Link added

To my previous post.

"We were constantly on the alert"

A Sullivan reader relates her story of her two sons and a Franciscan priest who "befriended" her two sons who were altar boys at their church. She writes that she and her convert husband "were constantly on the alert for any hints of unusual priestly interest" in her boys.

Even though they were devout Catholics and had their sons serving as altar boys, this couple was on alert, basically assuming that priests engaged in pederasty. If that weren't bad enough, so as long as it didn't happen to their sons, they were perfectly willing to let such behavior slide.

Need I say it? The Catholic church is one fucked up institution. I'm beginning to realize that all that sexual imagery in religious artwork hanging in the Vatican museum were not just reflective of the way artists liked to depict the human form. Could it be that these works were the early priests' version of pornography?

Abandon Ship

You know something is up when the rats start diving into the briny. One of Sarah Palin's most vocal supporters, Matt Continetti, delivers this stinging statement over at The Weekly Standard:

When Palin emerged on the scene in August 2008, she spoke as an authentic voice of non-coastal, upper-middle-class cultural conservatism. It was believable when she said, in her speech to the 2008 RNC, that she wasn't much different from your average hockey mom. Not anymore. In the years since, Palin's become something different -- a global celebrity who fuses politics and entertainment in new and startling and occasionally discomfiting ways. She's also become incredibly rich. But, as her personal wealth has increased, the number of people who think she is qualified to be president has decreased. The Palin brand is more and more powerful, but for a smaller group of people.

I believe that until her approval ratings drop below 30% she is a credible challenger for the GOP nomination in 2012 (especially since the talent pool in the GOP is currently so shallow).

Right of Reagan?

I never thought I'd see the day when the Republican Party was so far to the right of their modern-day founder, Ronald Reagan. But, thanks to Andrew Sullivan's intrepid work, I can pass onto you this little snippet of fluff.

That Giuliani commits such a bald-faced gaffe is not surprising to me. He's had his foot in his mouth for so long since 9/11 that he's chewed right through his soles and is now gnawing at his fallen arches.

Funny thing is, Reagan is starting to look pretty damn good (even with all the deficit spending he did and with all the strong-arming of unions and shafting of the middle and working classes). In some ways, Obama himself has started to resemble the old fart in the way he deliberates and commits himself to peace first, before rushing out with guns a-blazin' like the Cheneyites did.

WikiLeaks Video of US Troops Killing Unarmed Iraqis

If you haven't seen the video on YouTube yet, I've embedded it in this blog post and linked to it here (warning: it is extremely graphic and very disturbing). Glenn Greenwald has a brilliant post today on the video. Money quote:

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.

Andrew Sullivan compiles some reactions around the internet here and from readers here. Some choice bits:

When people like you (and me) supported a war in the first place, we might have stopped and reflected on the fact that something like this was well-nigh guaranteed to occur - again and again. I would challenge you to find any conflict in the history of war, that occurred on this scale, where an event like what occurs in this video does not happen hundreds of times.

...

This is what happens when you support a war. War is not and will never be clean and sterile, or even make sense. Upstanding Apache pilots explicitly follow their R.O.E. and yet the story still ends in unspeakable tragedy. ... Instead of getting incensed because we just discovered what war actually looks like, we should continue to channel our rage at the politicians who so were so cavalier with tossing our troops into these situations. Politicians who, conveniently, never had to serve in the combat and be exposed to these things.

See, it's not shocking that U.S. soldiers killed unarmed civilians, particularly unarmed civilians who were trying to rescue a mortally wounded, unarmed civilian. What's shocking is that we don't know about this, or we think this is unusual in any context of war. Soldiers "explicity follow their rules of engagement and yet the story still ends in unspeakable tragedy." This is what war looks like. For my generation and the one before mine, My Lai should have slammed this point home. For those who do not remember or have not studied or read about My Lai, the WikiLeaks video is going to look like a bunch of stupid soldiers who cavalierly dispatch unarmed people with 30-millimeter gunfire, all the while salivating for permission to "engage" the enemy. At one point in the video, while the Apache helicopter's camera is trained on a wounded man who turns out to be a Reuters employee and the van containing civilians and children pulling alongside to rescue him, one of the soldiers whines, "C'mon, let us shoot!" Like this is a fucking video game or something.

