actually being persecuted around the world for their belief. Have they no shame? Apparently not because we do not shame them, we lift them up.

Language

The role of language is to facilitate communication between one person and others, except when it isn’t. It’s one of those unspoken truths that the very thing that allows us to take the ideas in our heads and translate it into a form that can be understood by others can often do the exact opposite of that purpose. And let’s just set aside the pomposity of how I write and its tendency to make an otherwise salient point utterly unpleasant to read, a little cheeky there I know. The most recent estimates put the number of spoken languages in the world somewhere around 6500, and of those there are countless dialects, not to mention the regional twang that at best points out to everyone else that you’re not from around here and at worst that word you think you knew doesn’t mean the same thing over here. And then there is the more insidious part of the lack of precision in language that allows people to seem like they’re saying something, while meaning another or twisting multiple existing meanings of words to confound people to believe otherwise unbelievable things.

Let’s start from the beginning of this whole language thing, as far as we know, we are the only animals that have developed a system of spoken communication to convey complex thoughts, emotions, commands, questions, etc. True, other animals can convey basic messages through sound or motion, and still others can actually learn the fundamentals of language(see Koko the gorilla), but language remains one of the aspects that defines our humanity. And although we tell ourselves that language was developed to help with our communal nature, it seems clear to me that the proliferation of countless different tongues shows that it was also developed to impede the community from growing very large. I mean, just think about how useful languages have been in setting us apart from them, to the extent that we still have “serious” discussions about establishing a national language in the immigrant nation of the USA. I’ve seen some evidence that many species of animals develop regional characteristics to their modes of communication, but even then it seems that the buzzing of bees in Africa is not so different from the buzzing of American bees, especially in comparison to say the difference between Wolof and Cherokee.

The differences between these languages can eventually be overcome by translation, but even then there is difficulty because those languages come from different contexts. So although different cultures may both have words for a thing, the connotation behind it might be worlds apart. For instance in the West we tend to think of dogs as lovable companions, “man’s best friend,” and so we think of the word dog generally in positive terms. But there is another word for dog that has become a bit outdated that I think comes closer to the Chinese idea of the word 狗 and that would be cur. In China dogs are growing in popularity but there is definitely a generational divide that holds onto the use of dog as an insult, as something that is owned and dominated by men, which took particular significance in the communist revolution. And that’s a small example, there are so many words and phrases across languages that either don’t translate well or lack the depth of meaning in the other language that it comes off wrong. And so there’s that possibly apocryphal story of the American and British commanders during WWII who couldn’t get any work done for quite a while because of the contrary meanings of the phrase “on the table.” For the American commanders the fact that a subject was on the table meant it was being set aside for the moment, whereas in Britain it meant that it was the subject of discussion right now.

And these are all rather cute or interesting examples of the limitations of language across borders and even across dialects, but there is something much less wholesome in the way language can be perverted within a dialect. If anyone still remembers the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, think back to one of the discussions about evolution. Mr Ham argued that because evolution was just a theory that it should be presented alongside other theories like intelligent design. But this is taking two meanings of a word in a shell game to make a point that simply isn’t valid. In normal conversation to say you have a theory means that you have a guess as to what happened, hopefully an educated guess but nothing much more substantial than that. In the scientific community a theory is a constructed explanation of a specific phenomenon that takes into account all the facts that are yet known, which has been rigorously scrutinized by peer review and corroborated. Scientific theories like the germ theory of disease, the specific and general theories of relativity, and indeed the theory of evolution are not guesses, but rather the best explanation possible at the time. If you wanted the scientific term for that other word theory, it would be closer to hypothesis, or something that needs to be tested to see if it holds any water.

These shell games are meant to equate things that aren’t anywhere close to equal in validity in the hopes of making a point. But this strategy, although occasionally effective in a conversation or debate, makes the whole exercise of communication pointless as it shrouds meaning instead of conveying that meaning between people. And this kind of false equivocation and perversion of words is not simply the domain of the religious right, although their varying definitions of the word abomination do prove their expertise in this field. We are continually bombarded by empty words and phrases from politicians in the hope that we don’t pick up on the stench of male bovine excreta that emanates from them.

Always be wary of a person who uses a definition from a dictionary as the canon upon which everything must rest instead of as a working definition for clarity. Because here’s the thing about dictionaries, the words within them get their meaning from real world usage and not the other way around. And yet how many times do we hear politicians or public speakers say, “Oxford dictionary defines x as…?” This is a blatant attempt to use one version of a word to sweep in a point that has no business being there, but for the grace of some clever word play. And heck I am a sucker for the occasional bad pun, but that’s not how you construct and effective argument or a discussion with any tangible value.

