Hate crimes: a response

Hate crimes, or at least a seminal form of them, have been with us since nearly the founding of this country. They run the gamut from atrocities against Native Americans to the universe of abuses that surrounded slavery, to the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan to the "lynching era" of 1880-1930.

The laws against, them, however, are really quite new. They did not exist until the early 1980s, when a number of states began trying to grapple with the phenomenon. And for most Americans, they still are somewhat alien; in many regards they feel like any number of other "feel good" laws passed as sops to various minorities seeking to bolster their civil rights. Moreover, there is a dark side to them: Do they create thought crimes? Are they actually a threat to our civil liberties?

Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft comes down on this side of the debate, and evidently has for at least awhile, having chaired a committee on the issues for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and subsequently authoring an article making these arguments. She recently posted a condensed version that made a cogent and persuasive response to the posts by Matt Singer and Matthew Yglsesias favoring the laws.

I should note that Jeralyn is one of the rare bloggers with whom I usually agree with nearly everything she writes. But in this case, I a firmly disagree with her position in nearly every detail. (I've mentioned that my next book is about hate crimes in America -- the reality, not the theory -- and much of what follows forms the core of my basic thesis.)

Let me address Jeralyn's points one by one:

The federal judiciary released a statement recently expressing constitutional and practical concerns about hate crime laws. The underlying criminal activity of a hate crime, such as robbery, assault, or murder, traditionally falls under state jurisdiction. The concern is that by passing federal hate crime laws, there will be a mass federalization of crime which should and could be adequately handled at the state level instead of overburdening our already overwhelmed federal courts.

This concern is not very well grounded. Neither the current federal hate-crimes laws, nor the new version currently making its way in the Senate, step into state jurisdictions in any form.

A bit of explanation first: Hate crimes have little to do with "hate," particularly in the legal sense. The correct term for them is "bias-motivated crimes" or "bias crimes." They only exist on the books as a different category of crimes with which we already are well familiar (murder, assault, threatening, intimidation, vandalism, etc.) -- that is, a hate crime always has a well-established "parallel" crime underlying it, with the added layer of motivation by bias (racial, ethnic, etc.).

The federal hate-crimes laws either on the books or proposed so far restrict themselves to sentence enhancements for federal crimes committed with a bias motivation. In this respect, they closely resemble federal anti-terrorism laws, at least structurally; these laws, too, deal only with federal crimes committed with a terroristic intent.

The current federal law, passed in 1995, in fact is extremely limited (and nearly useless) because it restricts federal law enforcers from filing a hate-crimes charge unless the crime is committed on federal property or as a disruption of a federal activity (including voting). The new version, currently making its way forward in the Senate, largely eliminates this limitation, but is even more explicit about maintaining state and local prerogatives, and restricting the federal government primarily to the role of financier, coordinator and helper. Here is the 2001 version of the same bill, which goes by the title, "Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act."

Hate-crimes laws do raise important questions about federalism -- but then, all federal criminal legislation raises them. This includes their antecedents in the Reconstruction (particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Enforcement Act of 1870) and in the anti-lynching legislation of the '20s and '30s. And of course, the federal hate-crimes laws on the books are very circumspect and limited in scope, largely for just this reason.

Now, while Jeralyn tried to limit her arguments to the matter of federal hate crimes, it must be observed that the bulk of the remainder of her arguments militate against hate-crimes laws generally, and thus against the state and local laws as well. Let's look:

There is no evidence to suggest that hate crime laws will have a deterrent effect upon hate crimes.

There's very little evidence, actually, that laws against murder have a deterrent effect on would-be killers, either. This does not mean we should not have laws against murder. Indeed, deterrence is often the weakest argument for or against any kind of law that affects punishment.

Hate-crimes laws, as we shall see, exist for a whole panoply of sound reasons, the main one being that they provide communities with the tools to confront these crimes, which are clearly different in nature and intent than their parallel crimes.

In many cases, it is very difficult to prove a hateful motivation for the criminal act. The decision to charge a hate crime as such should not be left to law enforcement. The F.B.I., for example, includes gestures and other body language in its hate crime statistics. Prosecutions to date in some cases have been based upon bigoted statements made several years before the act in question.

There's no doubt that the main point here is true: Establishing a bias motivation is unquestionably the most difficult aspect of prosecuting these cases. Indeed, the bar is extremely high, since proving this motivation requires relying on both previous statements or associations and with establishing the perpetrator's state of mind, or mens rea, at the time of the act.

Moreover, most prosecutors are reluctant to file such charges for precisely these reasons. As such, it is clear that most hate-crimes prosecutions only occur when the evidence is clear and substantial. In other words, the well-established structure of the criminal courts provides the strongest insurance against abuse or questionable prosecutions. At times this barrier may fail, but not often. This is frankly no different than in any other area of criminal law.

Finally, it is difficult to ascertain what Jeralyn means by suggesting that the decision to prosecute these crimes should not be left to law enforcement. Is she arguing that prosecutors -- who certainly are part of the law-enforcement apparatus, and almost invariably are the officials filing the charges -- should not make this choice? If not they, then who?

There are already sufficient criminal laws and penalties on the books to punish hate crimes. We should punish the act, not the thought process of the actor. If these acts are inadequately prosecuted and punished when the victim is of a minority or disadvantaged class, the answer lies in increased education and sensitization of law enforcement and the judiciary.

These are the most serious of the points that Jeralyn raises, and there are two components of it that need addressing. However, I'll address the "thought crimes" argument when it is raised again below.

First is the suggestion that current laws against the parallel crimes are adequate to the task and that hate-crimes laws intrude unnecessarily on this ground. Indeed, this identical argument was raised in the 1920s and '30s by opponents of the anti-lynching legislation that was the NAACP's raison d'etre during its early years.

Nowadays, it is proffered by such hate-crimes-law opponents as the Traditional Values Coalition and the Family Forum (who fear new laws that include sexual orientation among the categories of bias). A clearly specious version of it is the common Republican meme, "All crimes are hate crimes" -- which, fortunately, does not appear in Jeralyn's arguments, but which can be heard frequently from the likes of George W. Bush and Orrin Hatch.

It should go without saying that in fact not all crimes are alike in nature. Indeed, not even all homicides are alike; they range from second-degree manslaughter to first-degree murder. The difference among them largely stems from the circumstances of the act and from the perpetrator's mens rea. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Are hate crimes truly different from their parallel crimes? Quantifiably and qualitatively, the answer is yes.

The first and most clear aspect of this difference lies in the breadth of the crimes' effects. Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays -- to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community. They resemble anti-terrorism laws in this respect as well. As Matt Welch puts it in the post that started this debate:

So, in effect, you add more punishment to those who perpetrate hate crimes because the crime targets and effects more than the immediate victim. It creates a culture of fear to which society must respond.

But this is only one aspect of how different hate crimes are from their parallel crimes. There are several more, and they are substantial. Frederick Lawrence, associate dean of the Boston University Law School, describes these differences in detail in his landmark text, Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law (1999, Harvard University Press), which is a truly definitive text on hate-crimes laws (and from which I openly admit I draw many of my arguments, partly because I've explored these issues thoroughly through other avenues -- at one time I too was skeptical of hate-crimes laws' efficacy -- and found that Lawrence was correct in most respects, indeed in nearly every detail):

Bias crimes are far more likely to be violent than are other crimes. This is true on two levels. In the first place, crimes committed with bias motivation are dramatically more likely to involve physical assaults than do crimes generally, One study conducted in Boston found that approximately half of all bias crimes reported to the police involved assaults. This is far above the average for crimes generally, where we find that only 7 percent of all crimes reported to the police involve assaults. Secondly, bias-motivated crimes are far more likely than other assaults to involve serious physical injury to the victim. The Boston study, for example, found that nearly 75 percent of the victims of bias-motivated assaults suffered physical injury, whereas the national average for assaults generally is closer to 30 percent. …

Bias crimes are may also be distinguished from parallel crimes on the basis of their particular emotional and psychological impact on the victim. The victim of a bias crime is not attacked for a random reason -- as the person injured during a shooting spree in a public place -- nor is he attacked for an impersonal reason, as is the victim of a mugging for money. He is attacked for a specific, personal reason: his race [or religion, or sexual preference]. Moreover, the bias crime victim cannot reasonably minimize the risk of future attacks because he is unable to change the characteristics that made him a victim.

A bias crime thus attacks the victim not only physically but at the very core of his identity. It is an attack from which there is no escape. It is one thing to avoid the park at night because it is not safe. It is quite another to avoid certain neighborhoods because of one's race. This heightened sense of vulnerability caused by bias crimes is beyond that normally found in crime victims. Bias-crime victims have been compared to rape victims in that the physical harm associated with the crime, however great, is less significant than the powerful accompanying sense of violation. The victims of bias crimes thus tend to experience psychological symptoms such as depression or withdrawal, as well as anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and a profound sense of isolation. …

… Bias crimes cause an even broader injury to the general community. Such crimes violate not only society's general concern for the security of its members and their property but also the shared value of equality among its citizens and racial and religious harmony in a heterogeneous society. A bias crime is therefore a profound violation of the egalitarian ideal and the anti-discrimination principle that have become fundamental not only to the American legal system but to American culture as well.

Not only are bias crimes substantially different in nature from their parallel crimes, there is no question that they cause substantially greater harm, so a harsher punishment is fully warranted.

Since 41 states already have hate crime laws, expanding federal laws in this area could result in double prosecution in many instances, with the federal government following up in cases where they simply do not like the results in state trials.

This is not only unlikely, under both the current and proposed federal laws, it simply cannot happen. (See the response to the first point above.) The only time that the federal government has room to move in and prosecute is if state and local authorities simply choose not to act.

The gender provision of the proposed federal expansion bill could make run-of-the-mill rape and domestic violence incidents “federal hate crimes.” The disability provision could result in basic crimes against disabled victims -- such as mugging a person in a wheelchair -- being prosecuted as “federal hate crimes.” The result risked is a trivialization of the federal criminal sanction.

This is simply so unlikely to happen as to border on being simply false. Establishing a bias motivation -- which is the core of filing a hate-crimes charge -- is, as already noted, an extremely high bar that requires more than simply a few words uttered during or before the commission of the crime. Prosecutors typically must prove several aggravating factors; they must demonstrate a pattern of behavior consistent with the bias, as well as a willingness or desire to use extreme or criminal means to act upon it. A simple mugging or rape does not meet this standard; but a gang of youths who systematically attack handicapped people over the course of a night, or a rapist who delights in terrorizing not just his victims but the community with misogynist taunts -- these do.

However, it is always possible that an out-of-control prosecutor (Kenneth Starr, perhaps?) could attempt such a case. My experience in federal courts, however, is that neither the juries nor the judges will often countenance that kind of behavior. I have heard of such flimsy cases occasionally being tried -- and many more in other areas of criminal law as well -- but fortunately, they largely end in acquittals. But this is a problem with the court system, not with the law itself.

