Archive for February, 2010
CPAC2010: The World According to Glenn Beck
On Saturday, Glenn Beck closed out the CPAC conference with great theater. Believe it or not I got a great deal out of watching his keynote address.
Beck starts by taking us back to the 1950′s. You see the problem is what it has always been — Communism! Yes, according to Beck, communism comes about by revolution but progressivism comes about by evolution. Progressivism sneaks up on you and before you know it you’re living in a communist state. Now I was left scratching my head on how we moved from socialism, the usual bogeyman, to communism but I guess the specific “ism” is not important so long as you strike fear into the masses.
What I sincerely love about Beck is that he stretches. He works at it. He makes Rush Limbaugh look like little more than a politically minded Andy Rooney. You know what I loved the most about Beck’s speech? In very simple terms Beck helped me understand the difference between liberals and conservatives and because he aimed his gun at Republicans even more than Democrats he came off pretty even-handed.
You see, our differences go back to the very definition of America and the nature of the American dream. Beck sees an American tradition of hardscrabble men and women who pulled themselves up from their bootstraps. Pioneers who asked for nothing but a God-given chance to succeed without any expectation of success or sense of entitlement. Beck spells out three core beliefs that clarify what it is to be a conservative:
- We all have the right to pursue happiness, but not the right to happiness itself.
- All men are created equal … but don’t necessarily have to end up that way.
- Life is not fair … tough.
What bridges the pursuit of happiness to the attainment of it, according to Beck, is self-reliance, accountability and just plain hard work. If everyone starts at the same place, then the only differentiating factor for where we end up is what we DO.
Beck hammers his point home at the end of the address by delivering two readings of “The New Colossus”, the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. In his first subdued reading, the one he says most progressives interpret, Lady Liberty is saying that if you send us “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” then we Americans will rehabilitate them and restore them to strength and prosperity. In Beck’s words, “Well if you read it like that and you really think it through, what are we? A hospital?”
Then Beck delivers the poem again, this time the words leaping from his mouth, and he ends by saying, “That – that is the message. Even the people that you reject can make it here. They will give it all to be successful – here. You can make it – here.”
In other words, this is the land where a man can make himself great. Not be made great, but make himself great.
And that my friends informs the entire debate between conservatives and liberals. As Beck himself says, our Constitution is really only there to protect us from “the bad guys”. It’s there to get people out of our way so we can succeed beyond our wildest dreams if we just work hard enough. But the liberal says that the devil is in the details. The best ideals of the Constitution are worth nothing more than the paper upon which they are printed if laws do not deter men from yielding to their darker nature. The more the federal government tries to protect men from their baser selves, the more the conservative views that as unnecessary interference.
The health care debate is a prime example of this difference in the meaning of America between liberals and conservatives. It’s not that conservatives want people to die. They just don’t think it’s the government’s job to help keep them alive. Conservatives are afraid of the nanny state. Again, this harkens back to a theme in Beck’s address. There is this fundamental belief that independence is inextricably tied to self-reliance. If we become reliant on the government, we lose our independence and then some form of slavery cannot be far off.
Beck paints the picture of a country going through a terrible hangover after too many nights partying. Beck’s personal struggles with drug and alcohol abuse give him a palpable fear for what it is to lose control. The conservative philosophy is grounded in that fear, the fear that if we give too much power to the government, we will lose control.
I submit that watching Glenn Beck’s CPAC keynote address would make the average liberal hate the average conservative just a little less. In Beck’s world, conservatives and liberals probably want the same end-game which is a society of people free to excel to their greatest potential. The difference, at least according to Beck is that liberals think the weak must be helped and in being helped everyone is uplifted while the conservative believes there are the weak who cannot be helped and that the intrusion of government to help them endangers the freedom of everyone.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Whatever Happened to Facts
Am I a romantic or was there a time when there were such things as facts? Seems to me there was a time when I was much younger when you could say things that were simply not disputable.
The Earth is round.
Water is a liquid.
Rain falls out of the sky.
Then things got a bit more sophisticated but facts were still facts.
George Washington was our first President.
