MORE HYPOCRISY, AND MORE DENIAL

Another example of how so many people can't handle the truth:

It bothered [Means], seeing Vietnam brought back into play as a political game piece. The left had done it to war veterans three decades ago. Returning servicemen had been vilified -- spat upon, in fact, as if they'd been the architects of U.S. foreign policy rather than just the young men and women obligated by law and duty to carry it out.

Now the right had seized upon the Vietnam War, too -- specifically the role, in uniform and out, of Sen. John Kerry. And to Means, it seemed just as wrong.

Means, a 55-year-old investigator for several Bakersfield law firms, was particularly annoyed by the words of one retired admiral. Roy F. "Latch" Hoffman, one of the co-founders of the pro-George W. Bush group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, had publicly criticized Kerry, a former Swift boat commander, for having brought back stories about alleged war crimes by U.S. forces -- often carried out, Kerry said in 1971, "with the full awareness of officers at all levels."

Seemed to him, Means said, his own Swift boat crew had come close to committing a war crime themselves one day. A senior officer, hitching a ride up the coast aboard their Swift boat, had ordered the crew to fire on a small group of unarmed Vietnamese fishermen working their nets in unrestricted waters, Means said. The boat's commanding officer had refused to comply.

Was that the way the boat's commander remembered the incident too, all these years later? Means had to know.

So he got on the Internet and hunted down Thomas W.L. "Tad" McCall, the retired Navy captain who'd commanded Means' boat, PCF 88, as a newly minted ensign. Means called him.

Not only did McCall remember the day in question, and that confrontation off the coast of South Vietnam, he remembered the name of the officer who had given the command to shoot: "Latch" Hoffman himself, then a Navy captain in charge of the entire Swift boat task force in Vietnam.

The next morning Means told me the whole story. Then I called McCall myself.

McCall, now 60, remembers March 14, 1969, because it was his 25th birthday. He'd only been running a Swift boat for a few weeks, having arrived in Vietnam in January 1969, the same month as Means. ...

McCall's crew was supposed to be off duty that day. But McCall was told Hoffman needed a ride up the coast to the base at Nha Trang to visit a seriously wounded Navy SEAL. ...

From the start, Hoffman made it clear the trip would be no pleasure cruise. He wanted to search every Vietnamese boat they passed, it seemed. McCall protested mildly; he knew many of those boats from having patrolled those same waters almost daily.

Then Hoffman set his attention on a small cluster of fishing boats, four small vessels with perhaps 10 fishermen, about 1,000 yards offshore. "We had seen them in the water there many, many times," McCall said. "They were fishing at a good fishing place ... in traditional fishing waters. 'Another patrol is coming up behind us soon,' I told him. 'We're taking you for a ride, not patrolling.'"

But Hoffman ordered a crewman to hail the fishing boats on a bullhorn. The fishermen didn't respond. So Hoffman ordered a crewman to fire his M-16 in their direction, splashing the water around them. The fishermen, perhaps not understanding what they were supposed to do, still didn't respond.

"Shoot closer," McCall remembers Hoffman saying.

"I can't shoot closer, sir, I'll hit them," the crewman said.

"Well, do it," Hoffman said.

The meaning of those words were clear to everyone aboard PCF 88, McCall said. Hoffman was ordering the fishing party destroyed, the fishermen killed.

The column has more details.

There are many reasons people do not want to discuss or acknowledge any of this history, even (or more accurately, especially) if they participated in it themselves. I discussed some of the major ones here.

It is one thing, and it would be very understandable if it remained a private matter, that people like Hoffman would not want to remember incidents like this one. But to deny the reality of all that happened in Vietnam -- and to smear Kerry in large part because, as I said in my earlier post, he dared to tell the truth about it -- is another thing altogether. And not at all an admirable one.

(Via Atrios, and his "reader k." For Kafka, no doubt.)

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THE FIVE BIG BLUNDERS

William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst. In the final part of his series for the LA Times, he writes about "Five Big American Blunders in Terror War." And he makes several critical points.

About the second blunder -- "What you don't know can be bad, but what you think you know can be worse." -- he says:

Administration officials have tied themselves in knots trying to explain why they were so sure Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Faulty intelligence is the scapegoat these days.

Certainly the intelligence community has shortcomings, and its senior officials happily joined the groupthink syndrome by shading their assessments to fit their bosses' preconceptions. But the truth was not hard to come by at the time. Two weeks before the Iraq war in March 2003, I wrote, "There is simply no hard intelligence of any such Iraqi weapons." That statement remains uncontrovertible. The proof of what intelligence analysts really knew — and didn't know — was revealed by the fact, reported in my column then, that "there is not a single confirmed biological or chemical target on their lists, Air Force officers working on the war plan say."

A president or a military leader who operates on the basis of what he thinks must be true, instead of the specific details of what is known and not known, is headed for trouble.

However, and as I have noted before, "bad" intelligence didn't make anyone do anything. The Iraq invasion was a policy decision, made regardless of what the intelligence may have shown -- as, in fact, it was.

Arkin's third blunder is one that almost everyone acknowledges now:

I missed the real message: Rumsfeld and his team were impervious to any views other than their own. Because of their love of secrecy and contempt for debate, they simply tuned out any naysayers warning about what to expect in postwar Iraq. That was true even when the warnings of postwar trouble came from tough-minded military advisors, not those wimpy experts from the State Department and academia.

But it is the fifth and final blunder that is most significant:

With dismaying frequency, Bush, Rumsfeld and senior military leaders have made critical decisions on the basis of what they thought was a clear view of their adversaries — looking at the enemy through an open window, so to speak. In reality, they were looking at a mirror and seeing fuzzy images of themselves.

Consider the question of whether we have too few troops in Iraq. Coalition forces are sometimes spread thin. But the problem in Iraq is not too few troops, or even too few allies. It's that we've persisted in seeing our enemies as mirror images of ourselves and tried to fight them as though they were us. ...

Because we have been unable to break out of our old mind-set, it's actually a blessing we don't have more troops in Iraq. The fact that the coalition force is relatively small is one reason that, on average, fewer than two soldiers are being killed each day, compared to the 30 American soldiers who died each day during the peak of U.S. fighting in Vietnam in 1968.

What is true militarily in Iraq is also true politically, there and in the rest of the Arab world: We keep thinking that, deep down, our adversaries are really just like us. In reality, for the present and for the foreseeable future, most of the Islamic world is not — and does not want to be — like us. It has profoundly different values and priorities. Thus our entire strategy is predicated on a mirror-picture that we will someday "defeat" the increasingly angry anti-American mob of Iraqi nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists, with democratic stability miraculously arising from the ashes. [I must note that we have made this same mistake before, with notably disastrous consequences.]

Unfortunately, John F. Kerry doesn't really offer a different view. He promises to execute his plans better, but that may not help much if the underlying vision of the situation is off.

Both presidential candidates, and both parties, seem to have accepted the idea that the war on terrorism is part of a larger clash, a titanic struggle for national survival. There's a seductive ring to such a battle cry. Part of the American character — and human nature generally — likes a call to heroism. But there's another part of our character that favors taking a deep breath, looking at things as they are and figuring out a practical solution. To me, the final lesson of the last three years is that this is the voice we need to hear.

That final point -- that perhaps the majority of people view this as "a clash of civilizations" -- is dangerously wrong in my view.

I hasten to add that this does not mean that I don't think there is a philosophical dimension to this struggle. There most certainly is -- but it does not arise or manifest itself in the manner that our leaders and many Americans think. And to fight it in those terms will almost certainly ensure disaster.

That is a subject I've been intending to address for a long time now, and I will do my very best to get to it tomorrow. I strongly recommend that you read Arkin's entire column.

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HOW DO YOU STOP THE GATHERING MADNESS?

I regrettably had missed this very perceptive and troubling entry from May by Timothy Burke. Well, much better late than never. On the difficult question of carefully making comparisons between America today and the rise of Nazism, Burke writes:

So while most analogies to fascism and Nazism in the present conjuncture remain, or ought to remain, out of bounds--Ted Rall's comparison of US troops to the Wehrmacht was fantastically stupid, for comparison--there does strike me as being one valid analogy that focuses or clarifies an existing question about the present.

Ever since the rise of Nazism, historians and commentators have second-guessed what Germans might have done to stop it before the fatal seizure of power. There are as many opinions on this as there are historians. ...

I raise the analogy because it does seem comparable to me to one narrow aspect of the present crisis. I am not saying the current government of the US, much as I profoundly loathe this Administration, is an apt analogy to the Nazi Party. More, I'd say it's like a late-Weimar regime, the gathering thunderclouds of a possible storm. I wouldn't have said that two months ago. Why do I say it now?

Not because of the prison abuses, not exactly. More because of two related developments in the wake of those abuses: first, the degree to which one important faction of the American right has unabashedly revealed its total contempt for anything approaching universal liberal democratic values, or any sense that the United States must actually earn its status as moral exemplar rather than have that status conferred on it as a cultural and racial inevitability, a national destiny. In the aftermath of Abu Gharaib, the intellectual and ethical collapse of one segment of the right has been total. It's been a litmus test to see who jumps which way. Andrew Sullivan, to his credit, has jumped back from madness and begun to ask the questions that need asking and say the things that need saying. But much of the populist right like Rush Limbaugh, as well as commentators like Victor Davis Hanson and politicians like James Inhofe, have dived in and happily wallowed in pure and unrestrained moral excrement.