But the worst case of this perversion of language comes when politicians want to say something without saying anything at all through the use of one, otherwise useful, word. Reform. We want immigration reform, we want tax reform, we want x reform is a meaningless phrase unless everyone agrees what that reform would look like. Does immigration reform mean turning away more immigrants or letting more of them in? Because both would be reforms. Does tax reform mean a simplification of the tax code, does it mean a new tax, does it mean a new loophole? Because all of those would be a reform of the system. And yet we allow our leaders to get away with this strongman routine of pretending they’re making bold promises, instead of just saying things that mean nothing but tested well with focus groups. Why? Because we’re lazy.

One of the most overlooked parts of George Orwell’s “1984” was that those in control would start to dumb down the language to make it impossible for people to form an evocative phrase, but this is child’s play. To do that would give away the intention, because everyone would see their speech being curtailed. It’s much more effective if you use the plethora of words and meanings to make meaningful words indistinguishable from domesticated equine feces. The remedy to this problem is to clarify what we mean, or to put it in the form that elementary school teachers know “say what you mean so you can mean what you say.” We need to recognize that language, like any ideology, has the power to bring people together and to drive them apart. Language, although it comes so naturally, needs to be thought about so that we don’t end up believing the meaningless words we are fed constantly. From corporate advertising to religious sermons, from political speeches to boring blogposts we need to think about the words that are said, the words that aren’t said, and the words that should have been said. It’s perfectly acceptable to stumble over words, to make mistakes and misspell, but only if you are sure that after those hiccups you make sure that you really were understood. Because it’s only after we hold our own speech to a higher standard that we’ll be able to hold those who use words as weapons to account for the shit they said.

After the Towers Fell

There are so many conversations that we, as a country, need to have in America: race, economic inequality, justice, immigration, etc. But there is one conversation that rarely is even acknowledged to exist, and it has to do with how we respond after the direct aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In that immediate aftermath it would do no good to try and tell people how they should react or heal from something like that, but we are now over a decade past that terrible day and some of the understandable mistakes we made in reaction to it are becoming a part of the culture in a negative way. There are certain things we should never forget about what happened, the people who stood up, and yes the people who left us. However, in that time when so many people were grieving a select few took the opportunity to direct the conversation in a way that has made us incapable of handling our own problems.

Let’s get a few things straight from the get go, America before and after 9/11 in terms of many ways like the status in world politics, the attitude toward foreign nations, and patriotic identity hasn’t changed all that much. Americans have not been the most popular tourists in the world since perhaps the late 1940s. It has gotten so bad that Europeans are often as skeptical about people labeling themselves as Canadians as many in the LGBT community are about people who label themselves as bisexuals. This is to say that it is true that some Americans do pretend to be Canadians abroad, just as many gay people identify briefly as bisexual, in an effort to create fewer waves. But this doesn’t mean that Canadians, or bisexuals, are an imaginary construct. All I’m trying to say is that even after this terrible event that supposedly brought down the walls of the American belief that we were separate from the world, we still basically think of the world as everything on Earth that isn’t America.

We only briefly learn the locations of countries that peak interest on a newsfeed for about a week and then go on with our lives believing that America is set apart from the world. The only other time we snap out of this delusion is when people are reminded that there are other countries that are taking away our jobs. It should also be noted that at this point some of those jobs are coming back, as workers in the “Third World” are also demanding to be treated as human beings in the work place. But the crucial fact remains that American political and social discourse rarely strays from our borders, unless of course we wish to bemoan immigration. This makes us susceptible not only to foreign groups that may wish us ill, but more importantly make us less able to integrate in the global economy. Our narrow focus on all things American and only American, aside from bend absurd, puts our economy in danger. And if there is one group to blame for all this, which there isn’t as there is blame to share but if there were just one, then it would have to be the people who have made patriotism into a commodity to be sold and not a virtue to be proven.

It wasn’t long ago that among the unofficial requirements for every aspiring politician was a flag pin on every article of clothing. In fact it is still the case that a politician cannot go long without some form of the flag appearing either on their person, on their car, or on their property, unless they wish to be labelled as unpatriotic. This form of marketed patriotism is shown in the way that politicians can get away with favoring policies that actually hurt soldiers, 9/11 first-responders, etc simply by shrouding themselves in the red, white, and blue. To put it bluntly, this is disgusting.

It took Jon Stewart’s comedic TV show to get any kind of momentum behind the bill that would help pay for the treatment of diseases contracted by first-responders in the time after they so nobly got to work in the aftermath of the attacks. Something that is so plainly patriotic as treating the illnesses our heroes got from their heroic actions had come to a standstill by the people most likely to wave the Stars and Stripes highest of all. Pundits who had never served in the military, and who actively dodged the draft when it was in effect, attacked veterans like, now Congresswoman, Tammy Duckworth. Students who simply didn’t want to say the “under god” that was tacked onto the Pledge of Allegiance, were labeled as unpatriotic. The mixture of false religion and falser patriotism allowed a select few to dictate ad hoc what is and is not patriotic or American.