The Civil War was fought between North and South over the central issue of slavery.
The Great Depression started in 1929.
Even if we go a bit deeper, still a fact, our country was founded on separation of church and state to protect religious freedom and prevent the establishment of a state religion.
These were all things we could count on as common knowledge. We could have discussions amongst ourselves and know that folks who denied plain facts were either ignorant or crazy.
Two exchanges that I witnessed in the past 24 hours reinforce for me that facts are now dead.
The first occurred between two of my readers in the comments section.
Well, [the Obama administration] could have saved the lives of 47,000 people annually who die because they don’t have insurance [if they had passed health care reform].
To which the retort was:
I’ve done some looking on the 47k thing. You really like that number don’t you? I personally find the number to be unbelievable and a discredit to anything it is attached to.
This conclusion was backed up by its own numerical spin.
How can we debate what is at stake in health care if we cannot agree on the basic numbers? There was a time when the best way to defend an argument was to quantify it. We now live in an age where any stat I offer up will be challenged as false.
The other example was an exchange between Marc Thiessen and Daniel Freedman on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. Thiessen’s new book gets right to the point (in its title) that Barack Obama is making America less safe. Daniel Freedman, a former aide to Rudy Giuliani of all people, says Thiessen doesn’t know what he’s talking about. As I watched the back and forth I could see everyday regular people scratching their heads. Both men make credible arguments at least on the surface. When we get right down to it, both men are calling each other liars. Again, we’re left wondering, where are the indisputable facts?
These two examples are not atypical. Returning to Rudy Giuliani for a moment, he famously said recently that there were no terrorist attacks under the Bush administration (a claim also made by former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino and conservative gadfly Mary Matalin). This observation was made with a straight face and was not challenged by the so-called journalists in the discussion. It occurred to no one to remind these folks that we got attacked on 9/11/2001, during the Bush administration? Here, we have an indisputable fact that gets cast aside in the most absurd way.
I am at a point where I am almost filled with despair that we Americans will ever have sane debates about anything again. No longer can the average person listen to an authority on a subject and feel they’ve gotten the truth. Now we must devote hours of our day scouring the Internet to research virtually everything because listening to just two people simply gets us an exchange of the Joe Wilson “you lie.” Who has the time to do that kind of research with full-time jobs and family lives? The average person therefore simply believes whomever is easiest for them to believe. Then the average person parrots this belief as fact.
We live in a world where Joe Friday’s “just the facts ma’am” has been replaced by “perception equals reality”. And then we wonder why we make so little progress in solving the major problems of our time.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
“Undercover Boss” and the Death of the American Dream
CBS has been broadcasting a limited run reality show called “Undercover Boss”. The premise of the show is that a C-level executive of a company goes undercover to work with “low-level” employees and learn more about how their company really operates. As of this writing, two companies have been featured, the Hooters restaurant franchise, and Waste Management.
The first episode with Waste Management, really struck a chord with me. The COO, Larry O’Donnell, seems a nice enough guy. His heart is in the right place, and in keeping with the premise of the show, he tries to right some “wrongs” that he notices as he works undercover. Larry takes on five jobs. He works as a garbage sorter, a garbage truck weigh station operator, an outdoor trash collector, a porta-potty cleaner and finally an everyday garbage man. He discovers that all these jobs are hard work. (Go figure.) He discovers that back-breaking work is being done by people with far worse circumstances than his, including one man who bags garbage outdoors while maintaining a steady schedule of dialysis treatments.
The show made me go places that I don’t think CBS had in mind. The American Dream is that you start at the bottom and through hard work you make it to the top. I have always been ambitious and yes, sometimes my ambition wrote checks that my ability or stamina could not cash, but I was always looking at that next rung. I spent 24 years in corporate America. Where I worked, you could start as a computer operator and retire as an executive, perhaps not the CEO, but an executive just the same. Of course, nowadays even this is no longer true. Promotions are few and far between and the strategy du jour is do more with less. Of course, at Waste Management, the difference in education requirements, for example, for a starting position as a garbage man is entirely different from the requirements needed of a COO. It’s probably not realistic to expect the garbage collector to one day be running the company.