The far more disturbing thing for me is that this isn't just the chattering classes, that there is a segment of the American public for whom there appear to be no conditions or events that would falsify their belief that the war in Iraq is necessary, just and winnable. More, judging not just from press reports but things I've overheard myself in conversations, there are people who believe that the conduct in Abu Gharaib was justified and if anything not extreme enough, and that the war has to be prosecuted with more intensity and force in every respect. There is the ordinary American man in today's New York Times who says, "Wipe them all out". There are those who many of us have overheard saying, "Well, if it comes to that, we have nukes".

There's nothing you can really say to this kind of fairly unapologetic exterminationism. Either it's basically insane and therefore completely barred to reason--how did "wipe them all out" become the aim of a war undertaken for humanitarian reasons?--or it is supra-rational and reveals that the war has been always at its core a New Crusade against Islam, a deliberately and intentionally exterminationist or brutalist program.

The reason this raises the specter of 1930 and the question of what Germans ought to have done against Nazism for me is that I now have a new appreciation for how hard it might have been to know what to do then, because I don't really know what to do now. What does one do when one becomes aware that a significant plurality of one's fellow citizens seems to believe that it's right to torture people and pursue an exterminationist or brutalist strategy of conquest? I honestly have no idea.

Against leaders or parties or even bloggers, I think I have some idea of what to do. Against millions of other Americans with whom I might share many things in common--people I go to the mall with, play computer games against, watch films in theatres alongside, walk the streets next to, root for baseball teams with--I feel powerless.

Read the entire entry, which has considerably more.

And this later entry, which touches on same of the same issues, is what led me to the earlier post. That subsequent post, in which Burke discusses the similarities between our current situation and that in 1948 South Africa (and in the aftermath of that election), contains these observations:

The current leadership of the Republican Party strikes me as being equally capable of sustaining a long-term authoritarian "emergency" whose ultimate fate is certain but whose misery could be horribly prolonged. The speeches at the Republican Convention, most especially those by Giulani, Miller and Cheney, made it clear that the current leadership of the Republican Party is rolling the dice and going for broke. They’re not going to compromise here and bend there, acknowledge dissent on some points or soften their policies where prudent. They’re pushing a total, rigid program of social and political transformation that serves the needs and desires of a sizeable minority of Americans and imposes their authority over the will of the majority. Like the National Party in South Africa, they may be able to accomplish this by taking advantage of the peculiarities of American electoral politics—and like the National Party, they may have both the will and the methods to permanently alter the structure of American constitutional democracy so as to lock their control of the government for as long a perpetuity as they can manage.

And this point is the same exact one I discussed in this entry earlier today, but instead of describing it as "rolling the dice and going for broke," I called it "Playing for Keeps."

But we're talking about the same precise phenomenon -- and that phenomenon is very real, and extraordinarily dangerous.

I wrote about Abu Ghraib story, and the underlying psychological-cultural mechanisms that make such events possible and even inevitable, here, here, here and here.

I also discussed these same mechanisms, and how they led to atrocities in Vietnam and to the kind of attitude discussed by Burke -- a "fairly unapologetic exterminationism" -- in this essay, which provides a summary of the major arguments in my series on "The Roots of Horror" in our world today.

The title of that last essay is, "When the Demons Come." And the demons continue to gather.

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PRE-BLOGIVERSARY TECH NOTES

Beginning September 6, please use this email for contacting me, and not the one currently listed on the sidebar:

arthur4801atdeleteearthlink.net

Just change the "at" to you-know-what, delete the "delete," and away you go.

Also, a number of people have links to The Light of Reason in their blogrolls (and for that, many thanks). If you link to:

http://blog.light-of-reason.com/

that link may be defunct as of tomorrow. (It has to do with renewing the domain name, which I probably won't do for a number of reasons, but it's too complicated to explain the whole thing. But if somebody has money burning a hole in his or her pocket and wants to renew it, please let me know. It would be easier to keep it in certain ways, but it's not a life-or-death issue either way.)

The link that should be used for The Light of Reason is this one:

http://coldfury.com/reason/weblog.php

The second anniversary of this blog rolls around on September 8, and there hopefully will be some further changes in store later this week.

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PLAYING FOR KEEPS: HOW THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SEEKS TO DESTROY THE ENEMY, AND ACHIEVE A MANDATE -- FOR ABSOLUTE POWER

This is absolutely astonishing:

In a fresh blow to John Kerry's flagging presidential campaign, the Pentagon has ordered an official investigation into the awards of the Democratic senator's five Vietnam War decorations.

News of the inquiry came as President George W Bush opened an 11-point lead over his rival - the widest margin since serious campaigning began - according to the first poll released since last week's Republican convention.

The highly unusual inquiry is to be carried out by the inspector-general's office of the United States navy, for which Sen Kerry served as a Swift Boat captain for four months in 1968, making two tours of duty.

He was wounded in action and subsequently awarded three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. But for the past month, the exact details of Mr Kerry's military service in Vietnam have become shrouded in a controversy that the navy has now decided warrants a full-blown search for the truth.

According to a self-styled group of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, many of whom served in Vietnam during the same period, Mr Kerry exaggerated the significance of combat incidents and inaccurately reported the circumstances of his injuries, at least one of which was allegedly self-inflicted. The accusations are repeated in a book, Unfit to Command, which was published last month.

Last week, the Kerry campaign attempted to leave the Vietnam debate behind, as signs appeared that the controversy was damaging Mr Kerry's standing in the polls. But to the consternation of campaign strategists, the US navy has now agreed to a request by Judicial Watch, a bi-partisan lobby group, for a full inquiry. Judicial Watch is calling for the Navy to report before the elections, but Navy officials are so far refusing to give any timetable for the inquiry.

In an August letter to the Pentagon, the group's president, Tom Fitton, requested an investigation into the "determination and final disposition of the awards granted to Lieutenant (junior grade) John Forbes Kerry, US Naval Reserve", in response to the Swift Boat Veterans' allegations.

A navy spokesman confirmed on Friday that the inspector-general's office at the Pentagon had authorised the inquiry. "It is the responsibility of all personnel to correct errors in official records," said the spokesman. Another official said privately: "There's a feeling that it's time to deal with this thoroughly, once and for all."

Among other records to be examined is a citation of Mr Kerry for bravery that was apparently signed by the former Navy Secretary, John Lehman, and contributed to the award of his silver star. ...

On Friday, Mr Lehman endorsed the investigation of Mr Kerry's awards....

In an angry statement from the Kerry campaign headquarters, Michael Meehan, Mr Kerry's senior adviser, condemned the navy probe as an expensive waste of the Pentagon's resources.

"The facts are clear," said Mr Meehan. "The navy awarded John Kerry the Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V and three Purple Hearts. This is a waste of taxpayers' dollars and the Pentagon's time, especially during wartime."

A few points about this ought to be emphasized.

First, I wish the Bush administration devoted even a fraction of this intensity and effort to capturing, incapacitating and otherwise destroying this country's enemies, rather than focusing this degree of energy on those who happen to be their political opponents.

Second, I have no doubt at all that, assuming this story is accurate, that this is all being done at the behest of the Bush administration, and more particularly the Bush campaign. It may be the case that Judicial Watch came up with this idiotic idea independently, although I find even that much very difficult to believe. (If Judicial Watch is "bi-partisan," I'm Aristotle's ghost. And the fact that Judicial Watch sometimes goes after Republicans as well as Democrats does not miraculously transform it into a "bi-partisan" organization.) But even if that were true, it is the Pentagon that ordered the "official investigation." The Pentagon takes direction from Bush, and if Bush had objected, I strongly doubt that the Pentagon would have approved this. And since Bush is Commander in Chief, one might have thought he would have objected, which brings me to point three.

It is utterly extraordinary -- and I would think most likely unprecedented -- for the Pentagon to order such an investigation into whether someone's medals were "deserved" in the midst of a Presidential campaign, two months before an election, when the target of the investigation is the President's opponent. This indisputably is part of what has to be one of the most vicious smear campaigns in history, particularly when a number of witnesses -- witnesses who have first-hand knowledge of what transpired, when many of the Swift Boat Veterans do not by their own admission -- have already corroborated the essential points of Kerry's version of events. Keep in mind one other point: the Navy does not have to commit to completing this inquiry before the election, and they probably won't. (Even this crowd can't be too obvious -- at least not yet.) But all that needs to happen is for one person to leak the required, and undoubtedly damning, information (whether true or not), toward the end of October, and the damage will be done. And if the leak is sufficiently negative, it will doom Kerry once and for all. (Another assignment for that peerless and dogged reporter Robert Novak, no doubt.)

And if anyone still had any doubt at all -- although I do not see how anyone could at this point, if they have been paying attention -- this destroys once and for all the vile pretense that Bush and his most fervent supporters have any genuine respect or admiration for people who serve in the military. If you should ever happen to their "enemy" in any way they consider significant, the fact that you served honorably -- when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. did not themselves (and in this context, please don't even mention Bush's National Guard service) -- they will drag you through the mud, try to destroy your reputation utterly, and only God might be able to help you or stop them.

