The leaves in Bloomington -- at least outside my door -- began turning color and falling last week. Fall isn't officially here yet, but it's beginning.
Naomi Klein was on Democracy Now! this morning, and the segment contained a delicious moment courtesy of the BBC. They played a clip of Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor complaining that the Durban Declaration blamed all bad things on Israel. Julian Marshall of the BBC commented that the Declaration didn't seem to contain any such material. Here's the exchange:
AMY GOODMAN: And Naomi Klein, in your article in Harper’s, you quote the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor. One day before the conference opened, he was interviewed by the BBC Radio. During the interview, he was questioned for asserting that the Durban conference declaration singled out Israel.
YIGAL PALMOR: Look, in the previous conference, Israel was singled out as the most racist state on earth, probably almost the only racist state. And all the problems that we were facing here in the Middle East were not historical or political or military or geographic or anything else; they were all attributable to one unique factor: Israel’s innate racism.
JULIAN MARSHALL: And this was speakers—
YIGAL PALMOR: [inaudible] this is absurd enough—
JULIAN MARSHALL: This was speakers, was it, at the Durban conference, rather than any final declaration?
YIGAL PALMOR: No, it was also included in the final declaration.
JULIAN MARSHALL: Because I’ve been looking at that final declaration, and I can see nothing that comes anywhere near to what you are saying.
YIGAL PALMOR: I don’t have the text in front of me, but in all the—
JULIAN MARSHALL: Well, I do have the text in front of me, and I can see nothing that comes close to what you are saying. I can see a final declaration that speaks out against anti-Semitism, that says we will never forget the Holocaust, that says we are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people, but nonetheless recognize the right to security for all states in the region, including Israel, and call upon states to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion.
YIGAL PALMOR: [inaudible] we talk about the same conference.
JULIAN MARSHALL: That is a mention of Israel in the final declaration.
YIGAL PALMOR: Right. I’m not sure we’re talking about the same conference, because even though I don’t have the text in front of me, I remember quite precisely some quotes that were completely contrary to those that you’ve just quoted. So we must be speaking about two different documents.
One reason this tickled me, aside from its inherent neatness, is that many Americans use a similar line about left critics of the US: they blame America for everything that goes wrong in the world. The best response is to ask such people for specific examples as Marshall asked Palmor, and let them squirm and try to lie their way out, because I don't know of any people who make such criticisms. It would be nice to know who they are, so I can criticize them too. I and the people I read and listen to are all very specific about what the US does wrong. ("But Mom! All the other murderous imperialist states are doing it!" isn't an acceptable excuse either, no matter how popular it is. It's interesting how easily the US and Israel go from being beacons of enlightenment and moral perfection to guys who are no worse than their enemies, as the necessities of debate require.)
Speaking of Naomi Klein, I have had Starbucks on my better-to-avoid list for years, ever since I read Klein's No Logo. The photo above is indicative: it's the Starbucks in Insadong, an artists' district in Seoul. According to my Korean friends, this is the only Starbucks in the world whose sign is in the local language -- company policy collided with Insadong's cultural protection policy which required the local language, and Starbucks capitulated. Avoiding Starbucks is easier since I don't drink coffee, but coffee places have their uses, especially for free wifi. In Bloomington we have numerous non-Starbucks coffee shops that I rely on for Internet connectivity and pastry, from the venerable Runcible Spoon to the relatively new PourhouseCafe. (I most often use the latter, despite its church connections, because the atmosphere isn't oppressively religious -- quite the contrary, it's comfortably secular -- and because it's nearby.) Jim Hightower renewed my distaste for the chain with the commentary I heard this morning, with an up-to-date list of the chain's offenses against humanity.
The corporation calls its workers "partners," but pays them only $15,000 to $20,000 a year for full-time work. Then there's the "optimal scheduling " policy, which means you never know when or for how long you'll be called in to work. Health care? Starbucks insures a lower percentage of its employees than Wal-mart does. And don't even think of talking union – you'll get harassed and possibly fired for that. Indeed, Starbucks is a leader in a corporate lobbying blitz to sidetrack the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers who want to form a union a way to stop the bullying, union-busting tactics of corporate bosses.
As I said, I'm not a coffee drinker, but everyone I've heard express an opinion agrees that Starbucks' coffee tastes burnt. So what's the appeal? Hightower went on to tout an online campaign called "Stop Starbucks!" which probably deserves support, but stopping Starbucks seems, I don't know, a little extreme, y'know? I'd think some harsh restraint would suffice.
