Positive Liberty

Longtime blog friend Joshua Claybourn has a fantastic post about the Mexican-American War, one of the most unjust and unnecessary conflicts our nation has ever entered. An excerpt:

One aspect of this oft-forgotten war is that it was quite divisive in its day. Whigs, particularly those in the north, opposed the war. Yet southern Democrats, smitten with the notion of Manifest Destiny and our perceived God given right to own “sea to shining sea,” enthusiastically supported it. Such disagreements should not be glossed over. Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman, remained forcefully skeptical about Mexico’s alleged instigation of armed hostilities. Others, such as former President John Quincy Adams, felt the whole affair was simply an effort to expand slavery.

I share John Quincy Adams’ opinion on the matter. Northerners came to speak of the “Slave Power” then running the country in part because they found that the South seemed able to make decisions as massive as going to war even when the rest of the country did not agree. (Likewise with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.) The Mexican-American War was also the reason why in 1846 Henry David Thoreau declined to pay his poll tax, instead spent a night in jail, and went on to write “Civil Disobedience,” one of the great American essays of all time.

And lastly, it is a remarkable testimony to the undemocratic nature of the antebellum South that the first president who was neither from the South nor a northerner willing to concede everything that the South demanded was Abraham Lincoln, and that the South immediately left the Union upon his election.

I’m with Sandefur on this (as I am on so many things, even if it doesn’t always show):

I knew after hearing of the raid in El Dorado that it was only a matter of time before the Doughfaces at Lew Rockwell.com stood up for the sacred right to rape children without the interference of government. Butler Shaffer has done them proud, in a post which hems and haws a little bit but comes to the expected conclusion.

His logic goes like this: because the United States federal government sends troops to foreign lands to fight wars, and because these troops engage in violence and sometimes to terrible things to innocent people, therefore the police officers of Texas have no right to point fingers at religious wackos who think God wants them to rape little girls. Indeed, although “there is no moral defense one could possibly make” of raping children, nevertheless, it is “difficult to tolerate” the “self-righteousness” of the state police or prosecutors who would insist on intervening to protect children from rape, given that federal officials sometimes endorse violent warfare. After all, the U.S. has “killed over one million” people in Iraq (we’ll put aside asking where that number comes from) and is now threatening “innocent” Iran*—and “such practices appear to be occurring, once again, on the plains of Texas.” Shaffer, of course, isn’t defending child rapists, no no. He’s just calling them “innocent” victims of unfair government aggression.

Very strange reasoning indeed.

Other highlights: No, Iran is not innocent. If I were Victor Hugo, I’d write a novel about this guy, whose picture says everything you need to know about the “Islamic Republic” of Iran. And no, being reflexively anti-anti-anti-military doesn’t make you “pro” anything, particularly not pro-liberty. Oh yeah, and Butler writes:

As I observed media coverage of the government’s assault on the Mormon sect’s property at El Dorado, Texas, I was struck by the fact that the description being offered of the church’s facilities and activities paralleled those of military installations.

For starters, the activities of the religious group were described as “secretive” in nature, ignoring the fact that the military routinely puts the stamp of “secret” on virtually everything it does - short of participating in a holiday parade. Nor does the church permit non-members access to its property. In the words of the state prosecutor who seems to be directing this assault, “their place of worship is very special to them. It appears to be of great concern to them if a person from outside their congregation even attempts to step inside their place of worship.” But have you ever tried getting onto a military base? If so, haven’t you met with the same “great concern” from armed guards desirous of keeping those “from outside their congregation” from entering?

It has also been reported that this church provides a great deal of on-site housing, as well as provision for the daily needs of its members, so as to make the facility as self-sufficient as possible. Again, if you have been able to get onto military bases, did you fail to notice all of the on-base housing (barracks) as well as churches, schools, recreational facilities, gas stations, movie theaters, medical offices, PX stores, and other means of accommodating the needs of their members?

One cable news report informed us that church officials wore insignias indicating the level of their authority within the organization. Need I point out the obvious?

Weird. Among other organizations that include secret rituals and militaryesque rankings are the Boy Scouts. But you know, they actually have policies against child abuse, rather than for it. Maybe that counts for something, rather than all the other stuff?

…or how about the dreaded Salvation Army?

