Opinion-Columns.com

Not On the Breakfast Menu—Humble Pie

President Bush has a breakfast meeting with Prime Minister Malaki of Iraq tomorrow morning and it is not a Breakfast of Champions, but a breaking of bread among broken dreams and shattered promises.

A Bigger Threat Than Terrorism

If you’re weary of ‘threat thresholds,’ as I am, it may have slipped your notice that as we edge our way into the 21st century--an old terror simply continues to grow additional heads.

Back Off a Bit, You’re Breaking My Leg

When Jefferson and Madison wrote into the law of Virginia (in 1777) freedom of as well as freedom from organized religion, they had a good many interesting and timely things to say. Not the least of them, included the admonitions (italics are mine)

that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time

that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own

And, when you boil down the somewhat archaic (yet wonderfully simple) language of those times, they were essentially saying that, while God himself may be infallible, religion is a construct of fallible men. Some of those men may be idiots, or simply wrong (or both). Nearly all have artfully contrived to explain God’s opinion being the same as their own. Jefferson and Madison tie the knot of separation between ‘civil government’ and ‘magisterial opinion’ rather neatly, insisting that one religion gaining a foothold would deny all others.

Nicely done indeed, but we have allowed ourselves to be taken from the spirit of those sentiments and ushered instead through the courts of law. It’s not an argument under law. It’s my right to believe or not believe in a God that suits you, with Jefferson’s disclaimer

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Yet should we choose to display the ‘ten commandments’ in a public building or depict Jesus in the manger on our village green at Christmas, we have become contenders—each side of this non-issue inflamed to apoplexy. How came we here? By what route and who really cares in their heart of hearts? When I see a menorah during the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, I am not offended, nor would I be if it were a matter of civic display. When did we all get so sensitive?

Or does our artificially inflamed sensitivity serve the purpose of those who would control and channel our access to God in their own interests? Righteous indignation is the lever that, when pulled, leads to mob hysteria. To mobilize is to organize people and resources for action. The mobilizers control the mobilized.

God has not taken a position on birth-control, abortion or stem-cell research and yet these have become hot-button issues from the pulpit of one religion after another. Individual instances of personal liberty argued from God's point of view and, again, quoting Jefferson (again, my italics)

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Rightful liberty of an individual to avail themselves of birth control, as long as they do not insist others do likewise. To decide to abort or not to abort, as long as they make no demands upon others. To enter the arena of scientific stem-cell study, if they so choose.

The right to live in harmony with personal religious conviction is an individual right, best practiced (and perhaps only possible) free of religious control. One right cannot hope to survive without the other. To believe otherwise is to accept the tyrant’s will.

It’s inconceivable to me that some believe and preach that members of all religions but Catholic are prevented from heaven. Equally inconceivable that a young woman who chooses to abort a pregnancy is somehow held liable before God. Impossible to hold in the mind the concept that all believers but Muslim are infidels in the eyes of an Islamic God.

These are the pretenses of men.

More believers have been killed in the service of misguided religions than all the despotic machinations of dictators and kings. No man has ever suffered death in the service of God, for God requires no such service. Mullahs and priests, ministers and Popes, TV evangelicals and radicals of all faiths are the ones who call believers to arms. This, in man’s everlasting shaping of a God in his own particular image. Religion is back again to haunt and maim and kill, its black shadow sweeping across the world to argue there are twenty gods or no God.

Back off a bit, give me some breathing and agreeing room before you condemn my position, you’re breaking my leg.
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Media commentary;

• Houston Chronicle-A science v. religion free-for-all?
• Daily Times-Pakistan-Religion, state and society —Rasul Bakhsh Rais
• Christian Science Monitor-Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history
• Malasian Sun-'A global ethic does not replace religion'

Twelve Days to the Wheels Coming Off

Promise them anything to get elected, was the obvious Pelosi-ploy, then go back to business as usual and blame the other guys. Until you become the other guys.

The Airline Industry, Following Detroit Down the Tube

It’s 200 miles from Washington to New York. A high-speed, Bullet-train, at 200mph, would make the trip, city-center to city-center in something approaching an hour and twenty minutes (figuring the get-up-to-speed and the slow-down times).

Mark Nord Gives ‘Security’ a New Definition

Mark Nord works over at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and he needs to be put out to pasture on the minimum wage for a while. Mark says ‘hunger’ isn’t a scientifically accurate term. This Republican—about to become Democratic—government seems to have trouble with basic definitions. And it’s a bi-partisan blind-spot; Bill Clinton with the definition of ‘is’ and George Bush with what ‘torture’ really means.

See No Opinion, Hear No Opinion, Speak No Opinion

Al-Jazeera, the Arab television network (funded by Qatari Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani) has been unable to find a single U.S. or Canadian satellite or cable distributor. After more than a year of trying, the doors are still shut.

Suddenly a “Great Opportunity”

The public seems to think President Bush has taken the Republican shellacking in the mid-term elections well.  He has not. Watching the press-briefings after meetings with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, it was evident that Bush was shaken. Furtive, unconfident, conciliatory.

Relief is Palpable in Europe

A great sigh of relief has swept across Europe as the Senate and House fell under Democratic control. That relief is seasoned by a concern, mirrored by American worries, about what comes next in Iraq.

Secrecy—a Death Blow to Oversight--a Cover for Incompetence

The current administration has used and abused national security and the secrecy inherent in that catchall phrase to shape American policy (foreign and domestic) without the permission of Americans.

It’s no small thing. Not a momentary accommodation to security nor an acceptable palliative in stressful times. The combination of stamping documents SECRET and attaching signing statements to legislation has all but removed Congressional oversight.

Worse than that, it has increasingly mired the electorate in misinformation campaigns they have no logical standards within which to judge. The answer to every question or complaint, every withheld document, every closed meeting and every reduction of Constitutional guarantees is national security.

There is no way to judge the incompetence of the administration, absent an understanding of what has been decided and The Decider operates in secret. Thus we are left to make our own judgments merely on the basis of actual results and they are, thus far, horrendous.

 

On the eve of national elections, we will open public opinion and see just how punitive (if at all) will be the voter rejection of a government held in secret by a handful of operatives, all but two of them unelected. Never has America been so blindly led into war, fiscal incompetence and reduced civil rights. Never in history have our citizens been so thoroughly prevented from the knowledge that preserves our republic. Knowledge is power and we have been made powerless.

In a stunning Washington Post article, Carol Leonig and Eric Rich reveal

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

Which is absolute poppycock. The extremely grave damage would be the international admission that Bush's statement (repeated endlessly in the face of evidence to the contrary) ‘we do not torture’ is a lie. Not a prevarication or a manipulation of truth—an outright lie by the President of the United States. The possible development by terrorists of ‘counter-interrogation techniques’ borders on contempt of Judge Walton’s court, it is such a  dissembling of fact.

Further in the Leonig-Rich article, the chilling comment

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Experiences never shared with the public, within the most free nation on the face of the planet—or so we claim.

All crimes, great and minor, are created in secret. Secrecy in this country has never gone long without discovery and that is the underlying hubris of those who would wield their power in secret. The nation’s 2nd president, John Adams pretty well nailed it;

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."

Stacked like cordwood, the lies, deceits and secrets of this administration are at risk. Not from disclosures endangering the national security, certainly not from terrorists and not even from the avalanche of former-staff books elbowing one another for position on the best-seller lists. The lies, deceits and secrets will out, either in the short run of tomorrow’s election or the long run of history’s judgement.

But they will surely not remain secret.
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Media comments;

• Washington Post-U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons