I Know What's Wrong with America

This week's 9-11 lie from George W.'s former speech writer Marc Thiessen is just the latest case. For close to eight full decades, the Right has steadily poured a deathly poison into Americans' eyes and ears. The result is that today we're sickened almost to the killing point.

There's a word for this. It's treachery. That's what a lie is, and take note: Treachery stems from the same root as treason. It means--please take these synonyms slowly, mull them over one by one--betrayal of trust, faith, or allegiance; perfidy, disloyalty, and treason.

Propaganda--let's be frank--lying in politics--is nothing new. What is new is today's lethality, systemization, ubiquity, and respectability. They aren't playing for partisan gain. They're playing for keeps.

And what is new is the credulity, ignorance, and apathy of the American public. Face it. We're a lot less educated and a lot more easily stampeded now than we once were. One such malady would be bad enough, but afflicted with all three? Baby, we just don't stand a chance.

For malicious lethality, I give you "baby killers," "the homosexual agenda," the hyped-up hoardes of "criminal, leprous immigrants," the "death panels." In fact, I give you the far Right's vicious Balkanization of all the American people into just so many expendable parts.

Journalist and blogger David Neiwert has aptly named this phenom "eliminationism." Unarguably, its inevitable consequences are the murders of Dr. Tiller, Matthew Shepard, Stephen T. Johns and thousands of nameless GLBT people, African Americans, immigrants, and desperate poor whose assassinations didn't make the national headlines. Not to mention the chance for millions of uninsured Americans to see a doctor, get a prescription, or have a life-saving surgery. Or prosecution of the Robber Barons of Wall Street. Or indictment of the last Administration for war crimes and theft on a galactic scale.

For systemization and ubiquity, I give you hidden corporate funding and uber-wealthy patrons. I give you Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Clear Channel, and the rest of talk radio, all full- or part-time propaganda arms of the Republican Party, all heirs of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and HUAC.

Add to far Right media the thousands of ultra-conservative nonprofits deputized (and given tax breaks) to incite us to lethal rage by telling lie after lie after lie. Citizens United, for instance. Focus on the Family. Eagle Forum. The 700 Club, and the numerous (tax-exempt) national curriculum coordinators for far Right, Christianist, activist home schooling. Front groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.

It's not just the far Right media impact or its voter recruitment, registration, and "education" consequences. It's also taxpayer subsidized direct mail avalanches of lies, distortions, and invective unleashed deliberatly for decades to whip up the base (and steal its money).

To these, add the astroturf websites and organizations, the tweets, and even the bumper stickers. Then from the total, subtract competing organizations as media consolidation, deregulation, and the Second Great Depression purge the airwaves and the presses of counterpoint, of fact.

Critical to understanding all this is grasping that there are thousands of heavily funded far Right organizations. If the far Right was once a "fringe," today it is pretty much the center of our culture. Its devotees occupy every sector of government, church, and culture, and just recently occupied even the White House.

Most of these organizations have innocuous or even positive names designed to confer credibility and respectability on ideas that nauseate and repel people of integrity. Americans for Truth, for instance, all about the "homosexual agenda." And FAIR, which the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago unmasked as one of at least ten manufactured virulent propaganda tools created by veteran racist Tom Tanton.

Such groups exist specifically to flood the media, to bury the gullible millions in "talking points" intended to whip up moral outrage, pit the well-off against the desperate, spur voter backlash and ultra-right lawmaking, and meanwhile to distract us all from the orchestrated Republican hosing of the American middle class.

This isn't made up. It's real. You know it to be true if you drew breath at all in the last 10 years.

Daily Media Matters e-alerts attempt to correct the rain of lies, but its circulation pales by contract to Rupert Murdock's reach.

For respectability, I give you United States senators, judges, sherrifs, Members of Congress, state legislators and governors, bishops, clergymen, physicians, heads and staffs of federal departments and agencies, professors, teachers, high school principals, librarians, and pharmacists.

It gets worse. The states are bristling with armed militias and so-called "patriot groups" poised to slaughter anyone they perceive as "not us." It will take only a spark. To provide it, talk show hosts incite murder every day. Murder, rebellion, whatever it takes.

Even so, and fully aware of what's at stake, "respectable" pundits and news anchors let the lies pass. Those who don't actually amplify the treasonous far Right Jihad on America (e.g., Lou Dobbs) either don't bother to get the facts themselves or are silent, baldly complict (e.g., Wolf Blitzer, Andrea Mitchell). Their jobs depend on their playing ball. After all, their corporate masters are heavily invested in a fascist America, because corporatism is a main tenet of fascism.

For eighty years or more, the American people have been systematically goaded by ever more concentrated poisoned prods into a brimming rage--over largely invented actions, omissions, and words attributed to this pro-Constitution, egalitarian Democratic President or that Democratic Justice or just to Lib'ruls in general.

But somehow, nobody's talking about how the heat is mostly over made-up, imaginary affronts to imaginary values (family values), imaginary traditions (the, um, unconstitutional "Judeo-Christian" nation), imaginary heroes (Ronald Reagan,fiscal conservative. George W. Bush, fighter pilot).

The War on Christmas? The "illegal takeover"? "Welfare Cadillacs"? The "Myth" of Global Warming? Liberals Appease the Enemy? See Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, and before them, see Paul Harvey, Joe McCarthy, and that high-toned FDR assassination cabal.

If you want to know what's wrong with America, or why the two parties can't cooperate, start right there.

The Left may not be spotless, but there's NO comparison, either quantitatively or qualitatively, between the Left and Right when it comes to corrupting the American cerebellum. In fact, one of the magic carpets under which this all hides is the lie of equivalence: "They all do it." Well, no. Doubt it? Go on: Name one Left counterpart action, organization, or person for every indictment in this rant. You can't. There is no counterpart to Fox. No counterpart to Limbaugh, or Lou Dobbs, or Pat Robertson.. Sen. Coburn. Sen. Santorum. Alan Keyes. None. Nada.

Again, there's a word for this.

This poison--certainly known in advance to be toxic waste--is both source and foundation of the unprecedented paralysis in Washington, DC that already threatens our capacity as a nation to respond to huge and growing national security, fiscal, environmental, and infrastructural threats.

The same polluted swill is also both source and foundation of the "Birthers," the Tea Partiers, the milititant Christianists, the Sarah Palin groupies, the wanna-be Joe the Plumbers (another hoax). This is the amniotic cesspool in which the whole dim-witted, fact-phobic, fear-drunk, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-pigment, anti-sex, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-labor, anti-humanist, anti-Constitution American Right has been steeped for 80 years.

Why's nobody talking about how all this is mostly over made-up stuff?

It would be funny except that America held such sacred promise.

It would be funny except that my dad lost his eye defending that promise.

It would be funny except that millions of people have already died, and millions more will follow, because those who perpetrate these hoaxes are who profit most. profits of perpetual war and the swindles of Wall Street. I give you Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the Neo-Cons all, and Paulson and Greenspan and Rice and pharma lobbyists and Dobbs-Limbaugh lapdogs.

For sure, the redneck hard-hats and the truck drivers who make up their conservative base won't profit. They're every bit as expendable as you or me: Remember W's repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act for Gulf Coast states right after Katrina? Remember what you learned from The Shock Doctrine? Remember for-profit, paid-per-capita prisons stuffed to the rafters through hard-Right propaganda and the not-coincidental suddenly intense war on Mexican immigrants? Remember "privatization," the plan that replaces public control of our infrastructure, water, utilities, hospitals, highways, and energy, and replaces them with with private ownership of water, utilities, the military, energy, hospitals, etc. Can you say ENRON? HCA? Blackwater/Xe? Hello?

So it turns out that the garbage we've been forcefed all these years isn't just false. It's also a boondoggle. Turns out that all this Rightwing raving isn't about (the bogus) "homosexual agenda" or the (made-up) illegal takeover, or the "emasculation" of the 'Merkun male at all.

It's about corporatism and privatization. It's about perpetual war for perpetual profit, and a "free market" stripped of regulation and stripped down for plunder. I give you Halliburton, KBR, Xe, Pepsico, Monsanto, the Carlyle Group, and the Wall Street con men. Even our far Right state legislatures, like Arizona's, and avowed racist lawmakers like Russell Pearce are penny-ante demagogues, pawns in a way bigger chess match and too stupid to know it.

There's a word for this. It's called treason. Yet the Legislative and Executive branches are either immobilized or co-conspirators, and our highest Court--that tool of the Right responsible for empowering W and Dick and legitimizing their Reign of Plunder--just took it over the top. When the US Supreme Court ruled recently that restricting corporate funding of political candidates is unconstitutional, they unleashed a corporatist muck tsunami that very well may choke us all to death.