The Advocate has an online article about four billboards on Interstate 30 in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas that tout the message "Would Jesus Discriminate?" The billboards are the work of some local Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay evangelical denomination, and I give them props for getting pro-gay messages on Clear Channel billboards in Texas, let alone Dallas. But I disapprove of the way they decided to frame their message.
Would Jesus discriminate? Why, he sure would, honey! According to the gospels Jesus was all about discrimination: between the sheep and the goats, the foolish virgins and the wise ones, the saved and the damned, his true followers and the false ones. The gospels aren't even sure how Jesus, a not-so-nice Jewish boy from Galilee, felt about Teh Goy. Sometimes, as when a poor Greek-Syrian woman came to him to beg help for her sick daughter, he was brusque to the point of racism (Mark 7:25-30):
"Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." 28 But she answered him, "Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." 29 And he said to her, "For this saying you may go your way; the demon has left your daughter." 30 And she went home, and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone.
Fortunately for her daughter, the Syrophoenician woman was a better person than Jesus was.
However, there are pagans and then there are pagans. When a centurion in the Roman peace-keeping force in Galilee approached Jesus with a similar petition, he got a very different reception (Matthew 8:5-13).
5 As he entered Caper'na-um, a centurion came forward to him, beseeching him 6 and saying, "Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, in terrible distress." 7 And he said to him, "I will come and heal him." 8 But the centurion answered him, "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, 'Go,' and he goes, and to another, 'Come,' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this,' and he does it." 10 When Jesus heard him, he marveled, and said to those who followed him, "Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith. 11 I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, 12 while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." 13 And to the centurion Jesus said, "Go; be it done for you as you have believed." And the servant was healed at that very moment.
Jesus could tell the difference between a mere mongrel pagan wench and an authoritative man of quality. In Luke's version (7:1-10) of this story, Jesus is out the door and halfway to the centurion's villa before the centurion, through messengers, tells him just to reach out and touch someone by long-distance. That's Jesus for you, no respecter of persons. There's what is probably a third version of the story in the gospel of John, where the patient is a court official's son -- a reminder that we shouldn't fixate too much on the details, since we're dealing with stories that were modified during transmission. On the other hand, though, the details that a given gospel supplies were probably significant to the writer, whether or not they are historically accurate, and can be studied in that light.
The MCC's interpretation of this story, based in some scholars' speculations, is that the centurion's servant was actually his boyfriend, so that by healing him "Jesus affirmed a gay couple." That's moving just a bit too fast, I'm afraid. I've been encountering this claim for some time now, and it has problems.
The key to this interpretation is the Greek word pais, translated here by the Revised Standard Version as "servant." Pais really means "boy," but it can connote either a slave (the use of "boy" toward social inferiors, especially racial, has its own history in English, including the United States) or a male sexual/romantic partner, especially in age-stratified relations where one partner is the "man" and the other is the "boy." (The "boy" doesn't even have to be an immature male, as many older African-American men who've been called "boy" by whites can tell you.) Gay and pro-gay Christians have argued that Matthew meant pais in this second sense, so that Jesus preserved a homosexual relationship by restoring the boy to health. Maybe they're right, but since the word is ambiguous, they're trying to hang a very heavy argument on a very slender thread. In his version, the author of Luke uses the word doulos, which is unambiguously "slave," but then slaves have often been used for sex by their owners, as Sally Hemings among others could tell you.
Even granting that there was an erotic relationship between the centurion and his boy, which is possible, I'm not happy about calling them a gay couple. Readers will note that we only hear about the centurion, not about the boy and what he wanted or felt. Until just a few years ago, gay Christians were fulminating about the inequality and exploitativeness of male-to-male eroticism in the Greco-Roman world, the sexual use of slaves, and so on. The word "pedophile" was thrown around a bit too freely, since the boys involved were not children but adolescents, sexually mature if not full adults even by the standards of contemporary American law. Now, rather suddenly, gay and pro-gay Christians have decided that if pederasty was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for them.
For example, this article from the "Would Jesus Discriminate?" site. It's an excerpt from The Children Are Free: Re-examining the Biblical Evidence on Same-Sex Relationships, published in 2002 by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Community Church, written by MCC Minister Jeff Miner and John Tyler Connoley:
To our modern minds, the idea of buying a teen lover seems repugnant. But we have to place this in the context of ancient cultural norms. In ancient times, commercial transactions were the predominant means of forming relationships. Under the law, the wife was viewed as the property of the husband, with a status just above that of slave. Moreover, in Jesus’ day, a boy or girl was considered of marriageable age upon reaching his or her early teens. It was not uncommon for boys and girls to marry at age 14 or 15. Nor was it uncommon for an older man to marry a young girl. Fortunately civilization has advanced, but these were the norms in the culture of Jesus’ day.