If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions. — Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo

I keep trying to tell myself that this isn’t how we do things in America. We have laws not because a few people are wise enough to break them, but because we trust in the efficacy of the laws as they are written. The executive branch’s authority to protect the nation is already expressed in the laws themselves. That authority is not a license to ignore whatever laws the executive doesn’t feel like obeying. The executive’s authority itself is bounded by law.

If we believe that the laws may not be effective as they stand, then we are morally obligated to write new ones. That’s how things work in a constitutional government. Our laws should be a simple declaration to ourselves and to the world: This is the way that American government operates. We don’t just disregard the law because we’re afraid, or because we want a tough executive to take care of the bad guys. We don’t declare that the ends justify the means.

Glenn Greenwald writes,

The fact that John Yoo is a Professor of Law at Berkeley and is treated as a respectable, serious expert by our media institutions, reflects the complete destruction over the last eight years of whatever moral authority the United States possessed. Comporting with long-held stereotypes of two-bit tyrannies, we’re now a country that literally exempts our highest political officials from the rule of law, and have decided that there should be no consequences when they commit serious felonies.

John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.

If writing memoranda authorizing torture — actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture — doesn’t make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

…While Yoo’s specific Torture Memos were ultimately rescinded by subsequent DOJ officials — primarily Jack Goldsmith — the underlying theories of omnipotent executive power remain largely in place. The administration continues to embrace precisely these same theories to assert that it has the power to violate a whole array of laws — from our nation’s spying and surveillance statutes to countless Congressional oversight requirements — and to detain even U.S. citizens, detained on American soil, as “enemy combatants.” So for all of the dramatic outrage that this Yoo memo will generate for a day or so, the general framework on which it rests, despite being weakened by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, is the one under which we continue to live, without much protest or objection.

…That John Yoo is a full professor at one of the country’s most prestigious law schools, and a welcomed expert on our newspaper’s Op-Ed pages and television news programs, speaks volumes about what our country has become. We sure did take care of that despicable Pvt. Lyndie England, though, because we don’t tolerate barbaric conduct of the type in which she engaged completely on her own.

…John Yoo is not some misguided conservative legal thinker with whom one should have civil, pleasant, intellectually stimulating debates at law schools and on PBS. Respectfully debating the legality and justification of torture regimes, and treating systematic torture perpetrators like John Yoo with respect, isn’t all that far off from what Yoo and his comrades did. It isn’t pleasant to think about high government officials in one’s own country as war criminals — that’s something that only bad, evil dictatorships have — but, pleasant or not, it rather indisputably happens to be what we have.

The scapegoat is punished. The higher-ups are rewarded. Life goes on.

There are little distractions, and there are beers to drink, and there are funny videos on the Internet. There are gardens to be cultivated. And behind all of this, our government has become something radically different from what it once was, and from what it claims to be.

I imagine that I will be told that I hate America, and that I want al Qaeda to win. I need to learn to stop caring about this kind of response. I want victory for the American ideal, and defeat for the hypocrites who are dragging it through the mud.

As Edward Rackley of 3 Quarks Daily writes,

As the election year approaches, I find myself fantasizing about a very different political consciousness in this country. A state of mind where the majority of voters are appalled, outraged and shamed by our military practices and outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Ashamed and outraged enough to mobilize in direct opposition to a geopolitical strategy that is digging our national grave by the day. To mobilize not just by voting for change next year, but acting now with concrete gestures of rejection and refusal powerful enough to bring the calculus driving this mad debacle to a shuddering, definitive halt.

In the name of what America has always meant to be, and against the recent madness, yes. But what is this consciousness? What are the gestures?

The Best:

Blog Comment.

Blog Post.

Rant.

Blog. Yes, they’re back.

April Fools Articles. At least, I think they are. I mean, I hope they are. I mean… oh just GIVE ME MY ENSLAVED DOG YOGA INSTRUCTOR ALREADY!1!!

Would be nice if he were a robot, too.

Dilemma: If I like Tim Burton but hate Stephen Sondheim, what do I do with the film version of Sweeney Todd?