Still I was left with a feeling of melancholy when the show was over. Despite his best intentions, Larry O’Donnell clearly glided right into a management position with no requirement that he have any experience with the real work of his company. On the flip side were a corp of workers whose hopes for true advancement were dismal at best. It felt like the caste system of India, born a garbage man, die a garbage man. Don’t get me wrong. There is no shame in any honest day’s work. If a porta-potty cleaner is earning a living for his family, more power to him. But is that the American Dream?
“Undercover Boss” paints a picture of a society in which there is a ruling class and a working class, neither of whom know much about the other. For those of us who believe in an America where you can be anything you want if you work hard enough, it is a depressing portrait indeed.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
A Mother and a Comedian Take On Sarah Palin
There is so much about Sarah Palin to find offensive. Her fans are so entrenched that she can do no wrong in their eyes. I have discussed many times in the comments section of the blog one particularly distasteful aspect of her persona, the way she shamelessly exploits her special needs child. What I get in response from her tireless defenders is that I am the one exploiting this child to make political attacks against Sarah. So I was pleased to find an eloquently written letter on the web today. This letter comes from the mother of a special needs child and she did a much better job than I could ever do of calling Sarah out.
I am the mother of a 16 year-old girl with severe intellectual disabilities. I am disturbed by Mrs Palin’s insincere comments when she speaks out for individuals with developmental delays. I watched The Colbert Report last night, and I have never been more proud to call myself a fan of Stephen Colbert.
But also, as a mother I wonder what is in Trig’s future.
If his Down Syndrome does not severely effect his ability and he is able to read, he will read his mother’s autobiography and learn that she questioned if she could love him. He will read interviews that his mother considered even for a split second to terminate her pregnancy, he will become aware that many consider his mother a hero for not terminating her pregnancy – thus knowing that among her fans he is considered beautiful but somehow a burden.
She needs to start treating him quietly as a child who will grow into a man. She needs to learn to advocate for him and not allow him to be a victim of satire when it suits her and a victim of discrimination when it can get her attention.
And she needs to stop using him as a political prop. A child with such needs should surely not be hauled around half-naked in front of flash photographers to promote a book tour, or be routinely referred to in speeches for applause lines. It’s unseemly. But then so much about this person is.
via A Mother With A Special Needs Child – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
After I read this, I wanted to find this woman and give her a hug. You see, the “hero card” that Sarah plays with respect to Trig, how courageous Sarah was not to terminate the pregnancy, sends the exact opposite message from the one a true advocate of the disabled would send. As the mother above points out, if you view your child as a burden, you’re already starting off on the wrong foot. There is no nobility in Sarah keeping Trig. She was supposed to have kept Trig. Had she placed him (or terminated him) it would have been a sign of her weakness as a human being, perhaps a forgivable weakness but a weakness just the same. You don’t get points for doing what you are supposed to do.
The mother also mentions a segment on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” where Stephen Colbert takes Sarah to task for her junior high school cheat notes written on her hand and the “retard” hypocrisy she exhibits for attacking White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel but giving Rush Limbaugh a pass for the same behavior. Apparently, so long as satire is involved (and in Rush’s case there was no satire), it’s ok to use the word “retard” according to Sarah. So Stephen Colbert invites us all to declare:
Sarah Palin is a f*cking retard.
It’s just satire right?
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Hot Pants and KSM: The Difference Between Good and Bad Prosecution
The recent revelations of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab cooperating with authorities after he was read his Miranda rights was music to the ears of anyone who believes in our criminal justice system. Abdulmutallab is the would-be Christmas bomber who tried to bring a flight down over Detroit by detonating an explosive in his underpants. This, so far has been a case of beautifully executed pre-prosecution procedure. Immediately after being taken into custody, Hot Pants was interrogated for about 50 minutes until it was determined that the pain drugs he had been administered would interfere with credible information. One can only assume, unless the interrogators were completely incompetent, that this 50 minutes of questioning centered around any possible ticking time bomb scenario. Was he a one-off? Did he have partners planning to down other planes? News reports indicated that Umar was more than forthcoming in this initial round of questioning. My guess is after this first interrogation, a ticking time bomb scenario was deemed unlikely.