Thought is the core value of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. It is absolutely protected and any attempt to regulate it cannot be tolerated.

Do hate-crimes laws create thought crimes? The issue has certainly been addressed in the courts, notably in the definitive Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell:

Mitchell argues [via the First Amendment] that the Wisconsin penalty-enhancement statute is invalid because it punishes the defendant's discriminatory motive, or reason, for acting. But motive plays the same role under the Wisconsin statute as it does under federal and state antidiscrimination laws, which we have previously upheld against constitutional challenge. … Title VII, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against an employee "because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." … In Hishon, we rejected the argument that Title VII infringed employers' First Amendment rights. And more recently, in R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 505 U.S. at 389-390, we cited Title VII (as well as 18 U.S.C. 242 and 42 U.S.C. 1981 and 1982) as an example of a permissible content-neutral regulation of conduct.

Nothing in our decision last Term in R.A.V. compels a different result here. That case involved a First Amendment challenge to a municipal ordinance prohibiting the use of "`fighting words' that insult, or provoke violence, `on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.'" … But whereas the ordinance struck down in R.A.V. was explicitly directed at expression (i.e., "speech" or "messages"), … the statute in this case is aimed at conduct unprotected by the First Amendment.

Moreover, the Wisconsin statute singles out for enhancement bias-inspired conduct because this conduct is thought [508 U.S. 476, 488] to inflict greater individual and societal harm. For example, according to the State and its amici, bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest. … The State's desire to redress these perceived harms provides an adequate explanation for its penalty-enhancement provision over and above mere disagreement with offenders' beliefs or biases. As Blackstone said long ago, "it is but reasonable that, among crimes of different natures, those should be most severely punished which are the most destructive of the public safety and happiness."

Of course, this is William Rehnquist, but the ruling was unanimous. Nonetheless, I think Matt Singer puts more or less the same argument much more elegantly in his first post on the matter:

[T]he real answer is that hate crimes laws don't punish individuals for their thoughts. They punish individuals for acting on their thoughts in unacceptable ways, by targeting a community for violence.

Frankly, I've always found the argument that these laws are "thought crimes" to be a little creepy, since it is echoed in the claims of the Christian Right that hate-crimes laws that include sexual orientation are an attempt to impinge upon their freedom of speech. But gay-bashing is no more a free-speech right than is lynching or even, say, assassinating the president. Political thought may motivate all of them, but that doesn't mean the Constitution protects any of them.

In many cases, enhanced penalties are not even possible. In most states, the penalty for murder is life in prison, and in many, the death penalty is already available.

This is both true and untrue. It is certainly true that at the upper end of the criminal spectrum -- particularly with murder -- there is very little sentence enhancement to be obtained by trying the case under hate-crimes laws. Indeed, because the bar is so high on those laws, it is extremely rare to see a prosecutor even attempt it, especially if the evidence related to the parallel crime is overwhelming.

The most prominent example of this was the Jasper case -- James Byrd's killers were not tried under a hate-crimes law, but rather under Texas' murder law. (Because it was clearly a hate crime, the federal government was able to chip in and assist the state prosecutors who were handling the case. This is the reality of how hate-crimes laws work vis a vis the federalism issue.) However, it's worth recalling that Buford Furrow, the fellow who shot up the Jewish synagogue in Los Angeles three years ago, in fact faced both local and federal hate-crimes charges, even though his crimes neared the upper end of the spectrum.

But it is simply not true that these constitute "many" cases. In fact, murder is probably the least prosecuted of all hate-crimes charges. There are annually only a tiny handful of such cases at best. The vast bulk of hate-crimes charges involve assaults, intimidation, property crimes and vandalism.

Granting increased powers of investigation to federal officials over our thought processes to prove bias and prejudice will become exceedingly Orwellian. Do we want to authorize the subpoena of book store records so that the fact that our spouse owns, say, a copy of The Turner Diaries can be used against him or her to prove the requisite mental intent for a hate crime?

Well, I'd like to think most of us would oppose such a system were it being proposed in any fashion. However, neither current nor proposed hate-crimes laws would authorize any such invasions of our privacy. All evidence in these cases must be gathered according to the standards of any criminal prosecution.

Do we want to support laws that will increase the investigator’s search and seizure powers into the sanctity of our houses, property and personal effects, which is guaranteed to us by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution?

This final, seemingly rhetorical question more or less repeats the same issues raised in the point previous -- and warrants the same response.

I should make it clear that I believe there are many problems with hate-crimes laws in America. The landscape is currently littered with a hodgepodge of state laws that are wildly inconsistent both in their constitutionality and their efficacy; Washington state's "malicious harassment" statute, for instance, is nearly useless and might not pass constitutional muster anyway.

And the federal statutes are currently so limited as to be useless as well. Consider, for instance, that the Justice Department has charted some 300 hate-crimes cases being either investigated or prosecuted related to anti-Muslim bias after the events of Sept. 11. Yet fewer than 10 of these so far have been charged under the 1995 federal hate-crimes law.

The most significant problem, however, is that prosecutions under these laws is wildly inconsistent and often unevenly applied. What is becoming increasingly apparent, as hate-crimes statistics are compiled, is that in rural America, hate-crimes laws go virtually unenforced -- not just by prosecutors, but by police. Minorities as a result are extremely vulnerable in these areas, and the problem, I believe, provides significant fuel for the fires of racial mistrust.

Hate-crimes laws in a sense were an unfunded mandate: Nearly everyone (41 states) passed the laws, but then failed to ensure that law-enforcement officials were given the tools to enforce them. Most of this comes down to education: Teaching LEOs how to identify hate crimes accurately and differentiate them from ordinary crimes; how to deal with the victims; and how to gather evidence. Similarly, local prosecutors, too, need to be better educated on these issues, particularly on what comprises these crimes and why they are important to pursue.

[For more reading on this point, see the Justice Research and Statistics Association's 2000 report, Improving the Quality and Accuracy of Hate Crime Reporting, as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center's damning 2002 follow-up, "Discounting Hate: Ten years after federal officials began compiling national hate crime statistics the numbers don’t add up".]

In the final analysis, all logic notwithstanding, I have to draw on my personal experience with hate crimes, their perpetrators, and their victims -- which includes the communities where they take place. And what my experience has told me is that hate-crimes laws are really about something that draws on Americans' sense of decency and fair play.

The old antilynching laws from which hate-crimes laws are descended were never approved, mostly because of the vehement opposition of the Deep South (whose senators three different times, over a 15-year period, filibustered the various versions of the legislation after it had passed the House and was headed for Senate approval). But the spirit that drove them has remained alive and resurfaced in more congenial times -- and it is a spirit, I believe, that runs deep in the American grain.

I think Fred Lawrence sums it up best in Punishing Hate [p. 169]:

Society's most cherished values will be reflected in the criminal law by applying the harshest penalties to those crimes that violate these values. There will certainly be lesser penalties for those crimes that in some respects are similar but do not violate these values. The hierarchy of societal values involved in criminal conduct will thus be reflected by the lesser crime's status as a lesser offense included within the more serious crime.

The enshrinement of racial harmony and equality among our highest values not only calls for independent punishment of racially motivated violence as a bias crime and not merely as a parallel crime; it also calls for enhanced punishment of bias crimes over parallel crimes. If bias crimes are not punished more harshly than parallel crimes, the implicit message expressed by the criminal justice system is that racial harmony and equality are not among the highest values in our society. If a racially motivated assault is punished identically to a parallel assault, the racial motivation of the bias crime is rendered largely irrelevant and thus not part of that which is condemned. The individual victim, the target community, and indeed the society at large thus suffer the twin insults akin to those suffered by the narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Not only has the crime itself occurred, but the underlying hatred of the crime is invisible to the eyes of the legal system. The punishment of bias crimes … therefore, is necessary for the full expression of commitment to American values of equality of treatment and opportunity.

Hate-crimes laws are indeed relatively new laws. But they represent something that I think is a long thread running through our history, something many of us almost instinctively understand -- that is, the ethical imperative to stand up against the bullies and the thugs and the nightriders, because their whole purpose is to terrorize, oppress and disenfranchise the people they deem different or "not American."

I witnessed this decency -- the only possible antidote to the obscenity preceded it -- playing out firsthand a couple of years ago, and I'll be writing about it this summer in Death on the Fourth of July (scheduled for publication in 2004). Please stay tuned.

How about 'Christianism'?

Tristero has some further thoughts on the matter of using false nomenclatures to describe radical terrorists like Eric Rudolph and Osama bin Laden:

To oversimplify, Islam is the religion, Islamism is the political movement inspired by the religion. A closer analogy seems to be that Islamism is to Islam as fundamentalism of the Pat Robertson ilk is to Christianity.
...
In an analogy to Islamism, I would propose the term "Christianism" to describe a political ideology inspired by Christianity that advocates the replacement of a secular government with one that is profoundly informed by a self-styled "literal" interpretation of the Bible. By this definition, Rudolph is perhaps best described as a radical "Christianist," a man inspired by Christianity to effect social change through violence.

"Christianism" is without a doubt an ugly neologism. However, it is a mistake to describe as "Christian" people and groups like Robertson, Falwell, Christian Identity, and those who are even more radical in their mission to transform the US into an explicitly fundamentalist "christian" state. This confuses Christianity, a religious belief, with a purely secular agenda. Furtheremore, it is highly misleading to ignore the hijacking of Christianity and its symbols by the Rudolphs of the world simply by repressing any reference to their Christian inspirations and calling them "anti-abortion terrorists" or some similar name.

Go read the whole thing (as well as the rest of the blog, which has been very thoughtful this week).

Newspeak of the Week

"The fairest tax cuts are those that favor one side."

I deduced this week's Newspeak from a meme that's being promoted by Republicans the past couple of weeks. The important examples are Tom DeLay and Robert Novak, though I swear I've heard it spoken by nearly every conservative mouthpiece who's been on TV talking about the tax cuts.

It goes like this:

"Tax cuts should be aimed at the people who pay taxes."

Here's the ensuing logic:

This is because the only people who count are those who pay taxes.

And if you pay lots of taxes, then you count more.

Thus, some Americans are more equal than others.

So when Ari Fleischer says, "This certainly does deliver tax relief to the people who pay income taxes," he means something other than what it sounds like he's saying. (Imagine that!)

At any rate, have you noticed that no one ever talks about "tax burdens" anymore? That's because they are the inconvenient flaw in this kind of "logic."

What these rich Republicans conveniently neglect to factor into their scenario is the fact that for someone with three kids earning $20,000 a year, the $1200 tax cut that's now been forwarded to the House means the difference between buying shoes for their kids or not. For someone earning $200,000 (or $2 million) a year, it's the difference between the condo with the view and the one without.

In other words, trying to ameliorate the difference in tax burdens is really about basic values of fair play and decency.

Not that Tom DeLay would be familiar with such concepts.

Another right-wing terrorist?

Here's a decidedly unnerving story that underscores, once again, the potent threat of "lone wolf" terrorists of both the radical Islamist variety and the American right-wing variant. From the Associated Press:

Bomb plot suspected in LA stashes of weapons, ammo, jet fuel

MONTEREY PARK, Calif. - A man now in prison for vehicle theft is believed to have been planning a significant attack on a building or people, say authorities who uncovered an arsenal of semiautomatic assault weapons, ammunition, pipe bombs and barrels of jet fuel.

There have been no charges filed involving the materials but the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is investigating, authorities told a news conference at Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department headquarters here Wednesday.

The man, John Noster, 38, has refused to talk to investigators, sheriff's Sgt. John Demooy said.

"He was definitely planning on targeting a structure, location, individuals, and would have created significant damage," Demooy said.

Authorities, however, have not been able to identify the target.

Note that Noster was a "white collar professional" who was far from the stereotype of the uneducated camo-geared beer-bellied militiaman. Also, there's this:

Investigators also found a list of apparent titles including "None Dare Call it Conspiracy," "The CFR," "The Invisible Government," "Secrets of the Federal Reserve" and "Shadows of Power." Books by those names allege a worldwide socialist conspiracy of bankers, government leaders and others.

It is, once again, fortunate that good luck and smart work by law enforcement caught this guy before he could carry out his attack. There have been other similar cases. Two spring immediately to mind: the arrest of Bradley Glover and his gang, for instance, before they could pull off their plan to attack a military base (they were en route and had some serious materiel); the arrest of the militiamen who were planning to blow up a propane facility in northern California, with potentially catastrophic results.

Of course, those cases didn't exactly make the evening news, either.

Intelligence and the lack thereof

An important read, from Jim Lobe at Foreign Policy in Focus:

Credibility Gap over Iraq WMD Looms Larger

Retired intelligence officials from both the CIA and the DIA are also coming out with ever-stronger statements accusing the intelligence community of twisting and exaggerating the evidence to justify war. They say both agencies were intimidated by the political pressure exerted in particular by neoconservative hawks under Cheney and Rumsfeld, who even established a special unit in the defense secretary's office to determine what intelligence was "missing."

Much of the evidence on which the WMD case was based came from defectors supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi that has been championed by the neoconservatives--including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis Libby, and Defense Policy Board members Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey--for more than a decade.

The disturbing aspect of this is that this lousy, agenda-driven intelligence also formed the basis for the administration's current strategy for rebuilding Iraq, which as you may have noticed is not exactly going according to plan.

[Also worth reading from the FPIF site: The U.S. and Post-War Iraq: An Analysis, by Stephen Zunes.]

An Identity tutorial

Just in time for those wanting to know more about Christian Identity and its origins, here's a nifty slide show from my friends at Political Research Associates:

Christian Identity: A Bibliographic Genealogy

What terrorists?

Here's an interesting response to the Eric Rudolph arrest, from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Don't rush to conclusions

No sooner had Rudolph been nabbed Saturday in Murphy, N.C. than he was being identified in the media as a "Christian terrorist" -- a shocking buzz phrase that is all but meaningless, although at least it may be giving Christians an inkling of how Muslims feel when news accounts refer to "Islamic terrorists."

Rudolph allegedly has ties to the radical Christian Identity movement and its violent Army of God offshoot. We don't know if Christian Identity truly reflects Rudolph's beliefs or merely became a convenient vehicle for him. But the easy generalization is to paint all conservative fringe religious groups as violent -- even though the pastor of a church Rudolph attended as a youth insists his sect teaches non-violence.

Either this editorialist is naive beyond belief (a common trait of mid-level editorial writers, actually) or purposely disingenuous. The Identity pastor to whom he refers (Dan Gayman) of course will claim he teaches non-violence, even though his frequently apocalyptic pronouncements border on outright incitements. Moreover, the ideology he preaches incites racial hatred; from it, a teenager like Rudolph naturally fell in with other Identity believers -- the Hayden Lake sort, who actually dominate the movement -- because Gayman himself associates with them. (See the ADL's rundown on Gayman, obliquely overlooked by both the Enquirer editorialist and the Washington Post reporter from whom he obviously cribbed his notes; observe, e.g., that he duplicates the Post's factual error about the Army of God being an Identity offshoot.) Ultimately Rudolph's chief mentor was another Identity preacher, Nord Davis, who in fact does preach a doctrine of violence and "lone wolf" terrorism.

These facts are readily available. But just as it's easy to lump mainstream Christians in with extremists, it's also easy to dismiss the ramifications of the associations with oversimplified whining. The latter only evades the responsibility on the part of serious Christians (I consider myself one) to stand up and make the distinction between Identity and mainstream Christianity clear. And rather than take on this responsibility, the editorial runs the other direction:

Rudolph's arrest also revived some ugly regional stereotypes. The thinking goes that he couldn't have eluded capture for so long without plenty of aid and comfort from the community in rural western North Carolina -- which has yet to be proven -- and that people in that religiously conservative region tend to agree with the bomber's twisted thinking.

But the signs and bumper stickers in support of Rudolph were meant more to mock authorities' inability to catch him, not endorse the violence he is accused of, residents told the Associated Press.

Regardless of its intent, those signs in fact minimized the harm that Rudolph wreaked by rendering his victims nonentities. One of those victims was a policeman, remember. Moreover, the editorialist at this point is bending over backwards to exonerate Rudolph's supporters of anything untoward.

As Travis Gettys, who brought this to my attention, observes trenchantly, this editorial amounts to "an apology for those who allegedly gave support to Eric Rudolph. For an editorial staff who decry any legitimate criticism of 'the authorities' -- particularly police -- they seem to take a different attitude toward these authorities tracking down an accused cop killer. I guess, to them, it's different if the cop was killed while providing security at an abortion clinic."

[Thanks to Travis for the link.]

Great reading

My favorite new blog by a journalist:

Back In Iraq 2.0

Being the work of Christopher Allbritton, yet another renegade journalist after my own heart. Be sure to chip in at the contribution button.

[Many thanks to Margaret in NY for the heads-up.]

Eric Rudolph and the face of terror

The arrest of Eric Rudolph has made for some interesting stories afterward. I especially was interested in the New York Times piece about the local reaction to the arrest, which opened with this nugget:

"He's a Christian and I'm a Christian and he dedicated his life to fighting abortion," said Mrs. Davis, 25, mother of four. "Those are our values. And I don't see what he did as a terrorist act."

Coming from the mouth of someone who lives in a backwater, this kind of sentiment sounds like something from Deliverance. But Davis in fact was expressing a view not far from that voiced by prominent Republicans in key positions.

Rep. Porter J. Goss, R-Florida and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said more or less the same thing during hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The trouble is, 'terrorism' is a very broad word, and it lends itself to a lot of mischief for people who would abuse common sense," Goss said. He then cited bombings of abortion clinics. "To me, that's not the kind of terrorism I'm talking about."

"That's criminal law enforcement," Goss said. "But it would fit most broad definitions of terrorism because the purpose [of those attacks] is to scare people."

Fortunately, the Justice Department has not taken this route in its dealings with right-wing terrorism. For the most part, it has taken on home-grown rightist extremists with more vigor than anyone might have expected, given who is running the department (Rudolph's non-arrest having formerly been the main bit of evidence to the contrary). See, for instance, the following report in the Washington Post:

Tracking Hate Groups Aids Terrorism Fight

Even as dismantling al Qaeda remains the clear priority of terrorism task forces, agents have been ordered to be vigilant about domestic groups. "The focus on international terrorism is obvious, but September 11th has made us examine all security issues," a law enforcement official said. "You can't make the number one goal preventing attacks against the U.S. and not look at a danger that could be posed here at home."

The terrorism task forces are homing in on all groups, including militia movements and even environmental and animal rights organizations.

But the efforts have had the greatest impact on neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. In recent months, prominent white supremacists have been indicted in several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia and Washington, and news of their arrests has resulted in a frenzy of anti-government exchanges on neo-Nazi and other racist Web sites.

Rudolph's arrest, along with the conviction of doctor-killer James Kopp, mark important steps in the progress made by law enforcement in keeping these kinds of extremists in check. But the problem may be moving beyond the point where law enforcement can make a difference.

Consider, for instance, the content of Ms. Davis' remarks, particularly the associations she makes between Christian Identity -- which is the core of Eric Rudolph's belief system -- and mainstream Christianity. If ever there was a boundary there, in her eyes it has been eradicated. And the more we see this kind of worldview become common, the more trouble we are in as a nation.

For most of the history of Christian Identity (its origins stretch back to the turn of the previous century), its beliefs -- which are that white people are the true children of Israel; that Jews are Satanically descended (or inspired) pretenders to the title; and that the rest of humanity is comprised of soulless "mud people" -- have been widely denounced as a heresy. Even the most conservative fundamentalists -- whose doctines of scriptural inerrancy certainly are an important component of Identity, though interpretations obviously differ, and whose cultural conservatism on racial and other issues forms a common ground -- have considered Identity anathema.

The problem appears in other forms. Consider this story from the Washington Post:

Is Terrorism Tied To Christian Sect?

Even though this article raises an important question, it is somewhat problematic. For starters, there's an important factual error, where the reporter (Alan Cooperman) refers to the Army of God as "a violent offshoot of Christian Identity." There is, as far as I know, no substantial connection between Identity and the AoG, which is strictly focused on the confrontational and violent approach to stopping abortion, an agenda which has only an intersection (the abortion of white babies) with Identity.

Even more important is the very phrasing of the question in the headline: It identifies Christian Identity with Christianity in general. And knowing Michael Barkun, I am fairly confident that he too pointed out that calling Rudolph a "Christian terrorist" is something of a misnomer, since Barkun knows better than anyone the gulf between Identity beliefs and mainstream Christian theology.

Cooperman's story does make this point, quoting my friend Jim Aho:

Another expert on such groups, Idaho State University sociology professor James A. Aho, said he is reluctant to use the phrase "Christian terrorist," because it is "sort of an oxymoron."

"I would prefer to say that Rudolph is a religiously inspired terrorist, because most mainstream Christians consider Christian Identity to be a heresy," Aho said. If Christians take umbrage at the juxtaposition of the words "Christian" and "terrorist," he added, "that may give them some idea of how Muslims feel" when they constantly hear the term "Islamic terrorism," especially since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Religiously inspired terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, and every major world religion has people who have appropriated the label of their religion in order to legitimize their violence," Aho said.

This becomes a serious problem when the boundaries between the mainstream religion and the extremists begins to be erased. Sometimes this is done intentionally, especially by Identity folk like Rudolph; sometimes it is done unintentionally, by simple thinkers like Ms. Davis; by politicians like Porter Goss; and by media folk looking for a smart angle and coming up with an old tire.