And this brings me to the final point. If this story turns out to be true, only one conclusion is possible: Bush and his fellow thugs don't just want to beat Kerry. They want to destroy him, absolutely and completely. And they will use any means available to do so. They thus hope to win by a large enough margin so that no one will be able to question that they have a "mandate" for their second term.

And then -- if there is another major terrorist attack here at home, or some other event that terrifies enough people so that they once again turn to the government for "help" as they did after 9/11, being willing to surrender a significant part of their freedoms to achieve an illusory "safety" -- Bush will have everything he needs to extend the power of the federal government further than anyone has dreamt.

Don't tell me I'm being paranoid about this. Consider just the Swift Boat story alone -- a story of smears and lies, designed solely to discredit Kerry to the greatest extent possible, and consider the lengths to which they are willing to go, directly involving even the Pentagon and the Navy in that despicable effort.

And then consider this article by Jonathan Turley:

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft's announced desire for camps for U.S. citizens he deems to be "enemy combatants" has moved him from merely being a political embarrassment to being a constitutional menace.

Ashcroft's plan, disclosed last week but little publicized, would allow him to order the indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens and summarily strip them of their constitutional rights and access to the courts by declaring them enemy combatants.

The proposed camp plan should trigger immediate congressional hearings and reconsideration of Ashcroft's fitness for this important office. Whereas Al Qaeda is a threat to the lives of our citizens, Ashcroft has become a clear and present threat to our liberties.

The camp plan was forged at an optimistic time for Ashcroft's small inner circle, which has been carefully watching two test cases to see whether this vision could become a reality. The cases of Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi will determine whether U.S. citizens can be held without charges and subject to the arbitrary and unchecked authority of the government. ...

Ashcroft hopes to use his self-made "enemy combatant" stamp for any citizen whom he deems to be part of a wider terrorist conspiracy.

Perhaps because of his discredited claims of preventing radiological terrorism [in the Padilla case], aides have indicated that a "high-level committee" will recommend which citizens are to be stripped of their constitutional rights and sent to Ashcroft's new camps.

Few would have imagined any attorney general seeking to reestablish such camps for citizens. Of course, Ashcroft is not considering camps on the order of the internment camps used to incarcerate Japanese American citizens in World War II. But he can be credited only with thinking smaller; we have learned from painful experience that unchecked authority, once tasted, easily becomes insatiable.

We are only now getting a full vision of Ashcroft's America. Some of his predecessors dreamed of creating a great society or a nation unfettered by racism. Ashcroft seems to dream of a country secured from itself, neatly contained and controlled by his judgment of loyalty.

Read this column, too, about the return of the Star Chamber.

Turley points out the essential key to what could be one of the gravest threats to civil liberties this nation has ever seen:

[Ashcroft's] greatest problem has been preserving a level of panic and fear that would induce a free people to surrender the rights so dearly won by their ancestors.

But if Bush, Ashcroft & Co. can convince people to be sufficiently afraid -- if, as I said for example, there is another major terrorist attack -- and if Bush can point to what most people view as a genuine mandate for his second term, then he may be able to get almost anything he wants. Look how compliant Congress and the great majority of the American people were immediately after 9/11, and how quickly the Patriot Act was passed, when most members of Congress had not even read it and when the Act itself had not even been completed.

Is this scenario unduly alarmist? I would dearly love to think so -- but a look back through history, including the just-completed century, is hardly comforting on that score. This pattern has been followed in any number of other countries, and there is no guarantee that the United States will forever remain exempt from those fatal missteps that led to disaster so many times before, and led finally to dictatorship.

On that last point, remember the remarks of another current hero of the Republicans, Tommy Franks -- reported last November, but remarked upon by almost no one:

Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government. Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men's lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine's December edition, the former commander of the military's Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that "the worst thing that could happen" is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, "... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."

Franks then offered "in a practical sense" what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

"It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world - it may be in the United States of America - that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important."

Franks didn't speculate about how soon such an event might take place.

Already, critics of the U.S. Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, have argued that the law aims to curtail civil liberties and sets a dangerous precedent.

But Franks' scenario goes much further. He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.

I pointed out in that earlier post some of the immense historical distortions and general ignorance that lay behind Franks' comments. And remember that the Bush administration did not distance itself from these remarks -- and hardly anyone else said much about it. The episode passed almost completely unnoticed.

As I also said in that previous entry:

Has a storm of outrage and protest greeted Franks' remarks? No. Has the administration denounced them as profoundly irresponsible and dangerous? No.

What you are now seeing are the steps by which the leaders of a country prepare it for dictatorship -- and, what is even worse, how they prepare a citizenry eagerly to embrace and even ask for a dictatorship, supposedly in the name of "protecting" their freedoms. ...

I have heard this argument before.... In response to one of my earlier foreign policy essays (the last part of which is here, and my major foreign policy essay is here), one reader made the same point that Franks did: that a terrorist attack on an even larger scale than 9/11 might well lead to the imposition of martial law. My reader therefore said, in effect, that we must go around the world, toppling governments, engaging in "regime change," "imposing democracy" (an oxymoron if there ever was one), and eradicating every single terrorist who might threaten us in such a manner.

As I have explained, and as events are now demonstrating more and more every day, this strategy is not working, it cannot work, and it will not work. But -- and this is the point that most people seem utterly unable to grasp, given the intellectual disintegration that is the distinctive mark of our culture today -- in our deluded, misguided, historically ignorant, and completely futile efforts to rid the world of every possible threat to our safety, we are now in the process of making the ultimate loss of all our freedoms happen today.

We don't need to wait for a massive terrorist attack to jettison the Constitution, and abandon any pretense of respect for individual rights and freedom. That process is underway now -- and that ignoble cause is advanced more with each passing hour.

Here is the other point that most people's disintegrated mentalities cannot or will not understand: the erosion of individual rights and liberty domestically, on the one hand, and our profoundly destructive foreign policy, on the other, are not two separate issues. They are the same issue, and the same battle. It is the battle that has raged through all of mankind's history: the battle between individual freedom and the state, between liberty and massive governmental power. And today, individual freedom and liberty are losing, all across the board.

I view the threat to freedom and liberty here in the United States as the gravest I have ever seen in my lifetime. Bush and his cronies seek to undermine and ultimately destroy our constitutional form of government itself, on the most fundamental level. And all the pieces are being put into place to accomplish that end.

People had goddamned better wake up, before it's finally too late. This crowd is playing for all the marbles, and for keeps -- and they don't intend to lose. They will not even let anyone else have a chance to oppose them. And their tactics against Kerry are only one indication, among many others, of the lengths to which they will go. They have ceaselessly worked to undermine, discredit, smear and destroy everyone who has opposed or even questioned them in any manner at all -- and despite the fact that many of those they have marginalized (or worse) have, of course, been vindicated by subsequent events.

But almost no one seems to understand or remember any of this -- and every time it happens again, people are surprised, as if they had never seen these tactics before. Are people truly that incapable of paying attention, understanding the meaning of events, and remembering anything for more than a day, or a week?

The only development that might derail Bush's determination to have a second term would be a major scandal, on the order of several indictments of highly placed officials in the Plame case, or a general unraveling of the Feith-Franklin-Israel-AIPAC-Iran story. But I wouldn't count on either of those things happening. The Bush administration controls all the lever of powers, as this latest story about the Kerry investigation reveals yet again. It won't be difficult for the Bush crowd to postpone any significant developments until after the election, or mute them so much that they won't make that much difference.

So I think this election is all but over already. Depending on the margin of victory, a second administration will probably allow Bush to do much of what he wants, especially if there is another attack, or Bush manages to get us into another war (Iran, North Korea, a general widening of the Middle East conflict, take your pick).

And the Justice Department may get much of what it wants, too. In which case, I may well see you in one of those nice, new camps.

And of course, it can happen here. It already has -- and in their desperate fear, many people now appear to believe that earlier internment camps were just fine, and even "necessary." Under the right circumstances, a large segment of Americans may welcome such camps gratefully, and enthusiastically. Of course, the central meaning and the basic founding principles of the United States will have been destroyed -- but many Americans will feel "safer," just as many others have in the dictatorships and semi-dictatorships with which history is littered.

I would very much like to think that it's not too late, but I'm not at all sure of that any longer. I think our path may have been irrevocably determined and, if Bush is reelected by a substantial margin, it may be all but over.

But perhaps the American people will prove me wrong. I deeply and fervently hope so.

UPDATE: For clarity's sake, I should note that the Turley article linked above is a couple of years old, and thus predates the trio of recent Supreme Court decisions about the detainment of "enemy combatants." However, as I have discussed before (here and here), it is hardly accurate to view those Supreme Court decisions as meaningful vindications of individual liberty. And the second of those linked earlier posts excerpts an article by Turley himself written after those cases, and it makes very clear that they are not by any means complete victories for freedom. In fact, quite the contrary, and the "enemy combatant" designation continues to be very, very badly abused.

And with regard to the comments here and the Judicial Watch-Pentagon developments about the Kerry investigation, and regardless of precisely how this investigation arose and where it may lead, I absolutely stand by my broader criticisms of the great dangers that the Bush administration represents to freedom and liberty here at home (and abroad as well, in my view). Those dangers will only increase in a second Bush administration.

