Wherein Marty demonstrates how the Right gets it wrong, twice

Posted on October 4, 2006 by Paul — 3 Comments ↓

Marty has posted a summary of a couple of arguments I’ve seen made a lot by those on the Right, one specific to the case of the Republican pervert Mark Foley, the other a more general case. First the specific:

Now suppose they had thrown Foley, a gay representitive, under the bus at that time with no evidence of a crime. The lefties would have been all over â€œthose Homophobic Republicans.â€ Now, a year later, as soon as evidence of a crime appears Foley is confronted and resigns. The cry is, â€œThey were hiding it until after the election! Hastert should resign!â€

No, Hastert did his job correctly. The scandal casts Foley in a bad light.

Partially correct. If Hastert had proceeded by saying “Look at Foley, he’s a big sweaty gay come to corrupt our children, can’t you see the gay dripping from him?” I think the Left would have protested. If, on the other hand, he’d made discrete inquiries about the issue, perhaps speaking to some former Pages who may have felt able to speak freely about what happened, I don’t think there would have been an outcry. Even if he had gone public, announcing that accusations had been made that were serious enough to warrant a full investigation, though he remained firmly supportive of his good friend Rep. Foley, I think there would have been little basis for complaint. But instead, as Marty phrases it, “he told Foley to knock it off.” I’m no expert, but “Please don’t be a pedophile” doesn’t strike me as being tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.

Now for the more general critique, where Marty quotes from RealClearPolitics:

“Scandal? Disgrace? I think not. Foley and others could only be so labeled if popular culture condemned, rather than promoted, immorality. Oh, sorry, there I go again, appealing to a discarded standard.”

This is based on the Christian (and some other religion’s) argument that morality is meaningless without reference to (a) God; that there is no action you can describe that can be said to be moral or otherwise without first understanding what (a) God would teach on that action. I don’t wish to debate this point – you either agree with it or you don’t, and my attempts to highlight its strengths or flaws won’t change that. But it simply does not apply here. Immorality isn’t a single entity, so popular culture cannot be said to promote or condemn it. Certainly there are things that Christians find immoral that popular culture promotes (such as casual sex), and things that I find immoral (such as the subjugation of women, which certain forms of Christianity also promote, ah the irony). But neither popular culture nor society as a whole support the idea of a 50-something man having sex with children, and to suggest otherwise is so ridiculous as to suggest some kind of brain damage.

Don’t take my word for it – ask around your place of work and try to find anyone who thinks it’s OK. Whether you work at the 7/11 or a Hollywood studio the answer will be the same. The only exception would be if I have readers who work at the execrable ManBoyLove organization, which I doubt (I’m not sure that’s its correct title, but I’m damn sure I’m not googling for it.) And they only further my point, because they’re about as far from popular culture or societal norms as it is possible to get.

All of us are, of course, free to follow a group morality or our very own invention. The choice will certainly have consequences in this world, and depending on your faith may in the next world too. Foley’s consequences now include disgrace and humiliation. Hastert and several others in the Republican leadership who appear to think that investigating credible evidence of a pedophile in your midst isn’t worth the trouble deserve nothing less.

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Addendum: I could quote approvingly from pretty much this entire piece at WorldNetDaily, which I can’t imagine being able to say about anything else they’ve ever published. Worth a read to see a sane view from the far Right.

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Update: Looks like it might be the fault of all those nasty horrible gays after all. Of course.

Karnataka bandh

Posted on October 4, 2006 by Paul

Today, as I was informed in passing by a colleague in Bangalore, is the Karnataka bandh. From Wikipedia I’ve learned that Karnataka is the region of India in which Bangalore is situated, and a bandh is a closing down of shops and offices to mark some kind of event. In trying to find out what the bandh was for, I found the following brief article:

BANGALORE: The Karnataka bandh, called by pro-Kannada organisations, will now be observed on Oct 4 and not Sept 30.

The bandh has been called under the aegis of Border Agitation Committee to protest against Centre’s decision to withdraw an affidavit in the Supreme Court on Karnataka-Maharashtra border issue.

“Preparations prior to the Ayudha pooja, which falls on October 1, should not be hampered by the bandh. Since pooja is followed by Vijayadashami and Dasara celebrations, we have postponed the bandh to October 4,” committee president and MLA Vatal Nagaraj said.