It’s taken for granted, often by some very smart people, that small arms are no match for modern military weapons, and that the Second Amendment is therefore no longer an effective shield against a would-be tyrant. Jonathan Rauch writes,

[In 1790] states’ armed populations could resist and overthrow a tyrannical central government, acting as an insurrectionary militia—much as Americans had recently done in overthrowing British rule. That may have made sense in 1790, but today the insurrectionary rationale would seem to imply a right to keep and bear surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers, among other things.

This seems to give ordinary citizens far too little credit.

Many of us, after all, have military training of one kind or another. We know chemistry and ballistics. Many of us work with and/or own high explosives. I’d bet that, in the space of only a few days or weeks, private firms would have the capacity to make some pretty impressive improvised weapons, even if most of the military-industrial complex as it is usually understood were to side with the tyrant. If our government went totally off the rails, the ordinary citizen’s handgun would be a stopgap until bigger and better things came along, and these would arrive in short order.

Let’s add to this the fact that the typical person serving in the U.S. armed forces is a decent and freedom-loving individual, not well inclined to follow an outright tyrant, and certainly not well inclined to attack U.S. civilians. It’s a bit of a smear that these scenarios always presume the military’s unquestioning loyalty to state rather than the people.

In any event, I think if the American people demanded it, they would certainly have the material basis for a pretty strong insurgency against a tyrannical government — one that would be significantly weakened without the Second Amendment.

Am I missing something here?

Ever since Christopher Hitchens left The Nation, I’ve been hard pressed to find a reason to frequent their website. My personal politics are probably equidistant from the Weekly Standard, as far as that goes, but as long as they keep publishing Matt Labash and Andrew Ferguson, I’ll keep checking back in.

Ferguson has the Standard’s cover story this week, “The Wit & Wisdom of Barak Obama,” wherein you will find such nuggets as:

There’s still room for whimsy at the New Yorker magazine, I don’t care what you’ve heard. Just the other day two of the New Yorker’s bloggers (now there’s a phrase to send Harold Ross spinning) were chewing over the widely noted eloquence of Barack Obama.

And:

The overarching theme of Obama’s speeches, and of his campaign, is that America is a fetid sewer whose most glorious days lie just ahead, thanks to the endless ranks of pathetic losers who make it a beacon of hope to all mankind.

Sure it’s a hit piece. But it’s a funny hit piece, damnit! Enjoy.

I’m not quite sure I understand the point of George Kateb’s “On Patriotism” in the current issue of Cato Unbound. It seems he builds an elaborate argument on a purely metaphorical foundation: Yes, the love of the nation-state is supposed to be just like the love for a father or a mother, or at least that’s what nationalists like to say. But no, fathers and mothers do not often butcher their children. Kateb seems to think that this proves something important about patriotism, but I’m less convinced.

On one level, he’s absolutely right — the distinction between love of family and love of nation is obvious, and it’s a little absurd when you state it in just those terms. And yet, on another level, you don’t argue with these things. It’s improper. Impolite, even. It’s like arguing with Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: Sometimes, the Fatherland most certainly will ask you to die for it. And at other times, you’re its dear, sweet, beloved children. Words mean what I say they mean, and them’s the breaks.

The whole discussion might benefit from some methodological individualism. This name is given to the approach to social sciences that ascribes intention, moral agency, and causality only to individuals, and never to groups. A methodological individualist will not deny the existence of groups, and will not deny that people often feel powerful allegiances or antipathies to them. But he will say that ultimately, “the Fatherland” isn’t asking anything. Only individuals make demands, because only individuals have agency.

After that, there’s no sense sugar coating the truth. Other people — other individuals — are asking you to die so that they may parade down the streets in triumph, award themselves fat pensions, and live on your orphaned children’s tax money. That’s what nationalism is, no more and no less. To make it all cohere as a political platform, these people, these other individuals, are trying to co-opt the feelings that you have for your very own family.

It should be no big mystery why libertarians are suspicious of nationalism. The methodological individualist sees nationalism as a request for a highly inefficient transfer payment from one person to another, repeated a few billionfold in the last century. The deadweight loss of nationalism is the mother of all deadweight losses. (Thought experiment: What if we held the parade, awarded the pensions, and levied the taxes without physically hurting anyone? Doesn’t this leave no one any worse off, and quite a few better, than in all wars that end up status quo ante? What, you mean to tell me it wouldn’t feel the same?)