For 30 pieces of silver, a platform, and a megaphone, men and women like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, John Boehner, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Tom Tancredo, Karl Rove, and a host of lesser infidels have sold their mortal souls.

They've sold ours, too, and any hope our children ever had for the American Dream.

There's a word for this. It's treason.

The American State of Mind

Pondering the notion that Americans might actually elect John McCain led me to wonder if we are the stupidest and most uninformed people on earth, or the most gullible and easily deceived, or all the above. A case can be made.

If being stupid is repeating the same catastrophic actions over and over while hoping for some outcome besides disaster, then to my mind we indicted ourselves in 2004. If we do it again, there's no point saying "God help us." We're past help, too stupid to splash around in the gene pool.

Lots of us have agonized about how low we have sunk since George Washington was first sworn in, and why. Back then we really were "the land of the free and the home of the brave." Despite our shortcomings, back then we had a magnificent collective vision and were willing to die to achieve it.

We had just come from tyranny. That is why we hadn’t yet forgotten that, although liberty resides in the soul as our human birthright, it can’t be actualized or preserved without first understanding what it is and that it is worth any price.

This is the "freedom" state of mind. It is, ultimately, a self-fulfilling attitude. Without it, freedom and liberty just don’t happen. That's what worries me.

You know, it’s been almost 400 years since those English colonists fled the tyranny of religious and political repression to create a free society. Whatever the shortcomings then and since, they and our later forebears had a clear vision and set out to accomplish it.

Since then, however, we seem to have forgotten the meaning of being without freedom, or else we’d never have consented to being ruled again by a tyrant.

But we have consented. What do I mean? A tyrant is above the law, unitary, aloof, arrogant, and unaccountable. That is precisely the stated perspective of this administration, and its vision for us of serfdom, intimidation, disenfranchisement, and perpetual surveillance is being realized as we speak--above all through defiance of the Constitution. Everything—-wiretaps, torture, contempt for Congress, politicization of the Justice Department, cruel capitalization on tragedy, stolen elections, pirated Treasury, rigged voting machines, stolen archives, trashed economy, and planted "news"-—stems from this fact. Despite swearing an oath on the Bible to protect and defend the Constitution, this Jesus-lovin' President perjured himself. He thinks the Constitution is just a piece of paper. He disdains it, ignores it at will.

And what of us? Rather than take George W. Bush's lies and assaults on our liberty seriously enough to defend ourselves and our birthright, we've bowed and stooped, stammered and excused, enabled, and folded. We are as responsible for this disaster as he is. If we lose that magnificent vision and all that has been achieved before, our children can rightly blame us all: you and me.

Why? Because, no, actually we are not brave. All our founding myths and folktales notwithstanding, we have shown that we can be manipulated so easily that even an obvious lie will cause us to approve really appalling things out of sheer terror. That's weak. That's really despicably weak.

We’ve several times now proved our abject cowardice by caving to mere rumors of war and warnings of catastrophe. I have in mind why we occupied Iraq, are terrorizing undocumented Mexican laborers, are excusing torture, are permitting a surveillance culture, abandoned New Orleans, allowed Bush to steal our treasury and rape our land; why we are, again, relinquishing our right to universal health care, why we are refusing to impeach this war-criminal and treasonous administration. Treasonous? What else do you call it when the Constitution is trashed, the commonwealth stolen, and the Congress and the people are treated with contempt? What else when our generals conspire to deceive us so that they'll get Pentagon consulting contracts?

We're the shiftless, blissful agents of our own demise. All that anyone with a blog or a microphone has to say these days is that we’ll suffer dire consequences if we don’t do as we’re told and do it now. And then we do.

That makes us puking cowards. It makes us ignorant, puking cowards. We can be stampeded by lies and rumors because we're uninformed, and worse still, we cherish our ignorance. We're so proud of it, in fact, that we even ridicule education as "elitist." We're so stupid that we even ridicule education itself as "elitist," when, as anybody with two brain cells to rub together knows, manipulation is elitist and education its only antidote.

We’re probably the only culture in history that has not cherished learning for its own sake and expected (at least) its (male) youth to attain certain standards of knowledge as a condition of self worth, if not of success and cultural preservation.

But bravery, like liberty, is a state of mind. Follow me here. Bravery begins in the centeredness of soul that recognizes its own and its neighbor's worth. That is why a brave person can't easily be deceived or intimidated. When courage stems from self respect—that is, when it stems from having the strength to draw the line from the utter conviction that we're worth defending in the first place—-then brave people just do not accept being manipulated, lied to, and toyed with. Those things fly in the face of self respect.

So. When you come right down to it, the fact is that liberty, freedom, bravery, and courage all stem from understanding what's really valuable in life, and from the wisdom to act accordingly.

The genuinely courageous, and the authentically liberated therefore understand that Truth is as essential to self respect as it is to national security, and that self respect, therefore, is one of life’s greatest values. That is why brave people do whatever is necessary to encourage freedom of speech and ensure a vigilant, skeptical, honest, probing, and free press, whereas cowardly people try to silence it.

We can’t both be brave and fear the truth or fail to understand that Truth is most likely found in the clash of opposing convictions.

Alas, we can tell what we are by the state of reportage and debate in this country today. Our patron saints are Rush Limbaugh and the Militiamen, Ann Coulter and Bay Buchanan. Our brilliant analysts the likes of Wolf Blitzer, Howie Kurtz, Tim Russert, Chris Matthews. God Almighty. What they want, above all, is to control our thinking and stampede us into violent, racist, and xenophobic frenzies. Is that really what we want? Is that really what we think is in our best longterm interest? Have we learned nothing from the last 100 years?

Well, as my mother used to say, you can tell if God resides in an action by its consequences.

Anyway, maybe our susceptibility to the grossest manipulation and to institutionalized deception is a symptom. Maybe it indicates precisely that we've lost our self respect somewhere along the way.

Perhaps it was when we Americans chose to value flash over quality--around about the mid-1950s, I guess, when fins defined The Car. Perhaps it was when we decided to value profits over the people who achieve them, about the time Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers union. (The dues are coming now.) Maybe it was when we stopped teaching our kids that it isn’t winning; it really is whether you play the game with integrity. Maybe we lost that when Little League dads started cursing umpires instead of teaching their kids a better ball game. Maybe it was when we decided to equate dignity with celebrity and character with wealth. That gave us the Reign of the junk bond king and Britney Nation. Or maybe it was when we started building our mansions of particle board and Scotch tape, and our fortunes on Ponzi schemes, and our self esteem on designer jeans.

Maybe we Americans can be manipulated to accept deception in exact proportion to the extent that we ourselves have come to value appearance much more than we value reality. Think about that.

We love cheap thrills to the point that our kids can’t tell the difference between Yellowstone and Disneyland. We live our lives in fantasy worlds of cyberspace and television to the extent that reality either bores or offends us. How else explain cosmetic surgery and foregoing regular actual water for overpriced stuff that comes in a bottle? We flash our neighbors with a "prosperity" made of credit cards, interest-only mortgages, and Lease-a-Beemer. We reckon that a day at Wal-Mart or Saks or Neiman’s is a day of life in the Real World, laugh at environmentalists, and tell our kids they’re marvelous even if they’re despicable, cretinous little snots.

In this America we’ve made, of faux achievement, faux culture, and faux substance, we might as well be faux heroes and faux patriots, too.

Anything better would be wasted.

Questions They Won't Ask McBush

Because the nation desperately needs three more weeks of the same old same old relative to Jeremiah Wright and Hillary Clinton, the following questions will not be asked of McCain and his answers will not be repeated on endless news cycles for months to come. I'm sure you have other questions that will not be asked or answered. Please advise.


How will "we" (by which I mean us and our children) pay for your war?

Explain how being indebted to China for the cost of this war secures America.

What will "we" (ditto) have to do without here at home in order to pay for your war?

The Shi'ites and Sunnis have been warring for centuries. Why will a delay in our leaving change that?

If we don't give Iraq notice, why on earth should they "step up"? We're doing the dirty work and providing billions in slush funds. Isn't that exactly the wrong incentive?

Are you afraid to stop the war because war profiteering is the only thing driving what's left of this economy?

Do you intend to ask the Department of Justice to conduct a criminal investigation into the fraud and abuse that have cost US taxpayers billions in this war, and to seek compensation? If not, why not? After allm, that fraud dwarfs the cost of earmarks.