What Eric Rudolph reminds all of us is that extremist believers like himself do not have to be numerous to wreak a whole lot of damage. This is true of terrorists of all stripes. Consider, for instance, this piece from the Christian Science Monitor, just before Rudolph's arrest:

'Lone wolves' pose explosive terror threat

This article is primarily about Islamic lone wolves -- the stray actors who in many ways pose one of the most potent terrorist threats, because they are so hard to detect and can wreak considerable havoc. It only lightly touches on the fact that this very strategy is one that has become a favorite of the extremist right in recent years, with acts running from Buford Furrow's rampage in Los Angeles and Benjamin Smith's killing spree in the Midwest.

Eric Rudolph, in fact, is a classic case of a "lone wolf" terrorist. Keep in mind that among the main proponents of this kind of terrorism was Nord Davis, the Identity preacher who was Rudolph's mentor:

But throughout, he emphasized the power of the lone wolf -- the unaccompanied terrorist who, like Davis’ follower Rudolph, would act without aid from others.

"America will not be saved by organizations or groups," he wrote in 1990. "If you ... study what happened in the South after the War Between the States, you will see how America will be saved again. ... Small groups, known by the Socialist traitors ... as the ‘invisible empire,’ will meet and work in secrecy and high security, and quietly eliminate the problem people. ...There will be no unified command structure between the various groups so any infiltration will be both expensive and time consuming."

Though I think there's little question that right-wing extremist groups have been in serious decline in very recent years, that is more or less in keeping with its traditionally cyclical nature. More to the point, the tightening circle of true believers also tends to amplify the potential for some of them to spiral off into violence. And as Rudolph or Tim McVeigh showed us, it only takes a few of them to wreak a hell of a lot of havoc.

Robert Wright made this point in his superb Slate series, "A Real War on Terrorism:

For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. They won't have to claim that they speak on behalf of a whole religion. They'll just have to be reasonably intelligent, modestly well-funded, and really pissed off. It may be hard to imagine a few radical environmentalists, or Montana militiamen, or French anti-globalization activists, or Basque separatists, or Unabomber-style Luddites, killing 100,000 people. Yet what makes this plausible is exactly what makes radical Islam such a formidable long-term threat: two enduring aspects of the evolution of technology [namely, the growing accessibility of massively lethal munitions, and the diverse threat posed by information technology].

Concurrently, leaders of extremist factions have been fairly explicit in advocating "piggyback" terrorism that seeks to increase the levels of chaos in conjunction with international terrorism. Consider, for instance, a couple of William Pierce's post-Sept. 11 remarks.

From a radio address: "Things are a bit brittle now. A few dozen more anthrax cases, another truck bomb in a well chosen location, and substantial changes could take place in a hurry: a stock market panic, martial law measures by the Bush government, and a sharpening of the debate as to how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place."

In an essay on his Web site, Pierce declared that "terrorism is not the problem," going on to explain that the current threat is "the price for letting ourselves, our nation, be used by an alien minority to advance their own interests at the expense of ours" -- meaning, of course, Jews.

"Bombing the whole Middle East flat will not solve our problem," he wrote. "Our problem is here, not in Afghanistan or Iraq. What Osama bin Laden gave us on September 11 was just a wakeup call.

"What the people mailing out anthrax-infected letters are giving us is just a reminder that we can have no real security -- in fact, no real future for our children and our grandchildren -- until we regain control of our own government. Americans will never again have real security or real peace of mind until they have regained control of their government and their media."

It's important to consider that the still-unsolved anthrax attacks of October-November 2001 may well have been the work of a right-wing extremist -- perhaps not someone with any organizational connection, perhaps even an idiosyncratic type, but nonetheless with largely right-wing beliefs.

And when you consider that right-wing extremists have in fact been arrested for the anthrax hoax letters sent to abortion clinics in the same time period -- a clear-cut case of "piggybacking" -- I think it becomes clear that these extremists have not only the means but probably also the clear intention of amplifying any kind of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda. For that reason alone, they remain a very serious threat indeed.

This is not to minimize the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorists, of either the "lone wolf" or the organized kind. It should be clear after Sept. 11 that both their networks and their lone actors pose a much more imminent and potent threat regarding mass violence than do right-wing extremists (for one thing, I think they are considerably more competent, as a rule). This is especially the case when you consider that, theologically speaking, in Islam the barrier between radical theology and the mainstream has become increasingly obliterated, with major theological institutions actually producing some of the most radical ideologues.

This is has not been the case with Christianity to any appreciable degree. If the Islamists are to Islam as radical fundamentalists such as Identity are to Christianity (a reasonable analogy, in my view), then we have not seen the same kind of obliteration of the lines between them in the case of the latter as the former. Even conservative fundamentalists, as far as I know, continue to view Identity as a heresy.

The real danger thus comes when the lines between Identity and Christianity become blurred, as they have in the wake of Rudolph's arrest. This is not the first time this has happened, and it likely will not be the last. There remain important "danger zones," meeting areas of common ground between mainstream fundamentalists and radical ideologues, including "Dominion Theology" and the anti-abortion movement, that probably bear watching the closest.

Moreover, the reality is that there is not any serious danger of radical Islam itself overtaking the United States in any kind of foreseeable future, nor for that matter of radical Islam manifesting itself as a social/political movement in the USA to any real extent. Islamists will not be recruiting many followers in North America anytime soon.

Right-wing extremism, however, has at various times manifested itself as a popular social movement in America, and it has in the recent past exhibited an ability to recruit large numbers of people from the mainstream of the body politic. More to the point, it has exhibited a remarkable ability to inflict terrorist chaos that must not be underestimated.

Annually, right-wing extremists within our borders are responsible for a siezeable number of crimes. These range, as Mark Pitcavage of the ADL points out, from "bombings and bombing plots to assassination plots and murders to weapons and explosives violations to hate crimes to massive frauds and scams (amounting in some cases in the hundreds of millions of dollars) to the myriad of lesser crimes." Even if you totaled up several years' worth of criminal activity related to Islamic extremism, it would fail to come close to the levels produced by our own homegrown terrorists.

It is also important to keep in mind exactly what the long-term strategy of the extremist right is: To undermine the existing government and democratic institutions to as great a degree as possible by creating as much social chaos as possible. Terrorism is central to this strategy, because through terrorist acts like Oklahoma City, they intend to make the public come to believe that their government can no longer keep them safe. They then intend to present themselves as the "strong" alternative that will secure our borders, imprison the internal dissidents and make the trains run on time -- and although swelling their own ranks is key to this strategy, they do not intend to seize power by democratic means.

We may breathe a sigh of relief that at least one of these terrorists -- and one of the most troublesome -- is finally behind bars. But it is important to remember that there are others out there waiting to follow in his footsteps. And they may prove every bit as hard to bring to ground -- if not harder.

Bush's historical revisionism

Atrios at Eschaton wonders why Bush would say this when touring Auschwitz:

At one point Mr. Bush turned to Ms. Swiebocka and asked, "Do people challenge the accuracy of what you present?" Mr. Fleischer, who was accompanying the president a few paces behind, said he could not hear the answer.

My answer: It's pretty clear that Bush -- who loves to make himself out a victim (of liberal bias) too -- asked the question because he sees himself in the same boat regarding his inability to prove that Saddam Hussein possessed biological and chemical weapons, the cornerstone of his rationale for invading a sovereign nation. Of course, without that rationale, Bush begins looking more and more like the international aggressor, not Hussein.

The difference is this: The evidence of the Holocaust is simply irrevocable. The evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is, evidently, unrecoverable.

Bush's tasteless willingness to play on the Holocaust imagery is particularly questionable, considering that his own grandfather was one of the great American capitalist contributors to the Nazi war machine. But this whole exercise was a gigantic public-relations gambit, intended to draw a clear parallel between Hussein and Hitler. It appears the Busheviks -- who are increasingly unpopular around the world -- are hoping they can pull the same bullshit over the eyes of the international community that they have with a substantial portion of the American public, not to mention the entire population of the punditocracy.

Unfortunately, Bush's analogy is not only ahistorical, it is every bit as revisionist as the kind of "Holocaust denial" as that practiced by the right-wing Institute for Historical Review and its sympathizers. Saddam was no Hitler. He was a tinpot who could barely run his own country.

And yes, Mr. Bush, people do question the accuracy of the recounting of the Holocaust. They are all on the right, and include such conservative stalwarts as Pat Buchanan. Indeed, one of their chiefs is a fellow named David Irving, who has been regularly defended by such ardent Busheviks as Christopher Hitchens.

They are liars. And so, I might add, are the politicians who led us to war by telling us Saddam had nukes.

A summer hiatus, sort of

I'd like to apologize to my readers, many of whom have written in these past few weeks wondering if Orcinus had gone defunct. Not to worry; I've just been catching my breath.

To be frank about it, I've been reevaluating my priorities and where Orcinus sits in the scheme of things. A few shocks to the system [see the preceding post] have kind of taken the air out of my blogging balloon, and forced me to take a step back and tend to the things that matter most to me. I hope regulars to the blog will forgive the lapse.

I'll be back to more regular posting for at least the next couple of weeks. I'm planning to wrap up the "Rush" series with a few supplemental posts, then I'll produce the long-promised PDF version for everyone to download. I'm also hoping to join in on some recent conversations in the blogosphere that resonate with the kind of issues I've tried to address here.

However, that's probably going to last only a couple of weeks at best, at least until "Rush" is finished. At that point I'll be putting Orcinus into a kind of semi-stasis through most of the summer, posting only semi-weekly or weekly. I'll be trying to stay on top of important issues, but it will be intermittent (or spasmodic, if you will) at best.

There's a simple reason for this: I'm about to sign a contract for my next book, a study of hate crimes titled Death on the Fourth of July: Hate Crimes and the American Landscape. Since I don't yet have a contract in hand (the agent is hard at work) I can't announce details, but suffice to say I'm planning for the reality.

And the reality is that until Sept. 1, when the manuscript is due, I'll have precious little time to spend blogging. I'd like to be able to make more room for it, but my duty in this case is pretty clear.

But if it's any consolation, I do plan to keep posting semi-regularly, especially on the issues I've tried to emphasize over the past five months. And when I return after the deadline, it will be with something of a vengeance. I have a specific project in mind that will entail a fair amount of reader participation, and I'll be spending the better part of this fall and winter making Orcinus a very active place indeed.

Please bear with me until then. I appreciate the patience.

In memory

Believe in the simple magic of life, in the service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that "craning of the neck" in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.
-- Martin Buber, I and Thou

Last week my parents and I took my aunt Melva, my mother's sister, down to pick up the ashes of my uncle Bill. The urn was actually a beautiful wooden box bound with wrought iron. We put it on the seat between us and took it back to their home in Denver.

I peeked inside and was somewhat surprised, really, by how small the pile of ashes actually was. Bill Hahn, after all, was a big man -- not just physically, but in every other way.