I guess my real question is quite simple: Why pull punches? Why talk about metaphors, when the real thing is horrible enough?

As Kateb notes, “the theorists of [social] contract knew that consent would not supply the passionate energy that is required to discharge the obligation to die.” He’s right. Love for a country has to be welded – awkwardly – onto the contractual account of government. Love for a contractual system feels strange. Yet this is not a bug but a feature of social contract theory. As I’ve said in the past, I’ll take a government that rules with all the majesty of an insurance company. Like good governments, insurance companies protect our lives and property, after a fashion. Yet virtually no one offers to kill or die for an insurance company.

Methodological individualism also takes much of the sting out of Kateb’s late-in-the-essay gender analysis. He writes,

The brute fact of patriotism is made brute by the inveterate inclination in men to associate virility with the exertion involved in killing and risking death. No theory can ever defeat or discredit this inclination, which helps to engender the fantasy that the competition of political units is the highest kind of team sports. Men love teams, love to live in a world where they are called on to back or play for their team against other teams, even though the sport of war is soaked in blood. . . Men can become peace-loving for a while, but not forever. The women who love them encourage their inclination to see team sports as the essence of their masculinity, and to call patriotic this inclination when it is projected into politics. The pity is that men lend their energies to a state that sooner or later embarks on an inherently unjust imperialist career and thus gets constantly engaged in policies that are deliberated in secrecy, and sustained by secrecy and propaganda, and removed from meaningful public deliberation. Patriotism is indispensable for sustaining this career of anti-democracy.

Now, many men certainly do associate virility with killing and dying. No argument there. Yet it’s hardly clear that “no theory” can ever change their minds. Deductively, the claim is impossible to prove. Empirically, many similar statements have been falsified. After all, men once associated virility with scholarly aptitude, and women – acting on the theory that all people are created equal – have disproven them.

The rest of the blockquote is also empirically troubling. Men can become peace-loving forever, as millions of lifelong pacifists will attest. We would not be worse off if the most militant among us adopted this course instead. Those of us in the middle will be happy to keep civil order in the meantime. And women, far from encouraging men’s tendencies toward violence, stereotypically discourage them instead. They sigh, and smirk, and roll their eyes at the silliness of men’s violent side. (They probably do us a service here.)

But I can’t be too harsh on Kateb. After all, he writes, “The support of one’s team is not the defense of the Constitution,” and I do wish many more people would take this maxim to heart.

First, the serious bit: Matt comments (on “Corporatism“),

Something like this is, I think behind the opposition to markets by the European left. Consider a typical privatisation in an EU country.

Corporation makes a donation to ruling political party.

Corporation is invited to tender for a government asset.

Corporation gains control of that asset for far less than it would fetch in an open market.

Government provides a subsidy that more than repays whatever the corporation paid for the asset.

Any profits are taken by the corporation, any losses are met by the taxpayer.

And this we are told is the marvel of the free market and private enterprise!

It’s certainly a terrible abuse, and I could see how someone might end up hating the “free market” if this were what he usually found under that name. Without a doubt, there are better and worse ways to privatize a state-owned enterprise. Perhaps a useful constitutional rule would be to outlaw asset sale privatization, while allowing for other forms of privatization.

Cracked features the Nine Most Baffling Theme Parks From Around the World. Weird food tie-in: Bon-Bon Land, which is just really scary. Now With Devastation: Grutas Park, also known as “Stalin’s World.”

The Onion’s A.V. Club has started hosting food reviews. I’m delighted. The first item on the menu is that twitchingly horrid canned cheeseburger we all read about a few weeks back. With video. My god, with video.

Cliopatria isn’t one to be left out, I guess. I can’t decide if this is the funniest or the most tasteless thing ever linked at the heart of the history blogosphere. But it’s a new record either way, with weird food and devastation in every single frame.

The last scene redeems it all, in a macabre sort of way.

And last, never count out Wikipedia. From the entry on “Shock and Awe,” we read,

Following the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, the term “Shock and Awe” has been used for commercial purposes. The United States Patent and Trademark Office received at least 29 trademark applications in 2003 for exclusive use of the term. The first came from a fireworks company on the day the United States started bombing Baghdad. Sony registered the trademark the day after the beginning of the operation for use in a video game title, but later withdrew the application and described it as “an exercise of regrettable bad judgment.” Miscellaneous other uses of the term include golf equipment, an insecticide, a set of bowling balls, a racehorse, a shampoo, and condoms.

Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

Ten bucks says this is just a bunch of bored info-geeks pulling one over on their superiors.

A month or so ago, Mike Huckabee said something to the effect that all signs pointed to Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that it was easy to use the tool of hindsight to point fingers of blame, but that it was unfair to do so. Far better it would be, he suggested, to forget about the past and look to the future. Now that we are in Iraq, what will we do?

I don’t trust anyone who says forget about the past. If not by history, if not by experience, then how, pray tell, can we humans learn from, and avoid errors in judgment in the future?

But Huckabee is (presently) wrong and he will (still) be wrong in the future because of where he has placed his trust.

Yours truly, with a group of seven other people and a budget of just $10,000, dared to blaze a trail that defeated the intelligence agencies of multiple nations. We called it TruthAboutWar.org. We launched that site seven weeks BEFORE the campaign of “shock and awe” began. We froze it when the bombing started so that you can still see it.

And our claim number one, which we broadcast on radio ads in seven different cities (most of which kicked us out after one week because their listeners didn’t want to hear it), was that Saddam Hussein DIDN’T have WMDs. We made other claims as well, all of which have turned out to be on track.

No magical powers were required to be so prophetic. This was foresight, based on hindsight. This project represented Continue Reading »

Jack the Misanthrope brings the following to my attention:

On February 13th, 2003 four Americans under contract with the U.S. Department of Defense and a Colombian citizen onboard a Cessna 208 crashed in the Colombian jungle. They survived. Unfortunately, they were deep within territory controlled and patrolled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, widely referred to as the FARC, the largest armed insurgent force in the Western hemisphere. The revolutionaries soon surrounded the crash site. They executed pilot Tom Janis and Colombian Luis Alcides Cruz on the spot. They took the three other Americans, Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes, prisoner. And so they remain to this day. Five years held hostage in the Colombian jungle.

It’s what classical liberals like to call the law of unintended consequences: You start a project with only the noblest of intentions. It’s big, it’s grand, it’s above all moral reproach. It’s run, as all such projects are, by the state. And then…

We hear a lot of talk about how drug use fuels terrorism. What we don’t hear so often is that U.S. funding for the war on drugs makes recreational drugs more expensive — so expensive, in fact, that organized criminal cartels become possible in the first place. And these cartels, being staffed by criminals, naturally branch out into kidnapping, torture, and murder. Terrorism too. If our goal is to minimize these things, we’ve got an awfully strange way of achieving it.

Jack’s got a gripping series of posts on the FARC kidnappings, which I recommend that you read. We pay a high price for our drug-free streets. Which aren’t even all that drug free, if we’re being honest. A slightly more rational society than our own would admit that the benefits of the drug war have been essentially nil, and that the costs are all too large.

Someone explain to me why we’re giving so much foreign aid to a country that does this. Bonus points for answers that don’t say “something worse would happen if we didn’t”:

A series of arrests in Cairo sparked by one man’s admission to police that he was HIV-positive endangers public health as well as human rights, Human Rights Watch said today…

The arrests began in October 2007, when police stopped two men having an altercation on a street in central Cairo. When one of them told the officers that he was HIV-positive, police immediately took them both to the Morality Police office and opened an investigation against them for homosexual conduct. The two men told human rights defenders that they were slapped and beaten for refusing to sign statements the police wrote for them. They spent four days in the Morality Police office handcuffed to an iron desk, sleeping on the floor. Police later subjected the two men to forensic anal examinations designed to “prove” that they had engaged in homosexual conduct.

Human Rights Watch has documented that such examinations to detect “evidence” of homosexuality are not only medically spurious but constitute torture.

Police then arrested two more men because their photographs or telephone numbers were found on the first two detainees. Authorities subjected all to HIV tests without their consent. All four are still in detention, pending prosecutors’ decision on whether to bring charges of homosexual conduct. The first two arrestees, who reportedly tested HIV-positive, are being held in a Cairo hospital, handcuffed to their beds and only unchained for an hour each day.