What will you do to clean up fraud and waste in the Pentagon, and to seek restoration of overcharges from US corporations?

What was your role in forcing the sale of Navajo tribal lands on Black Mesa to outside coal companies?

Miscellany

I'm very sad that John Edwards has suspended his campaign, and really mystified at this outcome. No need to write lengthily. The clear question is why, when the last 8 years of de-regulation, no regulation, runaway greed and a tsunami of official corruption have left 95% of us worse off than we were when Clinton left office. It's impossible to weigh how much was the man, the message, the zeitgeist, but it is obvious that the media ignored Edwards relative to the attention they payed to Obama and Clinton. I imagine the coverage was about 8 or 10 to 1. Even before Obama caught up with Clinton, Edwards was essentially cast as an "also ran." And I think the explanation for that is quite clear. Large corporations own our government, which is their feed trough. Of course they don't want Edwards's message to rain down in our ears. Unfortunately, they also own the media.

This calls into question the meaning of the vote today. When the media can outright bar a candidate from even appearing at a national debate, as they did Kucinich, and can lowball other candidates at their discretion, we might well ask what kind of chance the American people actually have today to effect meaningful change. It seems to me that we are trapped within limited alternatives fixed by corporate boardrooms, and that makes me, as a patriotic citizen, perfectly furious.

Closely related is the fact that the same dozen or so people have overwhelming influence on what news we hear and what spin it gets. This includes Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell (wife of the former Fed Chief, Alan Greenspan), Wolf Blitzer, Jack Cafferty, the Faux puppets, Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Joe Scarborough, Keith Olberman (the token liberal), a handful of pretty anchors (male and female), and Bey and Pat Buchanan. Of these, one is progressive and the majority are not moderate but Rightwing. Amazing, isn't it? These same few people control the national agenda and have done so for quite a few years. I so wonder what part of what I'm told is spun, wrong, and trivial by comparison with what I need to know. I mean, I'm pretty sure I don't need to know that a police convoy removed Britney from her home today or that there's new evidence in the most recent dead blonde girl case. I would like to know what executive orders W has signed and what they mean; what really is going on with the market and the dollar and the housing bust; how I would perceive the Clintons if Democrats and progressives had controlled the media over the past 18 years (I'm guessing like Ron and Nancy Reagan are perceived by the Right); the real impact of global warming; the cost of corruption in Iraq and in the Pentagon . . . you know. Stuff like that.

MoveOn wants me to vote now for either Obama or Clinton. I can't. I don't know yet. This isn't an easy choice, and I need more information especially about global warming, regulation, how to address "free" trade and the "free" market, how to ensure that our votes count as voted, and how to ensure the safety and security of this country without pouring our rights and freedoms down the toilet. Oh, and whether the Bush Crime Administration will face justice, ever.

She "Cried"!

Menu this morning: Words on toast.

What's clear is that nobody knows how to call it when a woman and an African American are candidates for President. Obviously the pollsters are not asking the right questions, and have an insufficient understanding of how women vote and why. (Not that I did such a great job of prognostication.)

The MSM analysis, such as it is, is fascinating. Every commentary suggests that there is a phalanx of angry New Hampshire women, and that they came out to support Clinton in an act of massive "gender solidarity." Nothing else, mind. Just "gender solidarity." They've reached into their collective subconscious and hauled out the fourth grade playground.

You know what I think? If it weren't so trivializing, I'd think it was funny. Imagine: Thelmas and Louises in their trundling hundreds, galoshing up the snowbanks and down the frozen sidewalks screaming "WOMAN!"

But what we can reliably infer from this fantasy is that there is a frightened phalanx of freudian males writing election commentary. The most obvious tip-off came in that sublimely enlightened "Vaginal-Americans" exchange between Tucker Carlson and Cliff May, President, can you believe it, of the alleged Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. (Footmote: Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson was also present, but to his credit, seemed embarrassed and wasn't having any of it, maybe partly because the premises underlying this projectile vomitfest also implicitly ridicule the African American cohort! That's how clueless these guys are, and on national TV, yet.)

In case you've forgotten:

Tucker Carlson: "Gene, this is an amazing statistic: 94 percent of women say they'd be more likely to vote if a woman were on the ballot. I think of all the times I voted for people just because they're male. You know? The ballot comes up, and I'm like, 'Wow. He's a dude. I think I'll vote for him. We've got similar genitalia. I'm--he's getting my vote.' . . . the Clinton campaign says: 'Hillary isn't running as a woman.' Well, that's actually completely false, considering the Hillary campaign--nd I get their emails--relentlessly pushes the glass ceiling argument. 'You should vote for her because she's a woman.' They say that all the time."

Cliff May: "At least call her a Vaginal-American."

Tucker Carlson: "Is that the new phrase? Boy, that's nasty. I don't think I can say that."

And off they gallop, yukking it up, to Planet Mysogynistica, where they remain, lost and wandering.

Tucker's assertions make two things clear about Tucker. One, he is one of the most intellectually dishonest individuals in media, and that's saying something really damning. Two, couldn't be plainer: When he thinks of "gender solidarity," he goes right to the crotch, to the genitalia, in his words.

The layers of trivialization in that construct are just boggling. The contempt blown across the TV screens is frightening, especially since the disease isn't limited to that little clod, Tucker.

He and his fellow Penile American pollster/spokesmen cannot see that gender encompasses anything else. No brains are involved here. No complex social histories, no variations by race, class, age, culture, religion. Women in New Hampshire didn't vote for Hillary because they support her policies. Their vaginas voted for her vagina.

And at the time, Digby made this excellent point:

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been desperate to "recapture" the white male vote and nobody thought it was illegitimate to appeal to a constituency on the basis of their race and gender. But when Clinton is said to be appealing to women, it's as if she's breaking some sort of taboo --- that she's being narrow and opportunistic and cheap.

It's "moronic" in Carlson's jumped up little world for the Clinton campaign to consider what might appeal to 50% of the nation, but it's sound strategy when the boys do it? It's just so. tediously. typical.

And then there's this. "Gender solidarity?" Oh yeah right. I haven't seen "gender solidarity" since Billy Jean King whupped Bobby Riggs in the tennis match of the sexes. That was like in 1973, after Riggs bragged about male superiority.

Gender solidarity? Outside the game field, there never has been any such thing and there never will be, because women are not reducible to a single common denominator--not even biologically.

Too much, maybe 90%, of the commentary about the Clinton campaign boils down to a fixation on gender stereotypes and a sexist "body politics" masquerading as political analysis. Cris Matthews is notoriously obsessed with this stuff. From practically panting for Bush's package to ridiculing Hillary's voice, for Matthews, Tucker, and the boys, it's all about the Cult of Masculinity's revulsion at the mere idea of a vagina in the White House. Can't stand her. It's her voice. No, it's her laugh. Wait, she's too old. It's the woman vote. She's controlling (read self-actualized, thinking person). She's cold. She's unemotional. She cried.

Here's a thought: Let American women make Tucker's nightmare come true. For when they do it unto Hillary, they do it unto you, too.

Sharia Sleight of Hand

We see masses in Sudan screaming for the execution of the British teacher whose charges named a teddy bear “Muhammad.” We hear that the Saudis sentenced “the girl from Qatif,” who was gang-raped by 7 men, to 6 months in jail and 90 lashes, and then upped the lashings to 200 on appeal. We’re informed that two youths in Iran were imprisoned, lashed 218 times, and then hanged for being gay. We learn that a woman in Iraq and another in Afghanistan were stoned to death in so-called “honor” killings, and that these are not isolated incidents.

Since the Occupation, cable TV periodically spotlights a case involving an incomprehensible punishment for women, and, less often, the gay media report a similar event involving gay men. In both cases, reporters’ contextual analysis is pretty much limited to allegations about the victim’s character or behavior, and to justifiably shocked indictment of Sharia, the Islamic code of law.

To this combustible mix, add our fury at the 9-11 attacks and the tons of toxic waste pumped out about Islam by Far Right talk radio and prominent but ignorant televangelists and White House denizens. The probable result is that most average Americans equate Islam with exactly this kind of thing.

Not. The reality is that Sharia is not a monolithic code of law in the Western sense. It's a complex legal/theological/cultural tradition influenced by the Koran among other things, but by no means synonymous with it.

Furthermore, there are five official varieties of Sharia, and how each is interpreted and applied depends on historical, tribal, political, secular legal, and circumstantial variables, among other things--including who's doing the judging.