A few weeks before, Bill had lost his three-month battle with clinical depression. No one can be sure whether or not it was intentional -- more than likely it was, sort of -- but he wandered out, sleep-deprived and delusional, into the middle of a heavily trafficked freeway near his home and was hit by a medium-sized moving truck. He lingered for a couple of weeks and was finally declared brain dead May 6. He was 66.

Life is always full of bitter ironies, but there have been few tougher to swallow in my lifetime than Bill's fate. Because Bill Hahn was a man whose life's work had been dedicated to the life of the mind and understanding how this gift functions; certainly, his own wide-ranging intellect was a vivid example of his subject. And in the end, it was his own mind that betrayed him. In the final weeks of his illness, Bill was not the man he had been throughout his life.

Bill was a geneticist who taught at the University of Colorado's School of Medicine, and I can only guess at his popularity, but it was a huge crowd, upwards of 300, that came out for his memorial service last Monday (and the school is reportedly planning a memorial of its own for him in September). He was also a highly regarded researcher who specialized in the genetics of the brain.

I'm sketchy on the details of Bill's career -- I know he won numerous awards for his work, and at one time there was Nobel talk, though I have no idea if it was warranted -- because frankly, it was always secondary to me anyway. I knew Bill was a great man because he was my uncle, one of those uncles who leave indelible marks on everyone they touch.

As I was growing up in conservative, Mormon-dominated southern Idaho, Bill was the first atheist I ever knew. To hear the John Birchers in my hometown tell it, this was possibly even worse than being a Communist. Certainly such a person at minimum sported a pair of horns and a pitchfork.

Bill, on the other hand, was a big, gregarious bullshitter who liked to golf and yank his nephews' chains. He could be brash and loud (his nickname on the golf course was Boomer), but at other times he could be quiet-spoken and thoughtful. Maybe his most endearing trait, the source of his special spark, was a boyishness that let him keep his sense of wonderment at the world. We kids loved him.

This trait was also the source of an unpredictable zaniness that was part of the scene whenever Bill was present. My sister Becky recalls a classic instance: "I remember visiting there one time and Bill came home with a tank full of hermit crabs. They were having a party and were going to have races. The look on his face was great."

One of his old friends at the memorial service recalled the time Bill, on a lark and a sizeable wager, managed to climb to the top of a nearby mountain in 45 minutes, mostly by clambering straight up the hillside through a dense thicket of brush. He emerged at the hilltop in time to win the bet, and emerged back at the camp -- scratched, bruised and tattered, certainly a bit worse for the wear -- in time to collect it. With, of course, that goofy, slightly deranged grin on his face.

To someone who didn't know Bill, this zany quality might have disguised or even overshadowed his brilliance, and ultimately his seriousness. But to those who knew him, it validated it. Bill reveled in life, especially the life of the mind, and every day was a celebration of it. He had little time for people too pinched to join in.

His declaration of atheism back in the '60s was in that same spirit -- a sort of declaration of independence from the small-mindedness that was part of the landscape we both grew up in. It was also, perhaps, a mischievous poke in the eye for everyone back home.

At the time, I was myself in the thrall of an odd brand of Methodist fundamentalism that fit neatly into the predominantly Mormon society of southern Idaho, and when I first heard of Bill's atheism, I was horrified. I tried arguing with him and found he was more formidable than I expected; indeed, his pointed counter-questions eventually had me doubting my own assumptions.

In reality, I was to find, Bill was more in the way of a pantheist than an atheist. He didn't disbelieve in the idea of God so much as he objected to the anthropomorphic and self-serving interpretations of God demanded by those who prefer to cite Scripture than deal in real life. He insisted on the independence of every person's mind in seeking God.

These were radical ideas for a young person and they affected me deeply. I like to think that the skepticism and insistence on factuality that are part of my approach to journalism were originally inspired by Bill's example. All I know is that at about age 15, I started looking at things differently, and Bill was much of the reason why. If nothing else, I understood that being from small-town Idaho didn't doom you to life as a reactionary know-nothing. I gradually came to see that much of the "common sense" I had taken for granted -- no small part of which involved a loathing of anyone or anything different -- wasn't part of our cherished "family values" but came from a darker place in our collective psyches.

I even tried to follow Bill's example: When I first enrolled at the University of Idaho -- where Bill also had obtained his bachelor's -- I was a biology major, with an eye perhaps toward wildlife or marine biology. But it was a bad fit; within a couple of years I had switched to English and was working for the school paper. Bill, I later discovered, had followed the reverse of this trajectory; he originally been a journalism major and switched to biology.

After we picked up Bill's ashes, I decided to thumb through his personal library in his reading room. There I discovered an old, well-thumbed copy of the Modern Library edition of The Philosophy of Spinoza, edited by Joseph Ratner (not an altogether accurate translation, but famous as the book that introduced millions of readers to the great philosopher). On the flyleaf Bill had imprinted his name and the year he had bought it: 1958, the year he switched majors at UI.

I was a little startled because I too have an abiding love for Spinoza, the "God-intoxicated" philosopher whose pure logic is still relevant three and a half centuries later. Perhaps this isn't coincidental; the man who introduced me to Spinoza, in a Philosophy of Science course, was the late Francis Seaman, who had been teaching at the UI back in the 1950s as well. But in any event, the concurrence struck a chord for me, because it helped me put Bill's life and death in perspective.

Toward the end of the text, I found the following passage (from the final chapter of the Ethics, "Of Human Freedom") that made me think of Bill:

He, therefore, who desires to govern his emotions and appetites from a love of liberty alone will strive as much as he can to know virtues and their causes, and to fill his mind with that joy which springs from a true knowledge of them. Least of all will he desire to contemplate the vices of men and disparage men, or to delight in a false show of liberty. He who will diligently observe these things (and they are not difficult), and will continue to practice them, will assuredly in a short space of time be able for the most part to direct his actions in accordance with the command of reason.

… From all this we may easily conceive what is the power which clear and distinct knowledge, and especially that third kind of knowledge whose foundation is the knowledge itself of God, possesses over the emotions; the power, namely, by which it is able, in so far as they are passions, if not actually destroy them, at least to make them constitute the smallest part of the mind. Moreover, it begets a love towards an immutable and eternal object of which we are really partakers; a love which therefore cannot be vitiated by the defects which are in common love, but which can always become greater and greater, occupy the largest part of the mind, and thoroughly affect it.

I'm not sure I have quite yet come to terms with the meaning of Bill's death, other than that it demonstrates in vivid colors how capricious and cruel fate can be. In the end, it seems inconsequential anyway when I think about the meaning of Bill's life. I was only one of the many people whose life he touched in profound ways, just through the force of his personality and his ideas.

People like Bill are capable of changing the world, one person, one relationship, at a time. And understanding how this happens is one of the great secrets of life Bill, by sheer force of example, imparted to those of us fortunate enough to have known him: that if our lives are to have meaning, it is through our relations with other people, which ultimately is the same shape as our relation with God.

Another passage, this from another Spinoza-inspired thinker, Martin Buber, perhaps describes it best:

The world … teaches you to meet others, and to hold your ground when you meet them. Through the graciousness of its comings and the solemn sadness of its goings it leads you away to the Thou in which the parallel lines of relations meet. It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity.

I've been spending the time since getting back from Denver with my two-year-old daughter. I am perhaps holding her a little closer than I did before. I know that Bill planted seeds in me that shaped my life, and I hold out the hope that I am planting them in my little girl in turn -- and, perhaps, in others too, just as Bill did.

It is, in the end, the best we can do. And Bill did it very well.

Dealing in reality

True Patriot over at Go Pound Sand writes in:

I gotta tell ya. I am not to worried about what Bush did 30 yrs. ago. And, most importantly, the military loves the guy. If they are not asking questions why does the arrogant left?

like your blog, but you should do a little more to acknowledge reality...

My reply:

Somehow, I suspect it meant a hell of a lot to you what Bill Clinton did 30 years ago.

After all, it seems to matter a hell of a lot what Robert Byrd did more than 50 years ago.

I guess double standards like that are meaningless when "the military loves the guy," eh?

But considering that the guy abandoned his post during wartime, the real question is: WHY does the military love him?

Could it be that they just haven't been told the truth?

After all, the main way to acknowledge reality is to deal in facts.

Flyboy Bush

The question of George W. Bush's military record is working its way back into the public discourse, thanks to his ham-handed antics aboard the USS Lincoln. Paul Krugman brought the matter up, as did the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn. Atrios, of course, has been on it all along, as has The Horse.

The frustrating thing about this story is the widespread impression that because there remain so many unanswered questions about Bush's extended absence from Texas Air National Guard duty, somehow the "real" scandal hasn't been uncovered yet. This seeming mystery indeed was at the root of Howard Kurtz's absurd dismissal of the story. And indeed there are many questions about Bush's service record that need answering.

But the reality is that what we know about his record now should be considered a scandal, and should have been since it was uncovered during the campaign.

Namely, there is this salient point:

Bush blew off his commitment to the Texas Air National Guard by failing to take a physical, and thereafter failing to report to his superior officers at his old unit for at least seven months. His flight status was revoked, and he never flew again -- at least, not until the Lincoln stunt.

These facts have never been disputed since they were uncovered, and in fact were acknowledged by Bush's spokespeople. Moreover, as Joe Conason has already noted, Bush actually falsified this aspect of his service in his ghost-written autobiography, A Charge to Keep, describing his pilot's training in some detail, then concluding: ''I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." In fact, Bush was suspended from flying 22 months after he completed his training -- a period that does not even generously fit Bush's description.

Several of Bush's former superiors in the TANG -- most of whom remain on friendly terms with the president -- have defended his service and suggested that there was nothing wrong with Bush's behavior in what for most other servicemen would be considered a fairly clear case of dereliction of duty.

Consider, for instance, the rationalization offered by Albert Lloyd Jr., a retired TANG colonel, in the Boston Globe story that in many respects was the most serious effort by anyone in the mainstream media to examine the issue:

But Lloyd said it is possible that since Bush had his sights set on discharge and the unit was beginning to replace the F-102s, Bush's superiors told him he was not ''in the flow chart. Maybe George Bush took that as a signal and said, 'Hell, I'm not going to bother going to drills.'

''Well, then it comes rating time, and someone says, 'Oh...he hasn't fulfilled his obligation.' I'll bet someone called him up and said, 'George, you're in a pickle. Get your ass down here and perform some duty.' And he did,'' Lloyd said.

This rationalization, of course, begs the question: What if anyone else had pulled such a stunt?

The reality is servicemen do not ordinarily have the option of deciding whether or not to attend drills. They do not typically have the option of shortening their commitment to the task for which they have been trained based solely on their own assessments of where they fit into the scheme of things. Those decision are made by their superiors. Moreover, the military considers the training of its personnel to be a significant asset that it protects, particularly for high-skill positions like jet-fighter pilots. This training is expensive, and pilots' status -- particularly their availability for potential combat -- is a carefully monitored commodity.