Suddenly this nation of many people who are one nation were told that there is only one American language, one American religion, one American patriotism, one America that has never changed, nor would it ever. We were told that to disagree with the president at a time of war was unpatriotic, until that fateful moment when there was a new president in town. At that point the only patriotic thing a person could do was attack the leader of this country. And those of us who disagreed stayed pretty darn quiet because A it shouldn’t matter what one group of people believes, B we risked putting our own necks under the axe, and C we just didn’t know exactly how to act in response to something so earth shattering to our worldview as an attack on our own soil. And so we ceded the argument without a fight and hoped that time would heal all wounds. And although this is generally true, we can’t afford to simply let the passage of time do everything for us.

Ground Zero no longer exists, in its place we have erected a great monument to our pledge that like a phoenix we will rise from the ashes stronger than ever. But it is still politically convenient for some people to use that emotive phrase to keep the other from encroaching on what is “American.” We feel hesitant to live up to the rule of law, because apparently our nation is too weak to try terrorists in civilians courts. No one ever told me that was the case before, and I had just assumed that this country that so values justice knew that justice is blind, but when I listen to the debates all I hear is that our courts are so fragile that the mere presence of a terrorist in a courthouse would collapse everything. So we’ve committed ourselves to indefinite detentions, the abolition of the writ of Habeas Corpus, the end of the Sixth Amendment, and the rule of the “religious.” America which for so long had kept her arms wide for the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free has closed herself to the world and to any American with the gall to disagree.

I grew up to believe that we were better than that. I grew up to believe that we always aspired for better things, for a more perfect union, but this seems to have been a dream deferred. And it affects not only our political discourse, but our movies, our TV shows, our music. The number of stories set in post-apocalyptic wastelands is too numerous to count, and all because we as a culture seem incapable of lifting our heads up to see the progress that we do make. There are indeed many things in the world that threaten our way of life, and many people dead set on ensuring that the worst prophecies of climate change, for example, come true. But I have seen nothing that says we are doomed to continue to make these mistakes, we can lift ourselves up, we can change, we can and are rising again and the rest of the world with us.

Even though all the news reports would have you believe that we are approaching a new world war, this is the most peaceful time likely in human history. At no other time has humanity been capable of sustaining life so long for so many people. And yet there are those who die too young, those who go hungry as ever. But we have the means to feed the world, to clothe the world, to house the world, to bring the whole world out of the gloomy past. But America cannot do this alone. We must remember that there is a whole world outside of our borders. A world of friends and allies and a world of people yearning to be a part of that ever more connected world. There are now, as likely there has always been in human history, long-lasting feuds and conflicts between nations and religions and ideologies. We will not change these things over night nor even in this generation, but we can step forward.

After the towers fell we believed that the world was ending, that this great experiment in democracy, in liberty, in justice was crumbling along with the windows and the concrete. But after the towers fell some few stood up and got to work and that emboldened the rest of us to stand up as well. And now we have a new gleaming Freedom Tower, taller than the old ones, to remind us what heights we can yet achieve. But freedom is not an American commodity. Freedom is the birthright of every man and every woman and every child on this planet. It is not ours to give freedom to other nations, but ours to show others so that they too can stand up as we do now and claim that birthright. This is a patriotism that I can get behind, and there is nothing false about it.

Impeachable Offense

There has been a bit of talk about the simple concept of impeaching President Obama, so I figured I’d put my two cents into the ring. The trouble with pinning down exactly what is meant by this idea is the fact that no one in the know actually believes A that there is anything worth actually making that big of a fuss about and B that even if there were that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of it going anywhere. At least part of the reason why this is such a fuzzy issue is because most people don’t know what the rules behind an impeachment are, which is fair enough because the rules that do exist are so incredibly vague as it is.

Let’s start by focusing on who is making a stink and why they are. When Obama won the 2008 election it wasn’t earth shattering, but it was surprising to many. For a certain sector of society the simple idea of Barack Obama’s presidency was reason enough to get up in arms, thus the birth of the Tea Party. I’m always hesitant to jump right to the race issue from the start, because who am I to claim knowledge of what goes on in a person’s heart, but it does seem odd to me that the first president who wasn’t a WASP since Kennedy, who you might remember had the grace to at least match the first letter, has caused so much backlash for no reason. And yes I mean no reason. Every claim about the Obama administration coming after guns, extending government overreach, expanding the deficit is in stark contrast to a little thing called reality. And although there are many, like myself, who wish that there were actually a little truth to the allegations that President Obama is a Leftist president, there is nothing about him that they should hate, much less anything illegal.