In that culture, if you were a gay man who wanted a male “spouse,” you achieved this, like your heterosexual counterparts, through a commercial transaction — purchasing someone to serve that purpose. A servant purchased to serve this purpose was often called a pais.
Talk about cultural relativism! As a matter of fact, commercial transactions were not the predominant means of forming relationships "in ancient times." To support their claim that pais was used for slaves purchased for sexual use, Miner and Connoley cite K. J. Dover's Greek Homosexuality (Harvard, 1978), page 16.
In many contexts [wrote Dover], and and almost invariably in poetry, the passive partner is called pais, 'boy' (plural paides), a word also used for 'child', 'girl', 'son', 'daughter', and 'slave'. The pais in a homosexual relationship was often a youth who had attained full height (the vase paintings leave no doubt about that) ...
However, though there was prostitution of both sexes in ancient Greece, the ideal love-object celebrated in classical Greek writing and art was a free-born boy, not a slave or a bought sexual partner. This ideal was still influential in Rome in Jesus' time, and the patterns of behavior were more complicated, but we still have cases like the poet Catullus' poems addressed to the presumably free youth Juventius. In Petronius' Latin novel the Satyricon, written at around the same time as the gospels, the protagonist (and former gladiator) Encolpius is constantly trying to keep his boyfriend (and slave, called "brother", not "boy") Giton from being lured away by other men. While marriage "in ancient times", as in ours, involved the exchange of property and other goods (dowry and bride-price) between families, a man who wanted to make a good marriage didn't go looking for a slave girl -- he wanted a free one whose status as wife certainly wouldn't be confused with that of a slave. No doubt many Roman men purchased male slaves or rented prostitutes, but no one would have thought of them as 'spouses.' (And slaves were anything but complacent about their status as slaves: buying their freedom was a major dream, and slaves formed cooperatives to accumulate money for that purpose.)
Miner and Connoley also mislead by speaking of "the culture of Jesus' day." There were numerous cultures in the eastern Mediterranean, and Jews ran their sexual affairs very differently than Romans or Syrians or Greeks or Egyptians, even though there had been a lot of multicultural mixing since the conquests of Alexander the Great three centuries earlier. Jews professed to be shocked by 'pagan' homosexuality, for example; Romans professed to be shocked by Jewish polygamy.
Oh, and about discrimination: Miner and Connoley know a thing or two about that as well. In The Children Are Free they discriminate sharply between good Christian gays and bad, unnatural gays:
And we know of hundreds of other gay people who could tell stories of struggling with their same-sex attractions while diligently serving God. These are not idolaters, people who hated God, and pursued their own desire for new and greater sexual thrills. These are lovers of God who, nevertheless, have been attracted to people of the same sex from early in life. They are innate (i.e., natural) homosexuals [page 16].
We’re not talking about the common stereotype of a radical fairy, riding half-naked on the back of a float in some Gay Pride parade, looking for his next sexual conquest. We’re talking about ordinary human beings wanting into loving relationships with the blessing of God – for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do them part [page 68].
It seems that for Miner and Connoley (and many other gay Christians) Jesus would only disapprove of discrimination against nice, middle-class Christian gays who get married in church. The trashy "radical fairy" (a term they don't seem to understand) who participates in Gay Pride parades is fair game.
Some of the "Would Jesus Discriminate" billboards have been defaced with the word "lie." I'm afraid that's not far from the truth. The squib accompanying that photo says,
The sign is one of 22 billboards and 2,000 yard signs that aim to eliminate scripturally-based religious doctrine as an argument against efforts to win civil rights protections for Indiana's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
How do you "eliminate" an argument with misinformation? Besides, the Bible is irrelevant to "efforts to win civil rights protections for gay people"; the Bible is not the law of the land. The gay and pro-gay Christians behind this campaign are ceding too much ground to their opponents. As Miner and Connoley's snide remarks show, that's at least partly because they agree with their opponents on so many things. Let them work out their disagreements without dragging the state into it. Arguments for civil rights should not be based on biblical interpretation, especially when it's as sloppy, biased, and discriminatory as the gay Christian standard.