Secondarily: If Joe Shlabotnik had failed to fulfill his commitment, would anyone have bothered to call him and urge him to find a way out of his "pickle" -- before the MPs came and took him away?

[Lloyd's hypothesis also is somewhat at odds with reality; though the F-102s were scheduled for phase-out, this would not occur until well after the completion of Bush's original six-year commitment.]

As Uggabugga observes in his terrific graphical presentation of the entire case surrounding Bush's military service:

Expensively trained pilots are not casually suspended. There is normally a Flight Inquiry Board. If one had been convened, its three senior officer members would have documented why such a severe action was justified in relation to the country's military objectives at the time, as opposed to the simple desire of a trained pilot to just "give up flying".

There is no evidence now in the public domain that a Flight Inquiry Board was convened to deal with Bush's official reclassification to a non-flying, grounded status.

This absence of a Flight Inquiry Board is of particular interest to veteran pilots. The implication is that Bush's misconduct was handled like everything else in his military service: aided and abetted by powerful family connections.

There remain many other questions about Bush's service, of course. Why exactly did he refuse to take a physical? Was it related to the plans then in the works to begin drug-testing military pilots? And why don't the various stories about his supposed fulfillment of his duties while working in Alabama on a senatorial election campaign jibe? Why have the documents related to this service been altered in some cases? Indeed, the ultimate question may be: Why does Bush refuse to release his military records?

This question alone should have set off journalists' instincts around the country. That it has not so far remains, I think, one of the chief pieces of continuing evidence supporting Eric Alterman's thesis in What Liberal Media? that whatever liberal bias once existed in the media has been thoroughly supplanted with a painfully obvious conservative bias, one that has permeated the culture of newsrooms to the point that questions which once would have intrigued any thinking reporter are now airily dismissed in the name of avoiding charges of "liberal bias."

For those who want the documented goods on Bush's military records, be sure to visit Martin Heldt's Web site. Marty's an Iowa farmer who decided to make use of FOIA and get ahold of the actual documents, most of which have been reproduced. (For a more partisan and somewhat sensational, yet reasonably accurate, take on the matter, visit AWOLBush.com.)

But forget all these unanswered questions. Just from what we know now, the question that needs answering is this: Why did Mr. Bush abandon his commitment to his country during wartime? Why did he blow off his valuable training and remove himself from flight status?

The question any serviceman should be asking is this: What if I were to treat my commitment to service just as Bush did? What if I trained to be a pilot and then refused to take a physical? And then failed to show up for any subsequent meetings of my unit? Dropped out of sight for seven months?

And then he ought to think about the big grin Bush wore along with that flight suit.

Shades of race

J. Keirn-Swanson writes in:

From personal experience, I'd have to take issue with at least part of the following statement posted on your site this morning:

"I gather there is plenty of Hispanic homophobia and hatred of blacks for them to find common cause with the GOP base."

The perception of a monolithic bloc of Hispanic homophobia is not as nuanced as your comments on race usually are. While I've found that Cuban-Americans tend to be more likely to act/react in this fashion, younger generation Mexican-Americans are more likely to respond to someone's sexual orientation with a shrug. This, like other issues, remains more problematic for older communities than younger ones and the dominant voices in the Cuban community still remain the '60s generation who wheeze on about Castro being the devil. The machismo attitude is probably more dominant in the Cuban community than in others, the Mexican being more laissez faire, with Puerto Ricans somewhere in the middle (while not counting all the other Hispanic communities (South Americans, other Caribbean nations) who display a range of reactions along this continuum (Brazilians seem to be faily open minded but not as significant a voting bloc as the above Big Three).

As for hatred of blacks, this possibly goes too far (white southerners are more prone in that extreme). Puerto Rican/Black intermarriage is far more prevalent than in any other racial-ethnic match-up. Brazilian intermingling of the races is near legendary. The GOP strategy of pulling Hispanics off of the Democrats with these tactics is not a sure winner (and is very likely to backfire). Apart from some photo-op Hispanic appointments (Gonzales, attempts at Estrada), the GOP outreach has done poorly.

Excellent points. I don't think Richard Einhorn (who actually made the remarks you cite) was suggesting any kind of monolithic view of the Hispanic community, but simply commenting on the existence of a faction within the community prone to anti-black or anti-gay sentiments. To what extent the GOP is hoping to appeal to such voters is hard to assess, but I wouldn't put anything past Karl Rove and Co. I certainly agree with your analysis of its chances of success.

For what it's worth, I've observed similar behavior among Asians, particularly those who grew up in Asia, where attitudes about blacks remain utterly appalling. Second- and third-generation Asian-Americans are likewise much more prone to holding a multicultural worldview.

In any event, I've seen no indication that the GOP is hoping to court those voters -- possibly because there isn't a widespread perception that Asians are the victims of prejudice (though as I've remarked previously, this is in many ways a false perception). Remember: The whole GOP "inclusiveness thing" is purely a cosmetic ploy designed to attract votes not from the minority community but from the fence-sitting soccer moms in the suburbs. Touting their Asian "inclusiveness" probably isn't as cost-effective, as it were.

Nascent brownshirts

Gil Smart over at Smart Remarks had some salient comments the other day regarding the virulence of the primordial ooze that's being excreted by the right these days. He first quotes a post from the Little Green Footballs comments, during a discussion about Saudi funding of terrorism:

To most people, 15 million smackers is a LOT of money, but this token funding pales in comparison to the billions in funding by the Saudis of the cause of Wahhabism in another country. That country would be the United States of America.

Whether or not the street knows it -- and they don't -- we are now in the early phases of the fight for our existence as a nation, and as the standard-bearers of the idea of democracy.

We have most of the EU and a good portion of NATO aligned against us -- the old school appeasers of Europe -- and most of the Arabic nations, and third-world oppressor nations as well. They are starting to sense a common ground of opposition to our position, which is one of self-determination of man.

That is very dangerous to all these folks, as they represent the dictator and dictator-enabler; the rapists and the voyeurs who profit from the rapes of mankind.

This war won't be quick, or easy. We will undoubtedly end up being forced to kill off some of our own citizens in order to protect the ideas set down by our framers over 200 hundred years ago.

It's happening now, and suddenly, and we are right in the midst of it. It is going to get bloody and scary and desperate before all is finished and a victor emerges.

I hope and believe that the victor will be the one that represents rightness and honor, because otherwise it means the end of democracy on earth, another untold dozens or hundreds or thousands of years of terror.

IndyMedia is part of the problem. We can't just go up and shoot these people for their hatred and ignorance, just like Israel cannot just wipe out the people in the PA controlled lands. Militant Islam KNOWS these things, and will be using them to coalesce the forces of their believers and sympathizers to undermine the efforts for equality and peace until, and if, they are defeated.

Is everyone ready? The time is here, and now.

Prepare yourselves.

Gil correctly boils down the salient points:

* Everyone is against us.

* They are using our own system against us.

* Thus, there will need to be a purge -- "We will undoubtedly end up being forced to kill off some of our own citizens in order to protect the ideas set down by our framers over 200 hundred years ago."

* That purge will be justified.

* Because we represent the forces of "rightness and honor."

Gil goes on to explore the significant ramifications of this kind of thinking; go read his post. I should add that what stood out in this post was the obvious eliminationist thrust of the argument, which is the most disturbing aspect of its fairly clear-cut fascistic nature.

I try not to get too worked up over either Usenet posts or blog comments, but I agree that the appearance of this kind of thinking is becoming increasingly common, and that is a cause for concern.

Santorum and strategies

From the mailbag, Richard Einhorn writes in response to my ruminations on the Democrats vis a vis Rick Santorum:

The Democrats are a genuine puzzlement indeed. Are there really so few voters with brains that Dems really risk anything by standing up and forcefully denouncing Santorum?

As with the peace protests, the Republican powers that be have unilaterally declared the Santorum flap unimportant. One can only hope that both the peace protests and outrage against Santorum's perverted bigotry grow into something permanent and politically powerful that will make it far more difficult to take issues embarassing to the right wing off the national agenda.

I'd like to suggest that you elaborate on what you write here:

This shift in GOP strategy is in most regards a good thing; the more that extremist positions are marginalized within the GOP -- which has unfortunately tended to pander to such voting blocs in the recent past -- the more they are marginalized in the population at large. But so far there is no indication that recent Republican attempts to cast off their Cro-Magnon image and assert their "inclusiveness" are anything more than cosmetic.

I'm sure you realize GOP gay strategy is similar to their wink wink nudge nudge attitudes towards blacks, where code words were developed that meant one thing to the Cro-Magnons -- 'We're just as bigoted as you are' -- and quite another to the rest of us -- it looks like they're changing their attitudes. It would be good to hear more about code-words like "inclusive" or code-strategies like Ari Fleischer's "Bush is not interested in a person's sexuality, but only in their soul."

Finally, unlike blacks and gays, I think that the GOP is making serious efforts to woo Hispanic voters. I gather there is plenty of Hispanic homophobia and hatred of blacks for them to find common cause with the GOP base. But what is being downplayed is that the CroMags are just as bigoted against Hispanics. The opposition strategy should be to drive a wedge between Hispanics and the GOP by outing the extreme right's bigotry towards Hispanics.

And reader C.G. chimes in on a similar note:

This quote is questionable:

It became clear during the Trent Lott controversy that Karl Rove and Co. were writing off the neo-Confederate wing (for now, at least) in pursuit of the ever-elusive Suburban Voter, who might swing Republican if he/she could be convinced the GOP weren't awash with extremists of nearly every stripe.

Don't see this. Immediately following the Lott dumping the Bush administration communicated their commitment to the neo-Confederates loud and clear with a series of moves, including renominating the conservative judge [Charles Pickering] who was rejected by the Democratic Senate last year and announcing opposition to the Michigan Affirmative Action policy on MLK day.

I do agree that the Lott dumping, being positioned as a race issue (instead of him simply being pushed aside, as happened with Gingrich and almost certainly happened here), was an attempt to seek out middle voters. I just don't agree that Rove was writing off the racist wing of the GOP.

I probably should have been more clear about my paranthetical remark -- "(for now, at least)" -- by noting that this was something of an assumption that was made at the time by a number of observers. Rove and Co. clearly made an example out of Lott, and there's little question it created considerable anger among the neo-Confederate crowd. Many thought at the time that Rove was intentionally writing them off; in retrospect, it's clear he only intended to create the image of doing so -- knowing that no matter how pissed off they might become, they would have no trouble roping them back in later.

That Rove has been able to pull off this neat trick is abundantly evident in the great zeal for Bush's war among the rednecks.

And as Richard adeptly points out, the Republicans' techniques have altered very little since the early days of the Southern Strategy. The only change is that now they've added a full barrage of Newspeak to the repertoire: The new code words like "inclusiveness" actually stand the meanings of the words on their heads, which in itself serves as a kind of signal to the extremist blocs -- while simultaneously obliterating their potency as issues for the opposition. Nasty, but neat, and all too effective.