Karnataka Film Chamber and Commerce president H D Gangaraj said the film industry will support the bandh

The bolding is mine, to draw your attention to the parts that left me utterly bewildered. So much I don’t know, so little time to Google it all.

Complexity in Television

Posted on October 3, 2006 by Paul

I was watching an episode of Spooks last night, a drama involving agents of the UK intelligence agency MI5 (hence its name – MI5 – when it is shown in the US). In the episode a conference to create a new trade agreement was threatened by a side deal between Japan and the US, and an assassin targeting one of the delegates. It all wrapped up well, with the side-deal foiled (to the advantage of the UK, of course – this is our TV) and the assassin stopped.

Well that is how I imagine a standard US take on it would have ended, assuming that the US would accept a spy drama based on a trade agreement in a conference hotel. I was struck, however, by the extra complexity the British viewer was expected to take on. The side-deal also impacted the country the assassination target was the leader of, as part of an attempt by him to ethnically cleanse a group in his country. The assassin was released to complete her mission after the trade agreement was signed, followed by a cover-up of MI5’s involvement that included blackmailing the Foreign Secretary. And at the same time we had the standard love triangle, internal politics and character development.

Clearly having an extra 10 minutes of programming time helps, but even so the programme moved much faster than comparable programs like NCIS or even 24 (both excellent programs). Still accustomed to US pacing, I kept looking at the clock and being surprised that we still had so much time to go.

Thinking doesn’t have to be hard

Posted on October 2, 2006 by Paul — 1 Comment ↓

Amazingly, here’s an insightful political post from Slashdot. I highlight it not because it contains any particularly stunning analysis, but because such clearly-stated thinking is pretty rare anywhere, least of all Slashdot.

Most of the principals were in the country by the time Bush came to office, killing Bin Laden wouldn’t have done much. Even now, Al Qaeda is not some monolith organization, and it is academically lazy to think of it as one. Bin Laden’s capture would certainly have a demoralizing effect, but it would not cripple the organization, nor would killing him in early 2001 have done so. Hell, we really need to get Al-Zawahri, but have been failing at that.

9/11 CANNOT be blamed on one individual. True, Clinton did not do as much as he should have during his term, but Bush obviously didn’t see the flaws being all that major as he didn’t do anything about them in the first 9 months. Also recall that anything Clinton did in the Middle East (most hypocritically was bomb Iraq) was labeled as “Wag the Dog” by Republicans. Meanwhile, when they do similar things they are being “tough on terrorism”.

The intelligence failures showed systemic flaws in the US intelligence gathering organization, flaws that go back decades(hell, Bush Sr. was head of the CIA for a few months). As George Tenet said, 9/11 was a “failure of imagination” on the part of the intelligence community. And so far in my opinion Bush has done almost nothing to fix those flaws. Well, he has allowed Army translators who are in short supply to be fired because they are gay, I guess there is always that. Also see the court cases of dismissed FBI agents who claimed they were ignored when they warned about attacks. The system is broken, and Clinton blaming Bush and Bush blaming Clinton surprisingly won’t fix it. Killing Bin Laden won’t fix it. Iraq certainly won’t fix it. Nor will using homeland security money to pay off political backers and punish adversaries (Because we all know Indiana has the most potential terrorist targets). What needs to be done cannot be boiled down to a soundbite, but I do know that past administrations, this administration and in all likelihood future administrations don’t have the will or desire to really fix it, but instead like to apply popular band-aids and use ad-hominem attacks on their critics.

Your leadership

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Paul

There’s a scandal going on about the fact that a Republican Congressman, Mark Foley, is a pervert preying on the young pages working at the House, and that the GOP leadership covered this up. Josh Marshall highlights a small but fundamental part of the story:

Rep. Alexander (R-LA), the first member of Congress to be alerted to the problem, says he contacted the NRCC. That’s the House Republicans’ election committee, a political organization entirely separate from the House bureaucracy and the Congress. (The head of the NRCC this cycle is Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY).) That is, to put it mildly, not in the disciplinary and administrative chain of command of the House of Representatives. Considering that the issue involved a minor, it seems highly inappropriate to discuss the matter with anyone not charged with policing the House. More to the point, however, you tell the head of the NRCC because you see the matter as a political problem.

So when you’ve uncovered a pervert in your midst, job one for the GOP is managing the political fallout, not stopping the pervert (in fact it appears, given how long this went on once it became known, that stopping him was way down the list of priorities).