When the next round of interrogation began, Umar was read his Miranda rights and basically allowed to “lawyer up”, which he did. The cries of conservatives were heard across the land. A missed opportunity to get more intel. But guess what? Good prosecutors know how to get information and once they leveraged the influence of Umar’s family and possibly took a death sentence off the table, Hot Pants began spilling the beans yet again. Not a drop of water touched Umar’s head. No loud music. No sleep deprivation. Just good old-fashioned law enforcement work.
Unfortunately, this puts the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in sharp contrast and has forced me to revisit the arguments of conservatives and in particular my conservative readers. Back in November, I wrote about the KSM case and in my eagerness to discard eight years of Bush lawlessness I did not see the noose I was tying around my own neck.
- I can find no evidence despite a fairly exhaustive Google search that KSM was ever read his Miranda rights.
- KSM was not arrested in the United States nor was he arrested by foreign law enforcement and extradited here. He was captured in Pakistan as a POW.
- KSM was tortured on at least 183 occasions.
These facts alone make this a defense attorney’s wet dream. To top this off, we have assurances from everyone from Attorney General Eric Holder to the President himself that KSM will be convicted and executed. Now every prosecutor brags about how he will secure a conviction, but in this case “innocent until proven guilty” is nothing but a farce. How can we say that we are holding up our justice system as a beacon of light to the world and in the same sentence make the verdict and punishment a forgone conclusion? We might as well summarily execute him and save the time and money. (As a side note, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s about-face on this matter based on cost is incredibly lame. Justice has no price tag.)
Back last November when I was waving my American justice flag, David Feige of Slate painted an even bleaker picture of the KSM prosecution. He stated that no matter how righteous our intentions, there is not a judge or jury in this country, even at the appellate levels, who would allow KSM to go free, no matter how prejudicial the evidence against him. This has ramifications going far beyond KSM’s conviction. It sets dangerous precedent for many prosecutions down the line:
…there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that’s where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.
At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM’s years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM’s initial torture from his subsequent “clean team” statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they’ve been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.
Hence with the inevitably corrupt prosecution of KSM, we open the door to corruption down the line in other trials, and we ultimately justify all the short cuts and indiscretions of the Bush era that we had hoped to repudiate.
This puts us between a rock and a hard place. KSM cannot get a “fair” trial in our criminal justice system. Any conviction he receives in a military tribunal is subject to Supreme Court challenge and overturn. The final alternative is to hold KSM indefinitely as a POW and release him to his home country once we defeat them at the end of the war. Oh, but wait a minute. There is no country with which we are at war. We are at war with a criminal phenomenon that will always exist. The war has no end. And so it follows that KSM’s incarceration has no end.
This brings us back to the folly of the war on terror. It reinforces what I have maintained for months now — terrorism is a crime and should be treated as a criminal matter. The reason Hot Pants will be successfully prosecuted is that he was treated like a common criminal. That is the way to achieve justice in America.
For KSM, there may be no true justice and the survivors of the victims of his crimes may never get closure. This is the true legacy of the Bush/Cheney endless war.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
Now the Democrats Have No Excuse
Well, my friends, I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. Today Barack Obama showed that the Republicans are not interested in increasing ACCESS to health care. They talk a great line about tort reform and cost cutting (with penny ante foolishness like eliminating paperwork) but when it comes to making insurance coverage available to MORE people, they come up completely empty. This is now clear to the American people. The GOP has got nuthin’.
Now the House will pass the Senate bill and then any adjustments that need to be made will be done through reconciliation. Then come November, the Democrats will run on having gotten something DONE and they will show how the Republicans tried to get nothing done.
With that said …. Obama has given the Democrats the green light to get this thing finished. If the Dem’s fail now, they are toast and utterly, completely incompetent.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
February 26, 2010 at 12:52 am Rutherford 197 comments