"The government should be doing things that are authorized by the Constitution; they should be doing things that the people want, not things that they just decide are nifty," one demonstrator said. "We can't afford these things anymore."
First, taking care of the people's health is at least arguably authorized by the Constitution under promoting the general welfare. Second, health care reform isn't on the table now because the government just decided it was "nifty", it's because large numbers of Americans want reform. (Whether what Obama and the Democrats are pushing is really reform is another question.) That is, health care reform is a thing "that the people want," as polls continue to show.
Another teabagger:
Another man said, "We're here to let the government know that we do not want government involvement in our health care, nor do we want the higher taxation that comes along with such a proposal."
This guy may be another of the lackwits who think that Medicare and Medicaid are not government programs. But again, most Americans do want government involvement in their health care, and are willing to pay the higher taxation that comes with such a proposal. Most would prefer to save money by getting the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and most are not happy with the huge government bailout of the financial industry -- two very expensive programs that don't do any one any good. Here, at least, the teabaggers may be in agreement with most of their fellow citizens.
One unforeseen benefit of the Obama presidency is that it may help to discredit the cry of "More and Better Democrats!" Elections are important, but they don't set policy: all they do is determine which candidate will occupy a given office. Currently the Obama faithful are deriding those who believed that electing Obama and giving Congress to the Democrats would make change possible. That the Democrats and the Obama campaign might have any responsibility for this misprision is not considered: the speeches, the campaign rhetoric -- everyone knows that's just talk, right? Of course, those who pointed this out before Obama was elected were attacked as cynics or agents of John McCain if not George W. Bush. Now our evil insinuations are mere political common sense in the mouths of Party apologists. I think a somewhat harder line will be appropriate in dealing with such people in 2010 and 2012.
I freely admit the pressures that President Obama must contend with. I realize that even the President of the most powerful nation on earth, yadda yadda yadda, is not omnipotent. But I still say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it. I can't see any reason to suppose that Obama is struggling to enact a progressive agenda but is held back by the Republicans and the reactionary forces in his own party. He made it clear throughout his campaign that he had no intention of doing any such thing, and no interest in doing it; the administration, largely made up of crypto-Republican hacks, he assembled after his election confirmed that he meant what he said and he said what he meant. (A Donkle is faithful, one hundred percent.)
The great anarchist, psychologist, sociologist, poet, and pederast Paul Goodman wrote over forty years ago, near the beginning of Lyndon Johnson's administration, which also enjoyed a strong mandate:
But in the system we have been describing, the Executive also is not a governing person nor group of persons, any more than the baronial corporations are persons except as a fiction. During the activist Kennedy regime, frustration was continually expressed because, somehow, the Cabinet and the President himself were powerless. Just so the heads of giant corporations and of apparently autonomous universities claim that they are powerless to alter policies that they say they disapprove of. It is inherent in centralization that powerlessness spreads from the bottom to the top [People or Personnel (Vintage Books, 1965), page 47].
The more it changes, the more it is the same. If you felt the same jolt of recognition on reading that passage that I did, you might want to read some more of Goodman's work. I think we can conclude that people who protest the helplessness of the executive are arguing in bad faith at the outset. People who claim to believe in an omnipotent, omniscient god make the very same excuses for him, which suggests to me that we're dealing with a reflexive defense mechanism, not a defense based on reality or logic.
One of my pro-Obama friends wrote me in e-mail that "One of the reasons I like Obama is that he gives his opponents more respect than they deserve." "Respect" and "deserve" are tricky words, but even if he's right, one of the reasons I dislike Obama is that he gives his supporters less respect than they deserve. Obama may go on the road to schmooze with the great unwashed in carefully controlled spectacles, but he shows his real allegiances by the people he associates with out of reach of microphones.
It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank and chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas. Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign, raised $250,000 for him back in 2006, and in February was appointed by the president to the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Economic recovery for whom?
Five hours playing golf. Does Obama spend five hours in the company of working people, maybe playing basketball or even bowling, listening to their concerns? Of course not. Does he spend five hours in the company of any of his grass-roots supporters -- the millions of people whose tireless organizing and monetary donations put him into office? Of course not. Does he spend five hours in the company of people who represent non-Democratic Leadership Committee concerns? Of course not. That would be taking sides with Special Interests.
Anyway, I think my friend is mistaking a reluctance to engage (nominal) opponents for "respect." As Alexander Cockburn wrote at Counterpunch this weekend:
The day after his speech Obama had Bluedog Democrats to the White House and they emerged, reemphasizing their obduracy. A White House without the ability to effectively twist arms, bribe the recalcitrant, threaten to break knees, is an institution shorn of a huge slice of its effective power. LBJ didn’t grab the headlines with stirring speeches on Medicare, or Food Stamps. He grabbed obstinate legislators by the lapels and smeared them with the honey of a promised dam, a judgeship, a broadcasting franchise; or he whacked them with a threat to pull a military base, cancel a highway project, nix the necessary patronage.
Despite the flexing of rhetorical muscles, Obama’s still a nice-guy president who still prates on about bipartisanship, even as the Republicans on Wednesday night sat on their hands, gave the president the finger and chortled as one of their number, Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted out “You lie”, when Obama said correctly that his plan wouldn’t offer services to illegal immigrants. By so saying, of course, Obama was acknowledging that he had just lied when he declared at the start of his speech that adequate medical care is a basic human right. Are undocumented workers, who sustain America’s agriculture and much of its building industry, not humans, or humans without rights like the captives Obama still wishes to classify as beyond the protections of the Geneva Protocols?
Publicly interrupting the President to berate him as a liar is not done in the U.S. Congress, and Wilson swiftly apologized. But it was an emblem of something that most definitely has surfaced this summer: white race hatred for Obama. Wilson’s uncouth outburst was a nasty reminder of how unrestrained this is swiftly becoming. Eight years of contented Bush-bashing made many – including probably Obama and his entourage -- forget just how violent would be the prejudices and hatred provoked by the election of a black president.
The Obama apologists who claim that their man must play politics the way the game is played are forgetting that politics means the kind of tactics LBJ used. That is not the same as sinking to the Republicans' level, or to the level of Democratic left-bashers. It is possible to disagree firmly, even forcefully with another person without denying him or her "respect," unless you define the problem out of existence by considering any disagreement to be disrespectful. I don't think it is.
Right now the hard-core Republican right continues to get headlines for its dishonest campaign; the soft-core Democratic center presumably continues sending money to the Democratic National Committee while Obama coddles the Blue Dogs. Obama is not my leader, but he's not even providing leadership to his own base. I've argued before (and I'm not alone) that Obama has shown himself not to be even minimally competent in dealing with opposition: he's all too willing to back down and give his worst enemies what they want. Liberals and leftists alike jeered at the Bush administration's apologists when they whined that no one could have predicted that Saddam didn't have WMDs, that the levees would break, that the economy would crash. But Obama is acting as though nobody could have predicted that he'd have to face Republican hatred, as though we hadn't seen exactly the same tactics used against Bill Clinton. I agree with this analysis:
In Obama, we get all the corporate toadying of the last Democratic president, along with an even greater unwillingness than Clinton – and who would’ve thought that was possible – to name names, call out enemies, and throw a freakin’ punch every other year or so. (We’re also getting a continuation of the civil rights and civil liberties policies of Dick Cheney, as an extra added bonus, but that’s another story.) What makes it even more astonishing this time around, however, is that we’ve seen this movie before, and we know how it ends. There is apparently absolutely no bottom – as the events of recent weeks have reconfirmed – to the pit of vicious lies, brutal tactics, and democracy-demolishing antics of which regressives will avail themselves in their practice of contemporary American politics. In addition to not being prepared for that, Barack Obama is still seemingly unable to raise his voice a decibel or two against the very people who are helping him to destroy his own presidency. Indeed, he is negotiating ‘bipartisan’ (read: total capitulation) deals with them, even as they relentlessly trash him before a national audience.
Is this president so deluded that he believes there are limitations on what the right will do not only to the republic, for which Obama seems to have only passing regard, but also to his presidency, for which we might imagine he would have at least some concern?
idea that single-payer advocates should create a "story" at the Town Hall meetings by arguing against "the plan" from a single-payer advocate's perspective: "Well, of course, that wouldn't be news either. A tiny turnout of pro-Republican protesters is always news, while protesters from the left will be ignored, minimized, and caricatured." And yet, I still don't think that means it's not worth doing. I just also think mass protests against media institutions that promote lies and suppress truth would provide a nice wake-up call.
As I replied in comments, I also think such protests would be worth doing. After all, mass protests are doing the Right a lot of good already. American officeholders will make change happen, not because of elections, but because they come under heavy pressure from their citizens between elections. Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't ban racial discrimination in the American government and defense industries during World War II because of an election: he did it because the union organizer A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington if he didn't.