So now that we are in an election year then unfortunate politicians who count these people among their constituents have to pretend like what they’re saying is actually sane. The one-liners that are hitting the airwaves are coming from people trying to engage a conservative core that still hasn’t died off yet for one last hurrah in the midterms and nothing more. You want to know how I know that this is the case, and not say that these politicians actually think that President Obama has done anything wrong? Because they aren’t willing to actually follow through with the threat. Every one of the comments coming from someone in elected office, and not some whack-job without any kind of repercussion for their comments, comes with the caveat that although they would like to impeach the president or that he should be impeached, that they won’t do it for electoral reasons. This shows the absolute lack of any kind of actual outrage with his presidency, beyond the political game of throwing stones.

Do you remember what happened when the Roman Senate believed that Julius Caesar was being a tyrant? Yes, regardless of the retribution that would doubtless follow, they actually assassinated him. Now I’m not saying that if the GOP actually thinks that the president is being a dictator that they should come packing, though given their ads it would seem like they might do it, if they did think that the president did something impeachable, why wouldn’t they impeach him? I mean heck, with the numbers they have in the House they can fairly easily do so, but the Democratic majority in the Senate means that President Obama would remain in office regardless. But there again when an actual impeachable offense has been committed then party lines shouldn’t matter, you’ll get people who will always tow the party line but you should be able to scrape together the mere 2/3 of Senators to ultimately convict a criminal. They know there’s nothing in it, so they recognize that the inevitable loss would result in a political cost.

But let’s pretend that this isn’t simply the addled minds of the far Right getting to voice their darkest desires and ask what it is that President Obama has done that would count as an impeachable offense. To understand that we would have to understand what counts as an impeachable offense. A cursory look at the old Constitution tells us that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High crimes and Misdemeanors.” Treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Although using the word treason polls very well with voters, the president has not done anything that the Constitution defines as treason. In fact given that the definition refers only to actions that either bring war tot he country or aid wartime enemies, it would seem that the President who has a record of ending wars has done the exact opposite. There is no allegation nor evidence that President Obama has any direct connections to bribery, despite coming from the Chicago machine. And this leaves the problematic “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

This nebulous phrase gives the House majority the freedom to define anything and everything that they disapprove of at a given time as an impeachable offense. And although there are many things that people might find annoying about this administration, not the least of which being his extension of many Bush era policies(USA PATRIOT Act, NSA Surveillance, and bush tax cuts), there is nothing that he’s done that is uniquely impeachable. The biggest problem that Republicans have had with President Obama have been related to his executive orders. Let’s forget that President Obama still isn’t even close to number of orders made by President Bush, he’s still under half the number of orders made by the Right’s favorite President Reagan.

There is simply nothing behind these calls for impeachment other than hate for this president in particular and this is where I have to firmly point towards race. No other president has been this calm and collected in the face of this level of hate that came without any provocation. Yes, presidents have been assassinated, but that was generally because they took a stand on something. Obama has been so afraid to be the “liberal” president, to be the “black” president, to be an unpopular president that he has done everything in his power to keep from offending anyone. He has barely touched any issue, even the ones that will likely be enshrined as his biggest achievements, but in this last term he’s finally willing to do something. And although it is a case of better late than never, I am glad to see him active now.

President Obama has done basically nothing wrong, but this year he’s finally committing to doing something right. Congress is so utterly gridlocked that he has been forced to act alone within the limited parameters that are covered by an executive order. Congress has proven itself incapable of approving anyone to any office, so can you really blame his administration for searching for any loophole to bypass the unending battle on the Hill? Congress, even after the end of the shut down still isn’t really to get up and do anything so of course President Obama is doing what he can to move anything forward. And even with all this “unilateral” movement he still hasn’t matched his predecessor, and yet no one called for his impeachment. So here we stand, giving air time to lunatics and nodding along as if it’s reasonable, but let’s recognize what impeachment means.

Impeachment is a scar on an administration, even if you survive the final vote. Only two president’s have ever been impeached, although only because Nixon resigned before he would have added his name to that list. Andrew Johnson was a corrupt politician who only barely dodged the rap for his actual crimes. Bill Clinton was a decent politician, but his weaknesses in his personal life did lead him to perjury. And even though he was guilty of that, even then there wasn’t enough of a push against him to carry it out. There is little precedent for impeachment and those occasions when it actually comes to that were the result of real crimes. There is nothing substantive here and the stench of pettiness is reeking from the Right.