Meanwhile, police apparently placed the apartment where one of the men had lived under surveillance. On November 20, two days after a new tenant had assumed the lease, police raided the apartment and detained four other men.

According to the arrest report, the men were fully dressed and were not engaging in any illegal acts at the time of the arrests. However, all were charged with homosexual conduct, apparently solely on the basis that they were found in a dwelling formerly occupied by one of the earlier detainees.

Also worth remembering: Egypt still imprisons people for blogging.

She is so right: Afghanistan won’t be free until its people are free to think and write controversial ideas. If we’re going to liberate the country, then let’s make absolutely certain that we do it properly, so that no one will have to do it again. Of course, given the constitutional endorsement of Islam that we let through under our watch, it may be too late:

Over the past four years, President Bush has pointed to various Iraqis and Afghans who represent life after liberation. One individual he hasn’t mentioned — and likely doesn’t want to — is Sayad Parwez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old journalism student in Afghanistan.

Kambaksh has just been sentenced to death by an Afghan court for downloading and distributing a document that offends Muslim clerics. Welcome to a surreal spin-off of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.”

Recently, I blogged about the irony of liberating Afghans just enough to create a new constitution that makes Sharia law pre-eminent. Article 3 of Afghanistan’s constitution states that “no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.”

That’s freedom? For whom? Ali in Wonderland?

I wouldn’t mind Americans fighting for freedom quite so much, if only they bothered to ask what “freedom” means.

One of the reasons I have been very interested in Ron Paul’s campaign is his opposition to the War in Iraq and the possible conflicts with Iran and in Pakistan. I am opposed to unprovoked, preemptive war.

Ron Paul has been saying something during his campaign that few people understand — make that very, very few people. Persuasive rhetoric — speaking in terms of concrete benefits — is not his strong suit. He’s an abstract, theoretical thinker, and so asserting that “we don’t even the declare the wars anymore,” is sufficient, to both he and his supporters. He said it. The point is made.

But every time Paul says this, he meets with smirks and giggles by his opponents. His supporters have tended to think that those smirks are due to some anti-Constitutional, pomposity. But those giggles are because, once again, he’s wasting his breath. Very few understand what is at stake.

Some have gone one step further and suggested that the wars, such as the one we presently have in Iraq, are indeed declared. Congress “authorized” them. That is, they took a vote to give the President discretion on the use of force.

But they can’t give that discretion to the President. It’s un-Constitutional (illegal). And that’s Ron Paul’s point.

It might seem like Ron Paul, and people who agree with him — such as, yours truly — are separating pepper from fly poop. Are we asking for a mere formality — that the resolution actually be called “a Declaration of War with (say) Bumstinkistan?”

This is not a question of formality. It’s a question of separation of powers.

Today, while reading part of a sermon by Fr. Earle Fox, a light bulb flicked on over my head. Here is the inspiring section: Continue Reading »

In the last couple of months, as Mike Huckabee surged to contender status, many expressed concern about his role as preacher. Would his faith result in a theocracy? Was he using his faith as a political wedge? Would his faith affect policies ostensibly related to science?

Well, Huckabee’s faith is definitely important. But perhaps not in the way his detractors feared.

In what has to be the dumbest thing uttered by any Republican candidate this season (and there have been some whoppers), Huckabee suggested to Chris Matthews that Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were probably shipped to Jordan!

As I already pointed out in my last post, I was on vacation while this happened. But miraculously I saw the Huckabee interview live — perhaps God wanted me to see it.

I say miraculously, because I watched only 45 minutes of cable news political coverage during the entire vacation. When I watched this gaffe, I just about fell out of my chair.

BTW, Congrats to Matthews for actually dealing with substance. He actually acted like a real political reporter in possession of a clue (nevertheless, Hardball Delenda Est). Where are these kinds of questions instead of the constant horse race garbage?

As it turns out, Mike Huckabee has great faith… in the conning speculation of Dick Cheney. Evidence is unnecessary when making claims about the goodness of America as she polices the world, and proof of any degree will be unimportant for the tens of thousands who will glom on to spurious claims like “Saddam drove the WMDs out of the country” and repeat the fable back to you. But in case you’re interested, let’s look at the evidence… Continue Reading »