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WELL, OKAY!

Definitely no more Mr. Nice Guy for me.

Ken Layne on Zell Miller:

I grew up in the South, surrounded by sons of bitches like Zell Miller -- bitter old nigger-haters who couldn't possibly understand why they weren't right about anything -- and this dixiecrat piece of shit is probably the best advertisement for the Bush Administration's Compassionate Conservatism we've ever seen. Thank you, Zell. Now we understand. Sorry about wishing the Bush Administration all the best after 9/11. Sorry I ever entertained the thought that these vicious pigs might find redemption in defending our country with honor.

Ken Layne on the Bush administration, and "conservatives":

The Republican leadership stands for absolutely nothing beyond growing the federal government, federal deficit and federal control of our lives at a staggering, unforgivable & untenable rate. We have a president who has never seen a spending bill he didn't love -- he has yet to veto anything.

What is fueling the party faithful? How do self-proclaimed conservatives maintain their righteous frothing at the mouth when it is abundantly clear that their party hasn't the slightest resemblance to Conservatism? How do you avoid Exploding Brain Syndrome when the hated opposition looks like Barry Goldwater compared to your insane tax-cut-and-spend Big Government rampage? ...

(And no, I'm not claiming to be a Goldwater Conservative. Like the overwhelming majority of voters -- that 60-70% in the middle of the Political Spectrum -- I simply believe it is reasonable to demand a government that practices restraint in all matters. You know, like staying the hell out of our private lives, not taxing us to death, not spending money it doesn't have, and not sending our troops off on ridiculous & doomed adventures dreamed up by a bunch of dingbats in some back room conducting foreign policy like geeks playing Dungeons & Dragons.)

If you feel like it, please explain this weirdness. I'll ask that you not use the "But it will be so much worse under Kerry," because you know that isn't true. There is no way in hell a Republican-controlled Congress (or a split Congress) and a Democrat in the White House will spend a fraction of what the one-party government of 2000-2004 has spent. A gridlocked federal government will not engage in wild misadventures, or the creation of giant new bureaucracies and cabinet-level departments as it has under Bush and the GOP-controlled Congress.

With the Crystal Methamphetamine Ball I keep for such occasions, I can predict those of you who continue to invent apologies for this government will tell me that logic, responsibility, coherence and competence don't matter a damned bit & never will again, because 3,000 of the 300,000,000 people living in this country were killed by an elusive enemy three years ago, and that for some mysterious reason the current inept administration should be further rewarded for failing to catch the culprits, failing to make this country safer from either similar or new-fangled attacks, failing to remove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan or Pakistan, failing to win an elective war that had nothing to do with those who launched a war on our shores, and not only failing to make a dent in the Islamic Terrorism movement but in fact creating millions upon millions of ready new converts who now have a massive wrecked state in the center of the Middle East as a home and training base for decades to come, along with a very new and real reason to attack us on every flank that makes Bin Laden's flowery historical rhetoric seem quaint by comparison.

I just can't figure out how anyone can look at our post Sept. 11 leadership and see anything but a smoking heap of tragic failure, and yet that seems to be the only thing the Bush loyalists have to offer as a concrete reason to re-elect this administration. Why? Is Losing the new Winning?

Oh, just start at the top and keep scrolling. Tons of great stuff there.

When did I get out of the habit of reading Layne? Shame on me. It won't happen again.

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BUSH AND THE GOP: PRINCIPLED CONSISTENCY ABOVE ALL

It appears that the Half Hour Hate didn't go over all that well:

After gauging the harsh reaction from Democrats and Republicans alike to Sen. Zell Miller’s keynote address at the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign — led by the first lady — backed away Thursday from Miller’s savage attack on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, insisting that the estranged Democrat was speaking only for himself.

Late Thursday, Miller and his wife were removed from the list of dignitaries who would be sitting in the first family’s box during the president’s acceptance speech later in the evening. Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Miller was not in the box because the campaign had scheduled him to do too many television interviews.

There was no explanation, however, for why Miller would be giving multiple interviews during Bush’s acceptance speech, or what channels would snub the president in favor of Miller. Nor was it made clear why Miller’s wife also was not allowed to take her place in the president’s box 24 hours after his deeply personal denunciation of his own party’s nominee.

The change was made only a few hours after Laura Bush, asked about Miller’s speech, said in an interview with NBC News that “I don’t know that we share that point of view.” Aides to President Bush and his campaign said Miller was not speaking for all Republicans.

Miller, who all but abandoned his party after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, returned Wednesday to Madison Square Garden to denounce Kerry as “more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure.”

It was in the same hall 12 years ago that Miller, then the respected conservative Democratic governor of Georgia, enthusiastically supported Bill Clinton and belittled President Bush’s father as “a timid man who hears only the voices of caution and the status quo” and a “commander-in-chief [who] talks like Dirty Harry but acts like Barney Fife.” ...

The Bush campaign stepped backed from Miller’s comments Thursday after it was received with almost immediate criticism, including complaints from prominent Republicans like Sen. John McCain of Arizona. ...

In an interview Thursday, Laura Bush told NBC News’ Tom Brokaw: “I don’t know that we share that point of view. I mean, I think Zell Miller has a very interesting viewpoint, just like I had the personal viewpoint to talk about the president when I spoke on Tuesday night. ...

“But, I mean, his voice is one with a lot,” the first lady said. “You also heard Senator McCain. You also heard Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor [Arnold] Schwarzenegger.”

A senior White House official, speaking to reporters before Bush’s address Thursday night, said, “Senator Miller was speaking on behalf of himself and obviously on behalf of himself.”

So Miller "was speaking only for himself" -- but he gave the keynote address? And he was selected to give the keynote address precisely because it was known that he would express exactly the views he did? Must be more of that special Republican "logic." At least Miller himself is consistent in the level of his bile, if nothing else. Bush and the GOP leadership can't even say that much.

I expect some clips from Miller's speech might yet see their way into campaign commercials, only not for Bush. Talk about unforeseen consequences...

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WE FIGHT FOR GOD! AND OUR GOD IS BIGGER THAN YOURS! NYAH NYAH NYAH!

What is truly pathetic about this is that people have to ask that Boykin be dismissed, and that Bush hasn't already removed him:

A group of congressional Democrats is asking President Bush (news - web sites) to dismiss a senior military intelligence officer who made church speeches that included inflammatory religious remarks while discussing the war on terrorism.

In a letter to Bush released Thursday, Rep. Barney Frank (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., and 10 others said action in the matter of Lt. Gen. William Boykin is long overdue, and he must be removed from his post as deputy undersecretary for defense.

A Pentagon (news - web sites) investigation concluded that Boykin violated regulations by failing to make clear he was not speaking in an official capacity when he made nearly two dozen church speeches beginning in Jan. 2002. It also found that Boykin, who made most speeches wearing his uniform, did not get prior clearance for the remarks.

Boykin's comments, said the lawmakers, "demonstrate a serious lack of the objectivity that should be accompanying military intelligence."

In one speech, discussing a U.S. Army battle against a Muslim warlord in Somalia in 1993, Boykin told his audience, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

I sure am glad that Bush and all the other members of the Theocracy Party are saving the world for God, or whatever Bush is claiming he's saving it for this week.

Earlier posts about the genuinely delusional General Boykin here and here, with links to more. And have we ever heard from National Review on this one? Have they decided what they think yet, now that the administration has apparently decided all this Crusader language isn't enough to get someone canned? (You can't seriously expect me to read National Review. I can only take so much in a given day, or week. And I still have the unbelievable gloriosity of Georgie Porgie to look forward to this evening.)

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TRASHING, AND BURYING, AYN RAND

Even though I don't call myself an Objectivist any longer, I guess it now falls to heretics like me (or even better, like Chris Sciabarra here) to defend Ayn Rand's actual, genuinely radical legacy.

As Skip Oliva notes in a comment here, one highly-placed member of the "Objectivist bureaucracy" had tremendous praise for Zell Miller's speech last night. After quoting Miller's speech (where Miller grossly distorts the meaning of part of Kerry's voting record -- and see this, which has many facts demonstrating just how misleading Miller's characterization of Kerry's history in this regard is, and there are many similar articles, from organizations of very differing viewpoints, all over the internet, easily found by various Google searches), the good Dr. Hurd actually says:

I love Zell Miller's spirit, for it reflects an understanding of what, in a more rational and principled age, would be obvious facts. Zell Miller is an older, retiring leader. Let's hope his attitude is the voice of the future.

And indeed, what Skip says is true -- and I myself noted with horror this profoundly revealing passage from Miller's hateful tirade last evening:

President Roosevelt, in a speech that summer, told America, "All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger."

In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died, he told a friend that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the latter.

How can people not understand what the plain meaning of this is? Miller actually states that "saving freedom" justifies, in his view, enslaving the entire population of the United States itself. For a draft is slavery, pure and simple.

And it was Ayn Rand herself who wrote detailed arguments about the deep immorality of a draft -- "peacetime" or otherwise -- and I summarized many of her statements on the subject in this lengthy post. Here's part of what Rand wrote, although you should consult the balance of that post for much more of Rand on a draft:

Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right--the right to life--and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.

If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom--then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect?