Yet, this is what happens all the time, and our government shields us from it in the name of protecting us from the ugliness of war, and the complicit media go along with it because it would generate protest calls, letters, calls for boycotts, if these images were beamed in all their explicit g(l)ory into our living rooms during dinner.

I'm glad to have seen the video, even though it made my stomach turn. I didn't hate the soldiers who killed the Iraqis or the journalists, since I know that their Rules of Engagement result in stuff like this in order to avoid making a mistake that results in unnecessary American casualties. Having spent some time among soldiers in the mid-'90s, I found them to be dedicated men and women doing a tough job. What I hated was that people were going to seize on the release of this video and condemn it for showing us the horrors of war (like when the Bush admin prohibited the showing of flag draped coffins being offloaded military planes at Andrews AFB). We need to see the horrors of war more often, if only to lend some much needed gravity to deciding whether or not to go to war again, especially a war based on false evidence like Iraq.

Quote for the Day

"Yes, it was a shocking thing to say, and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. If they open it and read it, they don't have to like it. If you read it and dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You could write to me and you could complain about it. You could write to the publisher. You could write to the papers. You could write your own book. You could do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read." -- Phillip Pullman, author of The Goodman Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, responding to a question from an audience member at an Oxford University event on March 28 about whether the title of his book was offensive to Christians. Video here (hat tip Andrew).

Refreshingly blunt without being coarse. Do you think that the right- and left-wing PC crowds would agree?

Why the Tea Party Will Destroy Itself

In all of its railings against taxes, HCR, immigration reform, etc., it should at least be mindful of the way it communicates, right? Well, this flickr photo gallery shows how well the Tea Partiers communicate via signs, t-shirts, and beauty pageant sashes.

My favorite below:

Immigration Issues Heats Up AZ Senate Primary

John McCain is hopping mad and has sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano (former AZ governor) urging that federal troops be deployed to secure the US border with Mexico. All this over the shooting of a rancher who, neighbors say, was shot by a border-crossing illegal immigrant who was on the rancher's property.

J.D. Hayworth, the Republican Congressman vying for McCain's seat, accuses McCain of being politically opportunistic and is using the shooting to score political points with voters to show how tough he'll be on immigration issues. "I'm glad John McCain has decided to join the effort to secure our borders," Hayworth said in a statement. "I only wish this same passion and fervor had come sooner. One day of anger and outrage does not make up for 28 years of inaction."

Hayworth is right, of course. John McCain has never met an issue yet that he didn't want to politicize. Perhaps he ought to suspend his campaign to deal with it, convene a meeting in Phoenix with the governor and the state attorney general, as well as other state-level political leaders, and then have no plan to offer and nothing to say.

Insubordination

Army Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a physician, has joined the birther movement and has appeared in a video stating that he will disobey any order, including, it seems, an order to deploy to Afghanistan, from a superior officer until Obama produces a birth certificate showing that he is a US citizen.

Obviously, insubordination of this kind calls for a court martial and incarceration if he's convicted. But let's pause for just a second and remember that he, and the organization which produced the video, also know this. So why would he go public like this? Simple: to keep the story alive, to generate media buzz (Huffington Post has the story, but I haven't seen it anywhere else in the "liberal" media. Not even Faux News is covering it). Hasn't really worked yet, I think.

Like much of what the Right thinks is important in governing this country, it appears that this story, too, will fall flat. There are bigger issues now, and even while nearly 50% of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, it's time for advanced citizenship to kick in and deal with what's really important.

The biggest problem now facing the Republicans, as one of the panelists in last week's Real Time with Bill Maher said it, is that they are no longer a national party. They have become a leaderless, amorphous conglomeration of regional and local parties. The agendas are different, although they all share two things in common: they are all infused with some degree of crazy, and they all hate Obama so much they would rather pick up their marbles and go home than cooperate with him.