I still think that any criticism of Obama, including protests, from the left will be ignored, minimized, and caricatured -- not only by the corporate media but by Obama and his loyalists. That's not a reason to give up, it's a reason to expect counterattacks and to plan ahead to deal with them. It looks to me as though the Obama administration is now willing to pay lip service to the idea of "single-payer," though not to consider single-payer proposals seriously, and why? Because activists began going to Obama's town meetings and demanding to know why single-payer was off the table. More pressure could lead to more progress. If Obama will cave in so easily to pressure, why shouldn't the left pressure him too? Prospective troublemakers might look at the history of AIDS activism in the US, which was both militant and media-savvy, and won many of its demands before it burned out and some of its surviving leaders were co-opted by the government. I presume that Americans who care about real health care reform are far more numerous than Americans directly affected by AIDS in the 1980s.
But, but, but -- don't be surprised when you encounter opposition, even dishonest and scurrilous attack from the Democrats. Take it as encouragement. The more they try to pretend that you're stupid, irresponsible, of no importance, the more you'll know you're making them squirm.
i root thru sex in darkness as a mole avoids the surface of the earth, where eye must squint and ear be cocked for danger: hole is safety, earth is warmth, and worm is my companion as i grub with nose and claw for sustenance, snuffling, wordless, unthinking save in backbrain, shunning who would draw me up to daylight, struggling and blinking. where sunlight reaches is no home for me. i want the depths, where heat provides a glow that doesn't hurt my eyes, by which i see where i had long forgotten i could go: a meeting place where tunnels intersect, a common ground where you and i connect.
-- Sometime around 1980, I think -- it was published in Ian Young's anthology Son of the Male Muse by the Crossing Press in 1982.
There's fever in the funkhouse now because Representative Joe Wilson (R-South Carolina) called out "You lie!" during President Obama's address on health care. Vice President Joe Biden, who knows a black kettle when he sees one, called the outburst "embarrassing." After scurrying out of the chambers as soon as Obama finished his speech, Wilson issued an apology for his "lack of civility." A Hoosier blogger informs us, on the basis of one comment on Wilson's Facebook page, that he may be on the way to becoming a "folk hero."
So what's the big deal? I suppose that letting one politician call a sitting President a liar during a formal address could set a bad precedent. Would you want Barney Frank screeching "What planet are you from?" during the next Republican President's State of the Union address? Me neither. I doubt very much that the Republicans would have welcomed a similar display when Bush was lying about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction or ties to Al-Qaeda, or calling for the privatization of Social Security.
The fuss, typically, seems obsessively focused on Wilson's lack of decorum. Was Obama telling the truth when he claimed that public health insurance wouldn't cover illegal aliens? I don't know, but I certainly wouldn't take his word for it. (P.S. September 12: He wasn't lying, and Wilson is in no position to cast the first stone, if it is a stone.) Obama does not have the best record for honesty in policy matters. (The true ending of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is that the little child who pointed out the Emperor's nakedness was dragged away to the dungeons and tortured until he revealed the names of his terrorist confederates. Liberal pundits opined that a major procession in a time of crisis was no time for such crude incivility.)
I, as usual, am more bemused by the spectacle of a Republican politician accusing a Democratic politician of lying. Since when did the Republicans put such a high premium on telling the truth? not when they were in power, that's for sure. Or even when they're attacking Democrats. I've been wondering, in fact, if Wilson wasn't just praising the President for his Republican mendacity -- if "You lie!" isn't just Republicanese for "You go, girl!"
P.S. September 11: I just saw this. Great minds think more or less alike.
P.P.S. September 12: And this. Glenn Greenwald nails it.
This morning's Democracy Now! had a good story on the Wall Street bailout and its aftermath. It includes an interview with Donald Bartlett and James Steele, the authors of an article in Vanity Fair which tracks the events leading to and after the bailout. They expressed some surprise that Bush's Secretary of the Treasury and former Goldman-Sachs exec Hank Paulson simply ordered bank presidents to take the money, whether they thought they needed it or not. (And some didn't -- they repaid it soon afterwards.) Maybe they should have taken into consideration Naomi Klein's thesis that the Bush regime was simply engaged in a last pillaging of the Treasury before they left office. But they do confirm that then-candidate Barack Obama was lying when he told an audience that the bailout was "not a plan to just hand over $700 billion of your money to a few banks on Wall Street."
So far just the video/audio and an introduction are up at Democracy Now! The full transcript should follow later today.
The leaves in Bloomington -- at least outside my door -- began turning color and falling last week. Fall isn't officially here yet, but it's beginning.