And the good Dr. Hurd does not see fit to even mention this apparently minor glitch in a speech he so mindlessly praises.

As Skip says at the end of his comment:

Zell Miller explicitly endorsed the draft last night--he believes George Bush has the right to murder any American citizen at will. If that is what Dr. Hurd believes, I think it is safe to say Ayn Rand's radical legacy is dead and buried along with the United States Constitution.

Truer words were never written. For someone like Hurd to praise Miller's speech in the manner he did -- and not to discuss this hardly minor "detail" (and, one might have hoped, disagreed with it) -- is an act of irresponsibility that deserves the intellectual equivalent of the death penalty.

May Rand's genuine legacy rest in peace -- and may these detestable and reprehensible "Objectivist" imposters and charlatans be swept into the dustbin of history, the only place they now belong. And even that is far, far too good for them.

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GOOD QUESTIONS, ZELL!

Well, I had already concluded that Zell Miller was one of the most deeply contemptible human beings on the face of the earth. But this truly takes the cake. As noted in this column, here are some excerpts from an article that Zell Miller himself wrote on September 6, 2002:

So, when it comes to expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq, I stand with the president and I will not criticize his judgment. He has already made the case with me, and I am convinced that Saddam Hussein has to go.

But I always like to run things by my focus group back home, and lately the comments from my focus group tell me that the folks out there in Middle America, sitting around their kitchen tables, have questions that need to be answered before we march our soldiers into Iraq.

Now, my focus group is not one of those formal meetings where you pay people to sit around a conference table in an office building. It's a very informal chat with the regulars at Mary Ann's Restaurant, up the street from my home in rural Young Harris, Ga. They are construction workers, retired teachers, farmers, preachers and the waitresses who chime in with their opinions as they pour coffee and bring more biscuits. Several of these folks have previously worn the uniform of this country, some in combat. Not an Ivy Leaguer in the bunch. Not a single one reads the New York Times, The Washington Post or the Weekly Standard. And their television time is devoted mainly these days to the evening news and to watching the Braves, who are close to clinching another division pennant.

I jotted down some of the questions that they want the president to answer in building a case for going to Iraq.

(1) Even if Hussein has nukes, does he have the capability to reach New York or Los Angeles or Atlanta?

(2) The old Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles for decades, many of them capable of reaching our major cities, and yet we didn't get into a war with the Soviets. The president needs to explain why Iraq is different.

(3) Who will join with us in this war and what share will they be willing to bear? (There was also some grumbling about our boys in Afghanistan "just doing guard duty" to protect those warlords.)

(4) What happens after we take out Hussein? How long will our soldiers be there? And, again, with whose help?

(5) There is concern about too much deployment. We've got our soldiers stationed all over the world. Someone needs to bring us up to date on where they all are, why they are there and how long our commitment to keep them there is.

(6) How does our plan in Iraq fit in with the whole Middle East question? How will it affect Israel? How will it affect our war on terrorism? Does taking Saddam out help or hurt that entire messy situation? ...

(8) The people at Mary Ann's know very well who fights our wars -- the kids from the middle-class and blue-collar homes of America. Kids like their grandchildren. They want to hear the president say that he knows and understands that.

And Mr. Miller ought to have remembered what he once seemed to understand:

None of the above in any way should be interpreted as my backing down in my support of the president's effort. His position and his principles have already made the case with me. I write this in the spirit of trying to get a better explanation for the folks back home and the folks across Middle America. Those folks who love their country very much and who respect their president, but who need a few more answers.

Miller and at least some of the Bush defenders who apparently are thrilled to have such a revoltingly unprincipled and meretricious ally once knew that to ask these questions -- to which we have not received answers to this day (except to the extent that they weaken Bush's case for war with Iraq) -- did not mean they were "weak" about defending the United States, or not to be trusted with matters of national security.

And we still need those answers now. Care to repeat the questions today, Mr. Miller? No. I thought not.

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THIS WILL BE VULGAR

Sorry, but after watching last night's valuable demonstration of the New Fascists at work, I am in a truly foul mood. I should more accurately say: it was valuable to anyone who watched with his eyes open, and who can still think to any extent. I was going to do a point-by-point analysis of everything wrong with Zell Miller's speech, as superb an example of political demagoguery at its vilest as I have ever witnessed. But (and cover your eyes if you're easily offended), I then had this thought: why should I take the time to wipe the shit off Miller's own asshole?

Well, I shouldn't, and I won't. And Will Saletan does a pretty good job of it here.

On another matter (and thanks to Matt Barganier for this one), if you want as perfect a demonstration of certain of the New Fascists' tactics in action as you are likely to find, take a look at this:

The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act. Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations. But in reality, what did they do? They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

It's hard to imagine a more public, open document than a decision written by the Supreme Court. It is incontestably public property: widely reprinted online and on paper; poured over by generations of judges, attorneys, prosecutors, and law students; quoted for centuries to come in court cases and political essays.

Yet the Justice Department had the incomprehensible arrogance and gall to strip this quotation from a court document, as if it represented a grave threat to the republic. Luckily, the court slapped down this redaction and several others. If it hadn't, we would've been left with the impression that this was a legitimate redaction, that whatever was underneath the thick black ink was something so incredibly sensitive and damaging that it must be kept from our eyes.

Now we know the truth. Think about this the next time you see a black mark on a public document.

Nice one, huh? And the government probably gets away with this kind of crap all the time, only we don't know about it as we do in this instance.

I can be somewhat sympathetic to someone who votes for Bush with considerable reluctance, viewing Bush as the "lesser of two evils" compared to Kerry. I think he would be gravely mistaken, but -- depending on the person's specific reasons -- I think such a view can be justified, at least to some extent.

But I am now prepared to say this: anyone who supports Bush with any degree of enthusiasm at all is no friend of freedom, or of liberty, or of justice, or of simple, basic sanity -- and any such person is definitely no friend of mine.

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OUR INSANE, DANGEROUS AND EVIL GOVERNMENT: THE REALIZATIONS OF A FOUR-YEAR-OLD

Perhaps you're thinking my use of "evil" in the headline is incredibly over the top. Well, you just read this, and then tell me what you think:

It was a January weekend in 2003. Dr Thomas Butler, a world-renowned expert on bubonic plague, had called in at his laboratory at Texas Tech University. The 62-year-old microbiologist had worked with the disease for decades and always kept a meticulous record of what was in his lab and where. That day, he noticed that 30 vials of plague were missing. It was the beginning of a nightmare. ...

Eighteen months on, Thomas Butler is no longer a doctor. He turned in his medical licence before it could be taken from him. His family - wife Elisabeth and four children, including a five-year-old son - are broke. He has lost his job and his lab, and he sits in a medium-security prison in Fort Worth, Texas. He is the most notorious scientist in the world, and probably the recipient of the most heavy-handed meting out of criminal justice in recent memory.

After Butler had spent the weekend looking for the vials, he did what he was supposed to do and called the university security officer. Together they searched again. Maybe the containers had been misplaced or accidentally sterilised. It happens in labs: vials go through the autoclave at the end of a busy day by mistake. It's no big deal. But Butler didn't find them, and the FBI was called in.

Within 48 hours, 60 agents had descended on Lubbock, Texas, a town of just 200,000 inhabitants. This was the largest single deployment of FBI personnel since September 11. Butler was interrogated for two days straight. Agents searched his house in front of his children. They asked his wife whether her husband was in sufficient financial distress that he would have sold plague to terrorists.

"It's a gross overreaction," says Donald A Henderson, a smallpox expert who ran President Bush's emergency response programme against bio-terror attacks in 2001. "There's plague all over the [US] South-west. It's endemic in animals, and there are a dozen cases reported in humans every year."

But the Department of Justice's blood was up. It was only two years since five people had been killed by letters laced with anthrax, and the entire weight of the nation's investigative powers had failed to catch the sender. Any whiff of bio-terrorism got the full attention of the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, especially as the letters are widely believed to have been sent by someone working as a biological weapons scientist.

Ashcroft immediately briefed the President on the missing plague. It did not matter that the FBI soon came to the conclusion that the vials had probably been destroyed accidentally. These 30 containers of yersinia pestis were now a national emergency, and Dr Thomas Butler, who had written a paper in the 1970s that pioneered oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea and who could thus, with no arrogance, claim to have saved millions of lives, was now Dr Plague, suspected bio-terrorist.

Dr Plague cooperated fully with the investigation. He even waived his right to an attorney. He had worked for the government all his life, since his days as a navy doctor in Vietnam, and he trusted them. "I was tricked and deceived," said Butler in an interview with the CBS television show 60 Minutes last year. "I was naďve to have trusted them and the assurances they gave me." ...

By the time the case went to trial last November, Butler was facing 69 charges and life in prison. But most of the offences had nothing to do with the missing plague. He was accused of fraud; embezzlement; tax evasion. And most of the charges came from his employer. Thanks to a complicated distinction between "clinical" fees (that scientists are supposed to pay universities) and "corporate" fees (for external consultancy, which they're not), five months after his original indictment bosses at Texas Tech decided that Butler owed them $1m. Thomas Lehman, a geologist at the university, made his feelings clear about his employer in two open letters about the Butler case. "I believe that Texas Tech has committed a great injustice to a good man. I do not know the Butlers very well, but I know a smear campaign when I see one."