Lying skank alert

Q: When do you know Ann Coulter is lying? A: When any orifice on her body is open. This includes her pores.

From her recent appearance on MSNBC's Hardball:

COULTER: Yes. No. That’s true. And though I have to say, in the current President Bush’s defense, he was a pilot. I mean, it wasn’t like the typical avoiding ... the military service by serving in the National Guard. He was a pilot in the National Guard. He was training to be a pilot. It’s a dangerous National Guard duty. If the Vietnam war had continued, he would have gone to the Vietnam war as a pilot, so -- I mean, he is a pilot, though he was not -- he did not serve in wartime.

Just to set the record straight, from the Boston Globe of May 23, 2000:

One-year gap in Bush's National Guard duty

But 22 months after finishing his training, and with two years left on his six-year commitment, Bush gave up flying - for good, it would turn out. He sought permission to do ''equivalent training'' at a Guard unit in Alabama, where he planned to work for several months on the Republican Senate campaign of Winton Blount, a friend of Bush's father. The proposed move took Bush off flight status, since no Alabama Guard unit had the F-102 he was trained to fly.

...

Lieutenant Bush, to be sure, had gone off flying status when he went to Alabama. But had he returned to his unit in November 1972, there would have been no barrier to him flying again, except passing a flight physical. Although the F-102 was being phased out, his unit's records show that Guard pilots logged thousands of hours in the F-102 in 1973.

What it boils down to is this: As a National Guardsman, George W. Bush blew off two years' worth of expensive flight training, paid for by taxpayers during wartime, by failing to report for duty or take a physical, thereby forcing the Texas Air National Guard to revoke his flight status. This abandonment of his duty meant that in no way could Bush have been called up for flight duty in Vietnam.

All those servicemen who cheered his "flyboy" schtick on the USS Lincoln should ask themselves which brig they'd have served in had they pulled the same kind of stunt. And they ought to wonder about any commander-in-chief who takes his commitment to his service so lightly.

[Via Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, who of course also demolishes Coulter's suggestion that Bush's TANG duty was not a "typical avoiding ... military service."]

Media atrocity alert

Sally Jenkins, writing in the Washington Post about a couple of college coaches getting the boot for acting like horny old men:

For Mature Audiences Only

The coaching profession should take notice: Grown-ups are running this country again. Whether you like the fact or not, people such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are in charge, responsibility is the new chic and there is extremely low public tolerance for overserved boyish high jinks from people who are paid to be leaders.

Oh yes, indeed, Sally. They are so very mature that they didn't believe they needed to heed the warnings about terrorism from that "overserved" and "boyish" predecessor. Look where all that maturity got us.

And while we're at it, we also need sportswriters who write like grownups -- not as wide-eyed toadies and propagandists for the White House.

Hate crimes and the GOP

I guess my post about Rick Santorum vis-a-vis the federal hate-crimes law was timely:

Senators Want to Expand Hate Crimes Law

The legislation, sponsored by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., would include protections based on sexual orientation, disability and gender to existing laws that target violence because of race and religion.

Supporters pushed anew for passage of the bill as Republicans grapple with political relationships with gay groups in the wake of recent comments by Sen. Rick Santorum, chairman of the Senate GOP Conference, who compared sodomy to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery during an interview with The Associated Press.

Note that Specter denies he's pushing this now as an antidote to Santorum's remarks:

"I've been for this bill a long time before what Senator Santorum said," Specter said. "I'm not going to get in the business of amends."

The only question about this is why Specter didn't rescue this bill from the clutches of Orrin Hatch last fall, when it was bottled up in the Judiciary Committee. But better late than never.

Of course, the real test for Republican "inclusiveness" will come when this legislation hits the House. There's practically zero chance that The Bug Killer and his gang of rodents will let it survive the gnawing they have in store for it.

Democrats have so far let this issue slide into the GOP's lap. One wonders if they'll have enough sense to exploit its imminent excursion into the Valley of Death. Considering the way they've handled it thus far, there's little reason for optimism.

Right-wing fraudsters

It's always a pleasure to see justice being served. From the Oregonian:

Judge halts Sizemore funding

A Multnomah County judge cut the flow of money to tax activist Bill Sizemore's political organization Wednesday, saying the group had engaged in "extensive wrongdoing."

The injunction dissolved Sizemore's tax-exempt foundation. It also ordered his political action committee to stop using money from charities and from doing business with Sizemore's signature-gathering business, I & R Petition Services, for five years.

Circuit Judge Jerome LaBarre blasted Sizemore -- Oregon's most prominent petitioner of ballot initiatives -- saying he illegally used the tax-deductible contributions for political purposes. LaBarre called Sizemore's group, supposedly set up for educational purposes, "a sham charity" used "for his own financial gain."

Sizemore has been the leading anti-tax activist in Oregon for some time now, and is almost singlehandedly responsible for the sorry state of education in the state's public schools. Like Tim Eyman in Washington, he's capitalized on the Conservative Freeloader faction -- you know, the folks who want all those public services and cops and roads and schools but don't want to have to pay for them -- by trotting out a fresh initiative every year or so designed to "get the government off our backs."

It should now be clear to everyone in Oregon that Sizemore and his ilk are nothing but scam artists. Unfortunately, there's a sucker born every minute -- and in the Northwest, it seems, there are two.

Militia border patrol update

In case anyone was wondering about the intentions of the Arizona militiamen now roaming our borders, there's this snippet from Diana Washington Valdez at the El Paso Times:

Militia group sees migrants as 'threat'

Among the requirements for joining the militia border patrol are a state certification for a concealed weapon course and a hunting license. Simcox says the course is to screen out applicants who have criminal records, which a background check would reveal, and the hunting license is to have legal access to federal and state park lands.

Actually, every member of the public has legal access to federal and state park lands, with or without a license. It's quite clear the license serves another purpose entirely, and a chilling one at that.

Of course, this is the kind of activity that President Bush has seemingly endorsed as "a backlash ... stirred up by the people."

Santorum and the Sea Change

One of the interesting subtexts of the current dustup over the recently outed homophobia of Republican Sen. Rick Santorum is that even though the GOP is officially standing behind him, party leaders must be discomfited by how deeply the controversy cuts against the GOP's current national electoral strategy.

It's also worth considering for a moment what the situation reveals about the politics of being gay and lesbian in America today. Ten years ago, Santorum would have been backed by a chorus of fundamentalists decrying everything homosexual, and there would have been little hesitation by party officials in their support. Now they're hoping the controversy just goes away. That quietly suggests a sea change that lurks beneath.

It became clear during the Trent Lott controversy that Karl Rove and Co. were writing off the neo-Confederate wing (for now, at least) in pursuit of the ever-elusive Suburban Voter, who might swing Republican if he/she could be convinced the GOP weren't awash with extremists of nearly every stripe. To pull off such a ruse, Lott had to go. But the scandal revealed a growing tension within the GOP, between its longtime pandering to the bigots and haters who comprise much of its voting base and the desire of the conservative movement to become a genuine majority with broad appeal.

Now comes Santorum, whose recent remarks comparing homosexuality to bestiality and other social ills run smack into this rift. Certainly Santorum's views resonated with a significant power bloc within the White House -- particularly its legal wing, headed by Solicitor General Ted Olson (as well as the judicial wing headed by Antonin Scalia), whose own legal philosophies rather neatly (and ominouosly) align with Santorum's thinking, such as it is. Most of all, it strikes a chord with the fundamentalist bloc both inside and outside the White House.

However, the controversy undercuts the national electoral strategy on which Rove seems to have embarked, trying to appeal to suburban voters whose fiscal conservatism is often overwhelmed by the sheer repugnance of the Republican party's agenda. This is the purpose of the Bush team's attempts to build an image as racially inclusive -- not so much to attract black voters, but to win the confidence of fence-sitting white voters. It's also clear that Rove intends to bank on an increasing passivity on the part of Democrats when it comes to capitalizing on such clear-cut atrocities as the Lott and Santorum matters.

This shift in GOP strategy is in most regards a good thing; the more that extremist positions are marginalized within the GOP -- which has unfortunately tended to pander to such voting blocs in the recent past -- the more they are marginalized in the population at large. But so far there is no indication that recent Republican attempts to cast off their Cro-Magnon image and assert their "inclusiveness" are anything more than cosmetic; witness the ongoing defense of Santorum, or the fact that Lott maintains considerable power in the Senate as chair of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. More to the point, there is little likelihood that the radical unilateralism of the Bush Doctrine, which in its utter contempt for both the United Nations and international law resonates deeply with a large segment of right-wing extremists, will be anything but ascendant in Washington for the foreseeable future.

Thus we get potentially the worst of both worlds: a dominant GOP that continues to attract and empower extremists even as it effectively markets itself to the broader mainstream as having purged itself of such elements. This is only made possible by two things: 1) a compliant press that functions more as a propaganda organ for the White House than as a civic-minded watchdog; and 2) a passive Democratic party that is reluctant to attract the wrath of the right-wing propaganda machine by confronting the Cro-Magnons who continue to run the show for the Republicans in the House and Senate.

The latter is especially important to the current dynamic. This passivity represents a mind-boggling level of ineptitude, because the breach exposed by this rift in the direction of the GOP is essential to Democrats' own long-term hopes to return to power. Hunkering down is a foolish option.

The GOP hopes to tone down its image as hospitable to extremists even as its extremist elements rise in actual power. Democrats should be leaping aggressively into this breach, demanding the removal of people like Santorum and Rep. Howard Coble as unfit for leadership positions in a party that touts itself as "inclusive." And it should be vigorously pursuing a legislative agenda that promotes issues which confront the breach in the Republican shift, particularly abortion, race, hate crimes and gay rights.

This latter -- which clearly is the flashpoint in the Santorum matter -- is one of the most significant, especially since Democrats' clear reluctance (aside from Howard Dean, who continues to give me reasons to vote for him) to leap into the Santorum fray is indicative of the miserable short-sightedness of the party generally. Democrats are afraid of being branded too "gay friendly" by the conservative Wurlitzer, and thus back off from a prime opportunity to cut the GOP off at the knees.

What Democrats fail to comprehend is something that the Republicans are implicitly admitting by their recent efforts to appear more "inclusive" of such former targets as homosexuals: the gay-bashing rhetoric so favored by conservatives in the '80s and '90s, particularly in service of the fundamentalist right, has backfired. It is no longer deemed acceptable behavior by all those soccer moms who Karl Rove wants on the Republican rolls.

The reality is that American society has quietly undergone an important change in attitudes during the past decade, especially as more and more gays and lesbians have come out of the closet and staked out their place in the mainstream. Increasingly, gay people are not just a few furtive strangers but they are somebody's cousin or brother or schoolteacher. This ultimately has affected even those people who find homosexuality repugnant or morally objectionable; they may not change their views much, but they understand that we're still talking about real flesh-and-blood people and not some abstract demon.

