Politics

I know this is why many folks can't stand Garrison Keillor, but I enjoy his radio show, his fiction, and even his editorials...and, from my point of view, his take on the mistake in Iraq is on target.

You wonder, however, what this earnest bunch can do when things are so far out of whack as they are in Iraq. The gangland-style execution of Saddam Hussein was visible reality, a token of the bloodlust and violence that swirls around Iraq, where our forces are mired, sitting targets, aliens, fighting a colonial war in behalf of a Shiite majority that is as despotic and cruel as what came before except messier.

In an article focusing on Mitt Romney's flip-flop on abortion (as well as a litany of other repubs and dems), Steve Chapman recently addressed the penchant of presidential candidates (from both sides of the aisle) to adjust their fundamental view points on important issues as practical tactics to try to get elected (see some quotes from the Chapman article below). That's one of the things I really dislike about politicians - that they tend to focus more on their own interests (financial, electoral, etc.) instead of what is best based on what principals they believe to be true or at least what is best for majority of the people they represent. As he freely admits, Obama is mostly hype at this point, but this is one of the reasons I can't help but get excited about him - hat maybe he won't conform to this trend. Speaking of Obama, Lisa and I listened to his World Aids Day speech and an article about him from Men's vogue while we were driving today. It worked out pretty nicely and here is how I did it. I had my laptop and I had the two web pages saved to my laptop via the "Scrapbook" extension in Firefox. I copied and pasted the text I wanted to read into MS Word. Then I printed it to a pdf file using the free CutePDF software. Then I opened the pdf and chose "read out loud" in the view menu of Adobe Acrobat Reader. I connected the laptop's headphone out jack to the FM modulator (just like I do with my iPod) and listened to Acrobat read the articles over the cars stereo. I've known for few years that Acrobat can read text out loud, but this is the first time I tried to use it to listen to a lengthy text without also following along visually. It worked fine. It sometimes pronounced words wrong given their context and tended to spell out words that followed a dash, but all in all it worked as I had hoped it would. Of course, I could have just read it out loud myself, but doing it this way was preferable to me. Here are links to the Obama articles: World AIDS Day Speech Men's Vogue Article Some quotes from Steve Chapman's article in the Chicago Tribune (because I think it will eventually disappear from their site):

You have to feel for Mitt Romney. The Massachusetts governor, who labored for years to convince voters in his state that he would not infringe on abortion rights, is now striving mightily to persuade voters elsewhere that he would do exactly that. He becomes the latest of many politicians who, in the course of their quest for the White House, have felt an irresistible impulse to re-evaluate this issue.

This change makes perfect sense if you assume he had a late-developing moral epiphany on the sanctity of fetal life. About the same time, it would seem, the scales fell from his eyes on the entirely separate matter of judicial activism, forcing him to disavow a Supreme Court decision that he once embraced. More likely, though, he realized that if he hopes to win the GOP nomination for president, he had better start sounding more conservative--no matter how many of his own words he has to eat. This hypothesis gains strength when you consider that Romney, who once endorsed a federal measure to outlaw discrimination against gays, now opposes the idea. It's a little unfair to single out the Massachusetts governor, since he is not the first presidential candidate to outgrow a youthful set of abortion beliefs. Ronald Reagan signed a liberal abortion law in California before reversing himself. George H.W. Bush, once a supporter of abortion rights, took the opposite position as Reagan's running mate in 1980. The current president had a liberal position when he ran for Congress in 1978. But Democrats have proven equally open-minded. Jesse Jackson, who once denounced legal abortion as "a policy of killing infants," morphed when he ran for president in 1984. Al Gore, who once voted for a measure stipulating that life begins at conception, made an about-face before becoming Bill Clinton's running mate in 1992. As governor of Arkansas, Clinton said, "I am opposed to abortion and to government funding of abortion." As president, not so much. You will notice the common element: Each of these shifts, however morally sincere, perfectly fit the political needs of the candidate in question at that point in his career.

A month or so ago, I got engaged in a conversation on Scott Freeman's site about nonviolence. One of the commenters (an apparently otherwise reasonable, dedicated Christian fellow) said (apparently yelling at the time)"

"I BELIEVE WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING AS CHRISTIANS ABOUT ISLAM AND THE MUSLIMS.THEIR KORAN TELLS THEM THAT THOSE WHO DO NOT AGREE WITH THEM THEN THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL THEM.TODAY THERE ARE MORE THAN 6 MILLION NOW IN THE US AND OVER 2000 MOSQUE. SURAH 9:29 STATES "FIGHT THOSE WHO BELIEVE NOT IN ALLAH NOR THE LAST DAY. THEY TEACH JESUS'APOSTLES BECAME MUSLIMS. THEIR INTENT IS TO DESTROY CHRISTIANS AND IF YOU REALLY READ THE KORAN THIS IS MOST EVIDENT."