Even to someone not familiar with the intricacies of university politics, this looked like a clear case of an institution throwing its professor to the wolves. "I think there's something else behind it," says Edward Hammond, who runs the US arm of the global bio-defence watchdog the Sunshine Project. "Texas Tech gets huge grants from the US army. The manner in which they turned on Butler certainly had something to do with that." Turley concurs. "It was made very clear that if they didn't cooperate, the grants would evaporate."

Now, isn't that just lovely? This is a perfect example of how, by becoming involved in literally every aspect of our lives, the government can exert enormous pressures on all of us -- and completely destroy the lives of an innocent man and his family.

And in terms of the relationship between this story and my earlier item today about the insanity of the "War on Drugs," consider this:

During the case, prosecutors compared Butler to "a cocaine dealer smuggling illegal drugs into the country". He was called an "evil genius". In fact, far from being suspected of bio-terrorism, he was only being accused of not properly transporting plague samples. ...

After the anthrax letters and September 11, the world of biological weapons research has no time for such scientific eccentricities. US-based scientists working with "select agents" - a list of 80 pathogens categorised under the 2002 Bioterrorism Act - have to register with the US health department's Centers for Disease Control. They also have to pass FBI checks, as do their labs. Similar measures have been adopted in the UK, but "not to that level of paranoia", according to one eminent British microbiologist. "It's become very difficult to send things between labs any more, and even more so between countries. We all accept that if you work with anthrax or any select agent, you have to be careful with paperwork. But it makes things very difficult." The Butler case has not helped matters. Jonathan Turley has met scientists at conferences who confessed that they didn't send samples to the US during the Sars epidemic in case they contravened regulations. "They've got a clear message from the Butler case that the US is a threatening environment to work in," he says.

And it still gets worse. In addition to the destroyed lives, this is the worst part -- and it puts all of us in much greater danger:

And the political purpose is paranoia. Why didn't anyone sensible withdraw the laughably weak case against Butler? "They couldn't afford to," says Turley. "It would have been a personal embarrassment for John Ashcroft." An FBI agent told one eminent microbiologist that they were going to "make an example" of Butler. His case would send a clear message that scientists working with materials of interest to bio-terrorists weren't above the law. But the jury's message was a lot muddier than the FBI would have liked. ...

The scientific community is still reeling. "Rather than demonstrating the importance of strict care in the handling of research materials," wrote the Nobel prizewinners, "the determination to convict Dr Butler and put him in jail sends a strong message to the scientific community. It says: this 62-year-old man, who voluntarily reported missing material and cooperated with federal investigators, is now being repaid with a ruined career and a personal cost from which he and his family will never recover." It also says that the next time a scientist misplaces 30 vials of a dangerous pathogen, they're hardly likely to call the FBI. It says that the biggest casualty in the Tom Butler case might be goodwill between the administration and the bio-weapons community, just when it needs it most.

This is your government at work: proclaiming every day that only they can protect us from the dangers of terrorism, and asking us to give them more and more powers. And simultaneously abusing the powers they already have in what ought to be criminally immoral and destructive ways, ruining the lives of innocent people -- who had made the single fatal mistake of "trusting" the government in the first place -- and finally putting us all in even greater danger.

It would be quite an accomplishment, especially if one for which our enemies took credit. Which reminds me, and to use one of the prowar hawks' favorite propaganda phrases, for once in a manner which is fully justified and even demanded: episodes like this one (and you can be certain there are many more we don't even know about) make you wonder just whose side our government is on.

Of course, that question will never be considered or addressed by those in our government or those who endlessly defend it, for to do so would require that they question all their assumptions about "trusting" the government to protect us in the first place. I myself don't trust the government to do that at all, and haven't for a very long time. I gave up that illusion about the time I first realized that adults lie.

I think I was four.

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SAY WHAT?

Even though I think they're stupid idiots for still believing they will have any influence on the Republican Party, the Log Cabin Republicans have my complete sympathy about this:

CNN has informed the Log Cabin Republicans that it will not air their new television advertising campaign, which is a response to the politics of fear and intolerance. Unlike CNN, other broadcast outlets are airing the ad. The network claims that images in the ad are "too controversial." "We are deeply disappointed that CNN has refused our voices the opportunity to be heard. Last week we told the Republican Party that you cannot sugarcoat the vicious and mean-spirited platform, today we want CNN to know that you cannot sugarcoat the politics of fear and intolerance that lead to hate," said Log Cabin Executive Director Patrick Guerriero.

The 30-second commercial is being broadcast during the Republican National Convention in New York City and on other cable stations nationwide. The ad begins with footage from President Ronald Reagan's 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention in Houston. President Reagan said, "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears." The commercial offers a clear choice for the GOP: follow President Reagan's lead by uniting Republicans on common beliefs or follow Jerry Falwell, Pat Buchanan and Rick Santorum's lead by dividing the GOP with an intolerant social agenda based on fear and exclusion. The ad closes with images of the Reverend Fred Phelps holding a sign that reads "God Hates Fags," at the funeral of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard.

Of course, CNN has the right to air or not air whatever it wants. But still, this is a call that defies belief. It obviously can't be the Reagan excerpt that it is "too controversial," so perhaps it's footage like the Phelps clip. But surely CNN has showed that, and probably many similar kinds of images, any number of times in news coverage.

I guess that when it's part of a message of inclusion and calling for an end to "fear and intolerance," then it's "too controversial." Okey dokey. I think I've got that now.

Bizarro world. Chapter 2,483,649.

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CREATING HELL ON EARTH -- "FOR YOUR OWN GOOD," OF COURSE

In case anyone was still wondering, these are just some of the effects of our government's benevolent "War on Drugs," and its prosecutions of doctors who write the "wrong" prescriptions:

Few disagree that pain is already poorly treated in the U.S. "Even the DEA admits that 30 to 50 million people are undertreated for pain," says Ronald Libby, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has studied the issue. A 1999 survey of 805 chronic pain patients conducted by Roper Starch for the American Pain Society and Jannsen Pharmaceutica found that roughly half of those with serious chronic pain could not find relief -- and that the more severe the pain, the less likely it was to be alleviated. Other surveys have yielded similar results. Only a tiny fraction of the nation’s nearly 1 million health care professionals licensed to prescribe controlled substances are willing to consistently use opioid medications, recognized as the best drugs for severe pain. A 2003 analysis by the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel found that less than 3 percent of Florida’s doctors prescribed the majority of opioids for Medicaid patients there.

Because "drug agents now set medical standards," this happens:

"This is causing doctors not to prescribe," says the Pain Relief Network’s Siobhan Reynolds, "and that means patients will be in hell." Several of the prosecutions have been associated with suicides by devastated patients who couldn’t get effective treatment elsewhere. Common Sense for Drug Policy reports that one of William Hurwitz’s patients killed herself on March 16. Frank Fisher says one of his patients drove her car in front of a train.

In a forthcoming documentary by Reynolds, pain patient Skip Baker says, "It’s a devastating health care crisis, to the point that thousands are committing suicide that nobody knows about. Most pain patients know -- everybody’s planning to run into this bridge abutment or that tree or whatever to make it look like an accident." Ronald Myers, a Mississippi physician and minister who founded the American Pain Institute, observes:

"They want to talk about deaths associated with OxyContin. But no one wants to talk about these deaths. There’s been an epidemic of suicide."

About OxyContin, this is a sample of what our wise and all-seeing government enforcers have to say:

Attorney General John Ashcroft said "the indictment and arrests in Virginia demonstrate our commitment to bring to justice all those who traffic in this very dangerous drug." Prosecutors said Hurwitz was "no better than a street corner crack dealer" who "dispenses misery and death." Assistant U.S. Attorney Gene Rossi had earlier declared that the feds would "root out" such doctors "like the Taliban."

Interesting how, for our own government, doctors trying to alleviate a patient's unbearable pain become the equivalent of the Taliban. I have to admit that the moral calculus involved in that judgment is beyond my grasp -- or perhaps it's simply that the government has equated the Taliban with the wrong party. A mirror might come in handy.

But more importantly, and aside from the question of whether the government should be policing this area in the first place (which it shouldn't), there's a very significant problem with the government's entire approach:

During the 1990s, pain experts, patient advocates, and drug makers sought to reduce exaggerated fears about opioids and increase prescribing. Research and clinical experience had shown that few patients without a prior history of serious drug abuse get hooked on narcotics during pain treatment, resulting in addiction rates no higher than those seen in the general population. ...

Most news stories neglected to mention that OxyContin abusers generally were not new addicts freshly minted from innocent patients by irresponsible doctors. Rather, they were drug aficionados who scammed physicians for the latest media-hyped high. According to data from the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, some 90 percent of illicit OxyContin users have also used cocaine, psychedelics, and other painkillers. The typical profile is a person who has abused many drugs in many combinations for many years. OxyContin poses no greater addiction risk than other opioids when taken as directed. But the media helped teach addicts and thrill seekers how to do otherwise. ...

While the OxyContin panic does not seem to have deterred addicts, it has scared doctors. "Every time there is one of these trials," says Libby, "another 50 to 60 doctors drop off from prescribing." ...

The diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association now recognizes that physical dependence is neither necessary nor sufficient for addiction, which is characterized by continued use of a substance despite ongoing drug-related problems. For pain patients, of course, the drug produces fewer problems and greater functioning, rather than the reverse.

Some patient advocates say drug warriors can’t accept this reality because it undermines the logic of prohibition: If most people don’t get hooked when exposed to the "hardest" of all categories of drugs, if patients’ lives get dramatically better and they function perfectly well on doses that are supposed to incapacitate, stupefy, and derange, why is it so important for the government to protect us from these substances? From this point of view, the DEA must fight pain control because functional patients on high doses of opioids threaten its authority.

"It completely puts the lie to the whole criminal approach because it shows that these molecules are not evil, that people can and do function well on them," says the Pain Relief Network’s Siobhan Reynolds. "It undermines the whole basis for the war on drugs and makes it a strictly scientific/medical issue."

Whatever their reasons, law enforcement officials (along with most of the public and many physicians) still cling to the old-fashioned view of addiction as a biochemical process that inevitably results from extended use of certain drugs. In the Myrtle Beach case, federal prosecutors said in court (before being forced to retract their claim due to contrary testimony) that none of the clinic’s 3,000 patients was "legitimate"; in other words, in their view every pain patient of all eight doctors was an addict.

The entire article has many more details about all this, including how these reprehensible prosecutions of doctors work. I recommend you read it, although it isn't likely to leave you in a very good mood.

There are an incredible number of myths surrounding "addiction," including about the very concept itself. (Basically, I consider the concept to be an invalid one, for some reasons indicated above and in the article, but there are many additional reasons for my view.) I've been meaning to get around to that subject for quite a while, and hopefully I'll get to it fairly soon.

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THE CULTURE WAR REVIVAL MEETING

It's interesting, isn't it, that the Republican Party feels it has to keep its actual soul -- and the details of its true agenda -- off limits, and away from the television cameras? But behind closed doors, the religious zealots had a party:

At a closed, invitation-only Bush campaign rally for Christian conservatives yesterday, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas called for a broad social conservative agenda notably different from the televised presentations at the Republican convention, including adopting requirements that pregnant women considering abortions be offered anesthetics for their fetuses and loosening requirements on the separation of church and state.

"We must win this culture war," Senator Brownback urged a crowd of several hundred in a packed ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, reprising a theme of a speech by Patrick J. Buchanan from the podium of the 1992 Republican convention that many political experts say alienated moderate voters in that election.

Called "the Family, Faith and Freedom Rally" in e-mail invitations sent to Christian conservatives in New York for the convention, the event was organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign "to celebrate America and President George W. Bush," according to a copy of the invitation. The e-mail called Mr. Bush "a conservative leader who shares our values, who takes a strong stand for his faith."

Ralph Reed, a senior campaign adviser and liaison to conservative Christians, also addressed the crowd. ...

At the afternoon rally, Mr. Brownback singled out several subjects of special interest to conservative evangelical Protestants that have been largely omitted from the presentations at the convention, including opposition to abortion and same-sex unions, the plight of Christians and other victims of violence in Sudan, human trafficking, and events in Israel.

"I fear for the Republic, I really do," warned Mr. Brownback, a favorite of party conservatives. "We are accused of having a radical agenda for saying that marriage is between a man and a woman and it is the best way for children to be raised. It is not about being hateful. It is about being truthful."

And thus spake every religious True Believer, and every bigot, since time immemorial. (I haven't called this group the theocratic Republicans for no reason.) And along the same lines:

Mr. Reed also addressed the crowd, recalling Mr. Bush's response to a question about his favorite philosopher during the 2000 Republican primary. "The President said, 'Jesus Christ,' " Mr. Reed recalled. And amid rousing applause, he repeated Mr. Bush's distinctively evangelical follow-up: "The president said, as only he can say, 'If I have to explain it to you, then you don't understand it.' "

As if that were not the oldest cliche in the world --and also the oldest evasion known to man, when a person can offer no explanation or justification for his views.

Here's perhaps my favorite (as in: worst) detail in the article, and one reason I may well end up voting for Kerry:

But it was Mr. Brownback who laid out more specific policy goals. On the subject of opposition to abortion, Mr. Brownback argued that many women who choose abortion were unaware of what he said was the pain the procedure caused a fetus. His call for women contemplating abortions to be offered anesthetics for the fetus referred to a bill, "The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act," that he has discussed introducing in Congress. "We are going to keep moving this agenda forward," he vowed.

Mr. Brownback argued the importance to the culture of appointing more conservative judges, asserting that courts have conducted "a 40-year assault on the Constitution." Courts, he argued, had wrongly overstretched "separation of church and state" to mean "removal of church from state."

That last point may be the closer for me: there is no more important long-term legacy for any President than the Supreme Court Justices he appoints. And the next President may well appoint three or four. Given the particular agenda of the kind of "conservative judges" Bush might appoint (and who would be confirmed by a Republican Congress), that could well be the decisive factor for me. I'm thinking about it, and will let you know when I've reached a decision. Please feel free to offer arguments that might persuade me one way or the other in the comments.

There is one additional reason for voting for Kerry, which a commenter mentioned here. And that is, assuming Congress remains in Republican control, that a Kerry Presidency would result in gridlock -- the surest means of achieving slower growth in federal government than occurs when one party controls both the Presidency and Congress. In fact, I myself first mentioned this as a reason for voting for the Democratic candidate a long time ago -- here, and then more recently here. (As I indicated in the first of those referenced posts, if the Democrats should come out for a draft, I would never vote for them under any circumstances. A party which endorses slavery cannot be supported by anyone who gives a damn about individual rights. But neither party would have the guts to endorse a draft before the election -- although both of them may well institute a draft after the election. That is perhaps the best measure of the detestable cowardice of virtually every politician today. They don't even have the courage of their own convictions, not that they seem to have any convictions -- in the sense of principles which they will never betray, even when it seems "opportune" or "pragmatic" to do so.)

One final excerpt from the article:

Calibrating its appeals to both conservative Christians and more secular or socially liberal voters is a longstanding challenge for the party. Although Mr. Buchanan's 1992 speech may have alienated moderate voters by taking aim at the popular culture, political advisers to Mr. Bush believe his 2000 campaign failed to adequately mobilize conservative Christian voters. Mr. Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, has often said that conservative Christian turnout in 2000 was about four million votes below his projections in the last elections, and anticipating another close race they are counting on regular churchgoers, who tend to vote Republican, to help Mr. Bush come out ahead.

Yesterday, Mr. Reed urged the crowd at the Waldorf to do everything possible to ensure Mr. Bush's re-election, especially reaching out to acquaintances at their "churches, veterans halls and rotary clubs."

I sincerely hope none of Mr. Reed's True Believers, get-out-the-vote-for-Bush people turn up at my door. They won't enjoy the reception.

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OF "CATASTROPHIC SUCCESS," BUSH "THE DESERTER," AND MUCH MORE

I hope you're reading Juan Cole regularly. Unlike many of those in the Bush administration who can offer only the pose without substance (and many administration defenders in the press, and on blogs), Cole is an actual Middle East expert, with extraordinary knowledge of the region, its various cultures, and its history. Even if you disagree with all of Cole's personal political beliefs (which I think it is safe to say are well left of center), his writings are invaluable for an understanding of what is now transpiring in that part of the world.

This entry from today is a very good example of what I mean. Toward the conclusion of that post, in talking about Bush's characterization of the Iraq war as a "catastrophic success," Cole writes:

This is the line that the US military succeeded so well so fast against Saddam's army that chaos naturally ensued.

Democrats are having a lot of fun with the phrase, but the real problem is that that analysis of what went wrong is incorrect. The Bush administration simply mismanaged Iraq. It dissolved the Iraqi army, throwing the country into chaos. That army was not gone and would have gladly showed up at the barracks for a paycheck. It pursued a highly punitive policy of firing and excluding members of the Baath Party, which was not done in so thorough-going a manner even to Nazis in post-war Germany. It canceled planned municipal elections, denying people any stake in their new "government," which was more or less appointed by the US. It put all its efforts into destroying Arab socialism in Iraq and creating a sudden free market, rather than paying attention to the preconditions for entrepreneurial activity, like security and services. It kept changing its policies-- early on it was going to turn the country over to Ahmad Chalabi in 6 months. Then that plan was scotched and Paul Bremer was brought in to play MacArthur in Tokyo for a projected two or three years. Then that didn't work and there would be council-based elections. Then those wouldn't work and there would be a "transfer of sovereignty." All this is not to mention the brutal and punitive sieges of Fallujah and Najaf and the Abu Ghuraib torture scandal, etc., etc.

So it wasn't a catastrophic success that caused the problem. It was that Iraq was being run at the upper levels by a handful of screw-ups who had all sorts of ulterior motives, and at least sometimes did not have the best interests of the country at heart. And Bush is the one who put them in charge.

Earlier in the same entry, Cole says:

The speech-makers [at the Republican Convention last night] kept saying "we did not seek this war," and that it was imposed on us, and by God we were going to keep hitting back. That is, the rhetoric was that of righteous anger, of the avenging victim. While this argument works with regard to Afghanistan (which the US did not invade, only providing air cover to an indigenous group. the Northern Alliance), it is hollow with regard to Iraq. Only by confusing the "war on terror" with the war on Iraq could this rhetoric be even somewhat meaningful, and it is not a valid conflation.