Five crimes, known as the Hadd offenses, are mentioned in the Koran as “affronts to God.” They and the crime of apostacy receive the harshest punishments and thus also the western spotlight. These are:

*Wine-drinking and, by extension, alcohol drinking, punishable by flogging
*Unlawful sexual intercourse, punishable by flogging for unmarried offenders and stoning to death for adulterers
*False accusation of unlawful sexual intercourse, punishable by flogging
*Theft, punishable by the amputation of a hand
* Highway robbery, punishable by amputation, or execution if the crime results in a homicide

Experts insist that extreme Hadd punishments are rare and that they are applied under the strictest evidentiary and regulatory conditions. This is fine as far as it goes. However, as in Christian lands, sometimes these punishments are meted out by vigilantees who, by definition, operate beyond official control. That’s what makes them vigilantees.

OK, now factor in international political agendas, village illiteracy and extreme cultural isolation, and the ease with which all people, including us, can be whipped into frenzies of outrage by manipulative religious and secular leaders. (Duh!) Now, possibly, one begins to comprehend some of what we're dealing with confronted with these events and in their reporting, and can approach an estimate what we're not comprehending.

Come to that, I don’t recall ever being informed by cable news of even one of the hundreds of thousands of judgments made daily under even one version of Sharia in even one Islamic country in, say, business or finance, or even one temperate judgment or exoneration made under Sharia in personal law. As a matter of fact, all I know of Sharia is pretty much encapsulated in a misogynistic stoning-amputation-hanging frame. How about you? (Here's another take.)

To wrap it up, I don’t subscribe to the notion that people outside a culture can’t fairly or ought not comment on it. But when they do, in my view, they’re obligated to be as informed as possible about the whole context—religious, traditional, cultural, legal, circumstantial, and political—and to be as critical of their own cultural barbarities and aberrations.

Certainly these hideous practices should be condemned and eliminated immediately. But I'm not holding my breath, and I'm not waiting for us to set the example by cleaning our own act.

Eliminating these practices would be like extracting the keystone from an elaborate arch venerated for eons and relied on for culture-wide social control. That is, whether imposed by illiterate vigilantees or the courts, these “honor” killings and barbaric punishments are all of a piece. They are about male supremacy, an institution there, as here, that is profoundly threatened by liberated women and by liberated homosexuals. That is because the patriarchy depends on rigid sex role assignments for its ideological coherence, and liberated women and Queers who won't oblige them reveal its arbitrariness and motivations.

But critics ought not equate these brutal practices with Islam, as CNN's Jack Cafferty did just this evening. It's demagoguery. It's inadequately informed, inaccurate, and unfair. Doing so should make us feel roughly as we would if most Arabs equated reports of the rail-fence execution of Matthew Shepard with Christianity and American justice. Remember, those American village boys grew up thinking the Bible condemns gay people. It is like Arabs equating lynching with Christianity and American justice. Remember: The Ku Klux Klan was and remains driven by exactly the same priorities now, and is populated by similar kinds of ignorant extremists who, similarly, justified their agenda by reference to their own holy book, and in some villages, is sanctioned implicitly by offician and ecclesiastical silence.

We also ought not overlook the political context, our own and theirs, in which these news reports occur. To its credit, CNN this morning pointed that out with respect to today’s events in Sudan. What we’re seeing there actually is not about the Koran or Sharia, neither of which says anything about naming a teddy bear “Muhammad.” It’s about providing a bunch of illiterate villagers a vulnerable westerner to stand in for Tony Blair and George Bush and be made to pay for real, perceived, and manipulated political humiliations. It’s not about Islam. Ultimately, what's happening in Sudan is about Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, bases in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and George Bush. It's about rage.

It's also about how the White House would like us to think of Islam.

Shoot when you must. But don’t be like Cheney. Aim first.

GOP Family Values, or How the MSM Covers the News

From this week's Washington Blade:

Gay Georgetown students protest handling of alleged hate crime
Son of former White House aide charged in anti-gay assault
Lou Chibbaro, Jr.
Friday, October 05, 2007

Members of Georgetown University’s gay student group organized a campus protest Monday to draw attention to what they said was the school’s failure to alert students about an anti-gay assault allegedly committed by one student against another.

D.C. police on Sept. 27 charged Philip Anderton Cooney, 19, a Georgetown sophomore and the son of a former White House official, with simple assault in connection with an alleged Sept. 9 gay bashing incident that occurred one block from the main entrance to the campus.