This got me kind of riled up - that the number muslims and mosques in the US is somehow evidence of an increasing threat. That in one fell swoop, the commenter lumped into one group the millions of law-abiding Muslim citizens of the US into the same category as that tiny, tiny number (remember, we're talking about people currently living in the US) of mentally-deranged jihadists who are poised to harm Christians and the population of the US in general. I wrote in response:

jihadists/Islamists are a minority of Muslims (a tiny or effectively non-existent minority in the US). It is unfair, bigoted, and counter-productive to lump all Muslims in the U.S. into the category of suspicion and threat that jihadists deserve - in the same way that it would be unfair, bigoted, and counter-productive to lump all Christians in the U.S. into the same category of danger that includes racist white-supremacist "Christians", the Olympic-park bomber Eric Rudolph associated with the Christian Identity movement, the militant Christian terrorists in Northern Ireland, etc. Lumping the 2 to 7 million Muslims living in the U.S. into the threat category harms the vast, vast majority of them who are no threat and does not help us identify the tiny, tiny minority who are.

I'm reminded of other xenophobia in the news lately like attaching significance to similarities between Obama's name and other infamous world figures or their Islamic origin (link), CNN's Glenn Beck asking a Muslim politician to prove to him that he isn't working with our enemies, and Virginia representative Virgil Goode's anti-Muslim letter to his constituents (Cenk Uygur make a good point about Goode's statement here). This came back into my mind when I listened to last weekend's installment of This American Life (episode 322, Shouting Across the Divide) (available for free as real audio on the show's web site, for free as a podcast in iTunes).

A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good, until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire.

Give it a listen. The story of what happened to Serry's daughter is really disturbing and is the kind of thing that naturally arises from blanket demonization of muslims. If you are either or both of these: a) a patriot dedicated to the ideals of religious freedoms and personal rights that are foundational to our democratic republic or b) a disciple of Jesus who, therefore, values compassion and mercy and treating others with love as you would have yourself treated then surely you'll want to be careful not to do anything to contribute the kind of suffering experienced by Serry's daughter.

Updated: 2006-12-26 See Ellison's response to Goode's comments here. Aziz Huq posted a nice historical summary of muslims in America here

Updated: 2006-12-28 I'll provide more precise targets by briefly summarizing what I'm trying to say here, and anyone can specify exactly what is disagreeable and why.

1.a. There are dangerous, violent, radical muslims in the world. Some of them may be in the U.S.

1.b. There are dangerous, violent, radical Christians in the world. Some of them are in the U.S. (for example, Christian Identity movement and white supremacists)

2.a. Radical muslims have attacked us in recent years (for example, World Trade Center attack) and will remain a danger for the foreseeable future.

2.b. Radical Christians have attacked us in recent years (Olympic park bombing, bombing and shooting of abortion providers, maybe even the Oklahoma City bombing though I don't think McVeigh considered himself a Christian) and will remain a danger for the foreseeable future.

3.a. The vast majority of muslims in the U.S. are not violent radicals, but are law-abiding, nonviolent, are not a danger, and are not guilty by association with radical muslims whose actions they repudiate.

3.b. The vast majority of Christians in the U.S. are not violent radicals, but are law-abiding, nonviolent, are not a danger, and are not guilty by association with radical Christians whose actions they repudiate.

4.a. The number of mosques and muslims in the U.S. is not a rational measure of the threat posed by violent radical muslims.

4.b. The number of church buildings and Christians in the U.S. is not a rational measure of the threat posed by violent radical Christians.

5.a. Muslim school children should not be ridiculed and ostracized at school because of their religion (TAL 322).

5.b. Christian school children should not be ridiculed and ostracized at school because of their religion.

6.a. Muslim school children should not be proselytized for Christianity in public schools in the U.S. (TAL 322)

6.b. Christian school children should not be proselytized for Islam in public schools in the U.S.

From the October 30, 2006, installment of The Writer's Almanac:

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. - John Adams, 2nd president of the United States

Via Today's Papers, in an article titled "As Power Shifts in New Congress, Pork May Linger," David Kirkpatrick makes the case that (regardless of what Pelosi says about earmarks), the change in power in Washington probably won't have a big effect on pork. See a summary graphic here.