No American president has more desperately sought out a war with any country than George W. Bush sought out this war with Iraq. Only Polk's war on Mexico, also based on false pretexts, even comes close to the degree of crafty manipulation employed by Bush and Cheney to get up the Iraq war. Intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was deliberately and vastly exaggerated, producing a "nuclear threat" where there wasn't even so much as a single gamma ray to be registered. Innuendo and repetition were cleverly used to tie Saddam to Usama Bin Laden operationally, a link that all serious intelligence professionals deny.

So, I agree that the war in Afghanistan was imposed on the US. But the war on Iraq was not. And pretending that the US had no choice but to attack Iraq and reduce it to a pitiful failed state is flatly dishonest. ...

I also objected to the use of 9/11 and the US military for partisan purposes. 9/11 happened to all of us, Republican and Democrat. Is it really plausible that all those firefighters from Queens are Republicans? But that was the impression they tried to give. As for singing all the service songs, not all servicemen support Bush. One person with direct knowledge of the incident told me that a US officer in Iraq had had to threaten his tired, dusty, frightened men with being disciplined if they did not stop referring to Bush as "the Deserter."

I am frankly not impressed by the Bush administration response to al-Qaeda. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are at large, as are a large number of other high al-Qaeda operatives. The Bush administration missed a chance to get a number of important al-Qaeda figures from Iran, which wanted some Mojahedin-e Khalq terrorists in return, because the Neocons in the Pentagon have some sort of weird alliance with the MEK mad bombers. Most of the really big al-Qaeda fish have been caught by Pakistan, to which the Bush administration has just farmed out some of the most important counter-insurgency work against al-Qaeda. Is this wise?

I strongly recommend that you pay Professor Cole a visit daily.

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NICE ONE

Will Saletan makes a point that Bush and his minions unfortunately have made it necessary to state clearly and forcefully:

The ultimate testament to Bush's manhood, supposedly, is the two wars he launched. As McCain put it, "He ordered American forces to Afghanistan" and "made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq." But the salient word in each of those boasts is the verb. Bush gives orders and makes decisions. He doesn't take personal risks. He never has.

I don't mean to be unfair to Bush. Vietnam was a lousy war. He wanted a way out, and he found it. But isn't it odd to see Republicans belittle the physical risks Kerry took in battle while exalting Bush's armchair wars and post-9/11 photo ops? Isn't it embarrassing to see Bob Dole, the GOP's previous presidential nominee, praise Bush's heroism while suggesting that Kerry's three combat wounds weren't bad enough to justify sending him home from Vietnam?

Watching the attacks on Kerry and the glorification of Bush reminds me of something Dole said in his speech to the Republican convention eight years ago. It was "demeaning to the nation," Dole argued, to be governed by people "who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned."

You tell me which of this year's presidential candidates that statement best describes.

Saletan has more. I recommend that you read it.

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RON PAUL, R.I.P.

No, Ron Paul hasn't died. But the news continues to piss me off today. I had been prepared to acknowledge that when he's good, Ron Paul can be very good. In fairness, this article is good.

However. A friend draws my attention to Paul's article praising the Texas GOP platform, which Paul says "is serious about reducing the size and scope of government." And he says the Texas party platform "is similarly bold when it comes to terrorism, civil liberties, and privacy." And he says...blahblahblah.

But here's one big giveaway: "It urges a return to truly republican government, based on limited federal powers and states rights." I just love it when libertarians can find that states have "rights." Why should individual states have "rights," but not the federal government? Isn't the federal government just a bigger state? Somehow, non-thinkers like Paul never seem to have time to address that tiny little problem in their "logic."

My friend also provided the link to Paul's wondrous Texas GOP platform. Well, let's see now. What else might there be in that platform, that Paul just didn't have room to discuss in his little paean of praise? There's this:

We believe that human life is sacred, created in the image of God. Life begins at the moment of fertilization and ends at the point of natural death. All innocent human life must be protected.

Guess that means abortion, even in the first trimester, and abortion-providers ought to be criminalized. Good one, Ron!

A bit closer to home for me, as a gay man, is this provision:

We believe that traditional marriage is a legal and moral commitment between a natural man and a natural woman. We recognize that the family is the foundational unit of a healthy society and consists of those related by blood, marriage, or adoption. The family is responsible for its own welfare, education, moral training, conduct, and property.

"A natural man" and "a natural woman." Sounds like bad news for transgendered people. But, you might be thinking, that's not so bad. Just the usual Republican theocratic mumbo-jumbo.

But ah, my friends, that is only the Preamble to the wondrous document that is the Texas RepubliGod platform. I'm having all kinds of trouble with the Adobe Acrobat version of the entire platform, and even with the HTML version of it via Google. But here's an article which sets forth the relevant parts -- which somehow Paul didn't think deserving of mention:

“The Ten Commandments are the basis of our basic freedoms and the cornerstone of our Western legal tradition. We therefore oppose any governmental action to restrict, prohibit, or remove public display of the Decalogue or other religious symbols.”

No, it’s not a passage from a sermon at your local Southern Baptist Church, but it could be. Instead, it is a statement from the Texas Republican Party Platform. This document, adopted at the GOP state party convention in early June, is inundated with references to God and religion. And while issues of separation of church and state were tossed out prior to the first “Four More Years” button ever being attached to a polyester, red, white and blue vest, GLBT rights were soon to follow.

The only word in the Texas Republican Platform repeated as often as the word “God” is the word “Homosexual.” And, of course, while any passage referring to a deity is written with the utmost of reverence and respect, the exact opposite is true for any dealing with non-heterosexuals. In fact, the utter contempt with which the state party holds gays and lesbians leaves one feeling they have just emerged from a good old fashioned, barn-burning, tie-them-to-a-fence-and-leave-them-to-the-vultures gay bashing. ...

Marriage receives the full attention of the state party in a rambling diatribe that leaves no room for guessing about where Texas is headed with regard to the subject of marriage equality.

“The Party supports the traditional definition of marriage as a God–ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman, which is the foundational unit of a healthy society, and the Party opposes the assault on marriage by judicial activists. We call on the President, Congress, and the Texas Legislature to take immediate action to defend the sanctity of traditional marriage. We urge Congress to exercise authority under the United States Constitution, and pass legislation withholding jurisdiction from the Federal Courts in cases involving family law, especially any changes in the traditional definition of marriage. We further call on Congress to pass and the state legislatures to ratify a marriage amendment declaring that marriage in the United States shall consist and be recognized only as the union of a natural man and a natural woman. Neither the United States nor any state shall recognize or grant to any unmarried person the legal rights or status of a spouse. We oppose the recognition of and granting of benefits to people who represent themselves as domestic partners without being legally married. Texas families will be stronger because of the passage by Governor Perry and the 78th Texas Legislature of the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’, which denies recognition by Texas of homosexual ‘unions’ legitimized by other states or nations. We urge the repeal of laws that place an unfair tax burden on families. We call upon Congress to completely remove the marriage penalty in the tax code, whereby a married couple receives a smaller standard deduction than their unmarried counterparts living together. The primary family unit consists of those related by blood, heterosexual marriage, or adoption.”

The Republicans leave no stone unturned with regard to marriage. Texans shouldn’t expect the mayor of a local city to follow the lead of the San Francisco mayor by standing up to the party in power to issue marriage licenses any time soon.

“The Party supports legislation that would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple and for any civil official to perform a marriage ceremony for a same-sex couple.”

And just when it seems the obsession with the lives of gays and lesbians has reached its ultimate height, the Grand Old Party of Texas created an entire section devoted to homosexuality in general.

“The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable ‘alternative’ lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should ‘family’ be redefined to include homosexual ‘couples.’ We are opposed to any granting of special legal entitlements, recognition, or privileges including, but not limited to, marriage between persons of the same sex, custody of children by homosexuals, homosexual partner insurance or retirement benefits. We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.”

And remember the joyous rallies held last June when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas Sodomy Law? They have an answer for that occasion, too…checks and balances be damned.

“The Party opposes the legalization of sodomy. The Party demands Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”

Marriage, Hate Crimes, Sodomy Laws, and Homosexuality in general…Is it over yet? Not by a long shot. Texas Republicans are very thorough. There are entire paragraphs (long ones) devoted to Adoption, Sex Education, the Military, and last, but not least, the Americans with Disabilities Act. ...

Texas Republicans support the military. It consists of brave and patriotic Americans. But in support of the armed forces they recommend some standard criteria to be followed by the Commander-in-Chief. There are exactly 15 items on this list of criteria. Items numbered two, three and four, respectively, are…the disqualification of homosexuals from military service; the immediate discharge of HIV positive individuals from service; and the exclusion of women from combat roles.

The entire article has even more, but that's enough to give you the idea. And it's all I can take.

So, even though Paul can be good on certain limited issues having to do with the "War on Terror" and civil liberties, apparently privacy goes only so far -- and it definitely does not include private acts between consenting adults, if those acts happen to be disapproved by the God in whom Paul and the Texas GOP believe. To say nothing of the other horrors described above.

Therefore, I say to Ron Paul: I can do very well without "friends" like you. Rest in peace.

You're dead to me, now and forever.

(Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.)

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