This sea change became clear during the last two attempts to pass an updated and upgraded hate-crimes bill. Titled the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act [of 2001 and 2002, respectively], its main champion in the Senate was Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, though it enjoyed bipartisan support, notably by Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee. It died in 2001 because Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah -- one of the chief enemies of the bill -- chaired the Judiciary Committee for much of the active portion of the session (until Jim Jeffords' May 24 defection); and it foundered in 2002 because Democrats failed to make it a priority, and Hatch managed to hold it up in the Judiciary Committee once again, citing bogus objections that the law somehow might prevent local law enforcement officials from prosecuting serious crimes.

The new hate-crimes law was a significant improvement on the 1995 Hate Crime Sentencing Enhancement Act, which is the primary hate-crimes law on the federal books. It is also notoriously inadequate because of limitations placed on its scope by Hatch and cohorts (Jesse Helms being among the ringleaders) during its two-year ordeal back then, since Republicans were running the show. The chief limitation is that in order for federal investigators and prosecutors to get involved in a hate crime, it must be a violent crime that occurred either on federal property (such as, say, a national park) or during the commission of a federal activity, such as voting.

Obviously, that severely limits the kind of circumstances that can even constitute a federal hate crime under the 1995 law, and renders the law nearly useless in actually dealing with hate crimes -- even when doing so is being emphasized by a Republican administration. For instance, since Sept. 11, the FBI has initiated some 414 hate-crime investigations involving Muslim, Sikh, and Arab-American victims. So far, only 17 people have been charged federally -- and not one of them has been charged under the 1995 law. State and local laws, as always, have been far more effective; another 129 people have been charged at that level in those investigations.

The 2001-02 versions of a federal law addressed three areas where the 1995 law has clearly proven inadequate:

-- It eliminated the limitations on venue and gave federal investigators broad leeway to open hate-crimes investigations and for prosecutors to file federal charges.

-- It provided federal funding for local law-enforcement agencies to tackle hate crimes -- including educating officers and prosecutors on the laws and their importance, as well as offering investigative and enforcement tools. This aspect of the law addresses the noterworthy failure of both federal and state laws to fund enforcement of the laws.

-- It expanded the definition of a hate crime to include those crimes motivated by a bias against both gender and sexual orientation.

It was this last feature, of course, that spelled doom for the legislation insofar as Republicans are concerned. Over the past decade the GOP has consistently fought against hate-crimes laws that offer protections for gays and lesbians, on the seeming logic that such laws discriminated against people who might harbor religious reasons for kicking the living shit out of queers. Hate-crimes laws that include sexual orientation among the bias categorites, they have argued, endow "special rights" upon gays and lesbians.

Throughout much of the 1990s, this opposition took the form of open gay-bashing, suggesting that somehow these people have it coming and are unworthy of any kind of protection -- in effect making gay-bashing a "special right" for fundamentalist haters. Remarks like Santorum's used to be commonplace among the Jesse Helms contingent, and the complicit GOP support for gay-bashing was a well-known reality among gays who are not Andrew Sullivan.

But by 2001 and 2002, the viciousness had faded -- and was replaced with the current GOP strategy, which is merely to strangle any controversy in its crib and hope that nobody notices its muffled cries. Republicans, in effect, were facing up to the reality of significant changes in attitudes about gays in broader society -- a reality that seems to have eluded the congenitally clueless Democrats.

I interviewed Rep. Barney Frank last fall about the hate-crimes legislation. Frank was anticipating that the bill might make it past Hatch's machinations in the Senate and into the House, where he planned to shepherd it. But he of course had a pretty grim prognosis for the law, since Tom DeLay and the rest of the Republicans running the House make cretins like Hatch look enlightened:

The problem in the House is that the Republican leadership is determined not to do anything or allow anything that’s supportive. And the way the rules of the House work, unlike the rules of the Senate, they’re in total control. As long as the Republicans are in control of the House, you’re not going to see, I’m afraid -- or at least, not for the foreseeable future -- but they won’t allow either the hate-crimes bill or ENDA or virtually anything else that’s supportive of the position of non-discrimination to go forward, and they have total control.

The Republican leadership -- look, they’re worried about their base, and a large part of their base is very homophobic. Things have evolved. They don’t want to do much gay-bashing anymore, because they know that face has cost them something. But they are firmly against and will never allow anything supportive.

Are they trying to attract the gay vote?

No, but they do know -- well, some of them are, I mean, the Log Cabin people try to basically say, look, they’re not calling us names -- what they’re trying to do is attract the votes, I think, of people who are gay and very conservative economically. But even more, I think, it’s not so much the gay votes, they know by now that since so many of us are out, what’s at play here are not just gay and lesbian people but millions of our relatives and friends. They understand it’s not a good idea to call somebody’s kid an asshole -- even if the person isn’t happy that the kid’s gay. So they’re really trying to answer to the general public.

Gay rights used to be a wedge issue used by the Republicans against the Democrats -- that is, they would force Democrats to vote on these issues because then they would feel that the general public being anti-gay and the Democratic primary electorate being pro-gay, we would be caught in the middle. Now that’s reversed.

Frank is one of the few Democrats who understands that this sea change in the electorate presents an important opportunity to make inroads against the Republican hegemony in Washington. The rest of the Democratic leadership continues to behave as though the old rules were still in place. Witness the reluctance to make an issue out of Santorum's continued leadership role in the Republican Senate.

There is a difference, of course, in being a "pro-gay" advocate and taking a firm stand against hatred and bigotry. Democrats need not be advocates of the "gay agenda" in order to expose the odiousness of someone like Santorum, and by extension the larger Republican Party. They only need to address the bigotry, specifically and unmistakably -- and when it comes to treating gays viciously, the mainstream view has become quite clear. Out of the entire pack of presidential candidates, only Howard Dean has acted as though he understood this, denouncing Santorum's remarks in very clear terms:

Equating the private, consensual activities of adults to the molestation of minors is not a policy discussion. It is gay-bashing, and it is immoral.

Its brazenness notwithstanding, the GOP's hypocrisy in trying to play both sides at once -- coddling Santorum and the gay-bashers even while it touts its "inclusiveness" -- has so far been a winning strategy. And it will continue to be until the Democratic Party rekindles an understanding that its greatness has always been measured by its willingness to stand up for the little guy.

The Satanic courts strike again

I've mentioned previously the anti-tax protesters who have been scamming a lot of people into filing phony federal returns and getting into serious legal trouble as a result. This kind of activity is, of course, one of the real threads running through much of the history of the Patriot movement, dating back to the days of the Posse Comitatus, and continuing through the rather vivid case of the Montana Freemen.

Well, here's the latest twist:

Judge bans a 'nonsense' anti-tax book
ACLU calls it a free speech issue

A Las Vegas federal judge has called the anti-tax writings of a civil defendant "nonsense" and enjoined him from distributing a book that's based on them.

The case has sparked a legal battle that pits federal tax law against First Amendment rights.

A suit brought by the Tax Division of the Justice Department has won a temporary restraining order that enjoins Irwin Schiff and two co-workers from 13 specific activities, such as holding seminars that promote any false or fictitious tax schemes. U.S. v. Schiff, No. CV-S-03-0281-LDG-RJJ (D. Nev.).

While the government's complaint is thick with details and weighted by exhibits, the allegations boil down to this: Schiff and his associates are tax cheats.

The piece explores the ramifications in reasonable depth. (Of course, it misses perhaps one of the more amusing aspects of the case, which is how the ruling will be received among the True Believers -- that is, as yet another perfidy inflicted by the Satanic cabal that now runs the courts.) I think the free-speech questions it raises are important.

In my relatively limited experience with Patriot-related publications, even those that are known to contain provably false information nonetheless enjoy certain First Amendment protections. This even seems to extend to such books as those which advocated violent domestic terrorism -- and contained detailed instructions thereon. Thus it remains possible to purchase any number of manuals describing how to build homemade pipe bombs.

I do know, however, that people tread onto very thin constitutional ice when it comes to claiming First Amendment protection for criminal acts. This is, as it happens, one of the important points undergirding the constutionality of hate-crimes laws: That is, laws that tighten sentences for criminal acts committed with a bias motivation do not run afoul of free-speech protections because they deal with conduct (that is, something which is already a crime) that is not protected by the First. The illustration at the vivid extreme end of this logic is that one cannot assassinate a president and claim a free-speech protection for doing so.

It will be interesting to see if this ruling stands.

Tripartite hate

Checking in with our friends from the theocratic right ...

Three Different Colored Gloves -- One Fist

By Flip Benham
Homosexuality, Islam, and abortion have something in common. They are three different colored gloves covering the same fist. Abortion is a crimson glove (stained with the blood of our pre-born children). Homosexuality is a pink glove (stained with the blood of young men and women given over to their own lust, and stained with the blood of nations that approve of such behavior). Islam is a black glove (stained with the blood of Christians, Jews, and anyone else who dares disagree with the false "god" Allah and his demon possessed prophet Mohammed). Three different colored gloves, yet the same fist. It is the fist of him who robs, kills, and destroys. That's right, I'm talking about the devil himself! We are not unaware of his schemes.

Flip Benham, for those with long memories, was one of the guiding lights of the former Operation Rescue, the radical anti-abortion group that advocated violence against abortion clinics and providers, including the murder of doctors. Three of its former members are now in prison.

Benham's new gig, for those who choose not to click on the source link (perfectly understandable), is called Operation Save America. It openly advocates a theocratic Christian state, outlawing abortion and declaring war on Islam. He's become much more marginal a figure than he was in the 1990s, but the memes he trots out have a way of working their way into the broader fundamentalist circuit. And he maintains considerable clout in the radical anti-abortion underground, which is still hiding such domestic terrorists as Eric Rudolph.

This most recent piece is a "three-fer": It targets pro-choice liberals, gays, and Muslims, all of whom evidently are the allies of America's true enemy, Satan. What, no Tom Daschle?

Well, Benham should be easy to dismiss, but I'm troubled by his concluding paragraph:

We must stop relying on Conservative and Republican mercenaries to fight our battles for us. It is said that politics is the "art of compromise." The Gospel of Christ, however, is not up for negotiation. There can be no compromise when it comes to any one of the issues mentioned above for they are simply different colored gloves camouflaging the same fist. It is the fist of the devil. We must take this battle to the streets in the Name of Jesus Christ and win it there before we can ever expect to win the battle in Washington, D.C.

This is not very dissimilar to Paul Weyrich's call for cultural conservatives to withdraw from the mainstream in 1998, setting up an alternative system that operates by its own rules. Benham likewise is no longer willing to let secular politicians or public officials handle matters, and appears to be calling for "Christians" to take matters into their own hands. Taking this "battle to the streets" to Benham's true believers likely means engaging in guerrilla terrorist tactics of the type formerly favored by Operation Rescue.

The problem is that there only need be one or two people who take Benham seriously and act on his advice to wreak a lot of misery.