FairAndUNbalanced.com

The importance of an individual in the White House can be roughly measured by the length of the title. The relationship is inverse. Less means more.

Barack Obama is President.
Rahm Emanuel is Chief of Staff.
Valarie Jarrett and David Axelrod are Senior Advisors.

Kevin Jennings is Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. A long way down the line. But Jennings is making headlines. Conservative Christians charge him with abetting statutory rape. At issue is a counseling session he had as a teacher with a gay student. The youngster acknowledged sexual contact with a man he had met the night before at a bus stop.

Did Jennings have a legal obligation to report the incident? A teacher/student relationship is not legally protected as would be a lawyer’s relationship with a client, or a member of the clergy with one of the flock. But most of us want kids to feel free to talk with teachers in confidence, with some exceptions.

Criminal intent, physical violence, and child abuse are among the exceptions. Statutory rape is a form of child abuse, and has to be reported. Sex is rape whenever it is not consensual. Consent can’t be given by a child. That is why defending Roman Polanski, who fled the country to avoid sentencing after conviction for statutory rape, is a sign of Hollywood corruption. A teacher is obligated to report statutory rape.

In 2006, it became obvious that Congressman Mark Foley was making sexual advances to Congressional Pages, GOP leaders left him alone. The cover up left Foley in charge of a committee safeguarding children. After it all exploded, Foley did not face charges in the District of Columbia. That is because the age of consent in DC is 16, the age of the boys he hit on. Conservative Christians at the time defended his “harmless pranks.” Angry conservatives published the names and addresses of the boys who had “tattled.” But Republicans were bounced from the Congressional majority.

In Jennings’ case, the accusations have turned out to be bogus. The boy was 16, the age of consent in Massachusetts. As with Foley, the adult was legally untouchable. It appears he was also unreachable, having been an anonymous one night stand. Jennings was concerned that the boy had not used a condom. The despondent boy told him his life was not worth saving. Jennings objected and they argued. The young fellow left a bit happier.

Conservative Christians, who believe they possess an exemption from the 9th Commandment, have falsely accused Jennings, changing the age from 16 to 15. They argue that the boy should have been outed. But I like to think the youngster’s life may have been affected in a more wholesome way.

He had encountered a teacher who actually thought he was worth saving.

This past weekend Steve Benen, who blogs for the Washington Monthly, offered a rundown of conservative Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs.

Benen wants to give credit where due and decided it was due in Johnson’s derision of a few documented cases of conservative dementia. It is worth noting, as Benen does, that Johnson has been getting some heat from conservatives for turning away from the sort of thing that is becoming right wing orthodoxy. He approves of Johnson’s call to reject extremism, and hopes others follow Johnson’s sensible lead. He quotes Johnson:

This turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP — unless people start behaving like adults instead of angry kids throwing tantrums and ranting about conspiracies and revolution.

Benen is an unfailingly thoughtful writer, and Johnson does deserve credit for courage in the face of withering unreasoning from fellow conservatives. But the analysis offered by both is misguided.

The Republican Party is not in a downward spiral because of evil or stupid leaders. There are some demonstrably undesirable characters, to be sure. Some can be shown to possess less than stellar intellect. But those things are effects, not causes.

The GOP is the victim of a sociological phenomenon. Today’s technology was not around during those times when Democrats went around the bend. In those days, reality had a way of imposing itself. The loss of an election or two had an astonishingly sobering effect. Re-examination of ideas was the inevitable outcome of electoral waterboarding. This is not happening today.

Technology offers a wider spread of choice than ever before. Conservatives are clustering around those outlets that tell them what they want to hear. The country is really with them. “They don’t surround us, advises Glenn Beck. “We surround them.” If it wasn’t Beck it would be someone else.

The drumbeat is endless. Conservatism has not failed, true believers are told. It cannot fail. It can only be failed. The party drifts rightward, and loses moderates. This causes a further rightward drift, and the loss of more moderates. The cycle is hard to stop.

The drumbeat fuels the cycle, but it is not the cause. It is sought out by those who are addicted to the comfortable message. The comfort sought by the base is at the base of the problem.

The message is the massage.

Michael Steele knows the Republican Party is fighting for more than the next election. They are battling for the loyalty of tomorrow’s voters, the kids who will come to the ballot box a decade or more from now.

He is right about that. Events have forced a re-evaluation of many of the perceived failures of the administration of Jimmy Carter. He was a stronger and more prescient executive than was commonly seen by even most of us who voted for him as he lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980. But many of those who were coming to even the dimmest political awareness in the 1970s grew up to be reliable Republicans. They were taught early on to associate Democrats with economic flubbery and failure in international security.

Today’s children, seeing parents recover from President Bush, are likely to grow up as Democrats. So Steele wants to recast the Republican image to achieve greater appeal in what he calls “urban-suburban hip-hop settings”. His self-conscious use of terms unfamiliar to many older adults has provoked some comment. He is against “bling bling” in stimulus efforts. He offers “some slum love out to my buddy,” Bobby Jindal, who he says “is doing a friggin’ awesome job in his state.”

I dimly recall a sitcom I saw in my nearly forgotten youth. The title and plot escape me, but the scene was one of a middle class suburban professional in a casual sweater arguing outside of his comfortable house with a couple of hipsters. This was in pre-hippie days. As they reject his uncool values, he verbally pushes back. “Hey, I’m with it,” he protests. “I’m hep.”

Michelle Bachman, hosting part of the recent CPAC conservative fest, got into the spirit of the effort to appeal to America’s future voters. “Michael Steele, you be da man!” She then repeated, for emphasis, “You be da man!”

The GOP is rapidly becoming a regional party of racially resentful white men. A few Republican office holders seem to want to stop the downward spiral with actual rethinking of values and worldview. But they are becoming more afraid of their own volatile base than of the general electorate. If the message must stay the same, what is left?

Steele gambles that wrapping the grand old message in a hipper, cooler, younger language will do the trick. Sometimes a conservative associate becomes daring enough to join in with what fringe whites imagine black folks to be. A sort of minstrel show without, thankfully, blackface.

Will young kids grow up remembering a sincere effort to communicate in language they understand? Maybe. I suspect the image they carry will be an out of tune attempt to be cool, combined with intolerance and ignorance.

I’m hep. Hear me rap. Farm out! Right arm! Outta State! You be da man!

Your very cool turn.

In the made for television movie about the events leading to 9/11 that played over a year ago on ABC, much of the drama had to do with failure to stop Osama bin Laden before the 9/11 attacks. You can see the frustration of the military people with the terrorist mastermind in their sights, as they wait for permission from Washington to pull the trigger. You can see the uncertainty as a sweaty Clinton bureaucrat hesitates, finally letting the opportunity go by. As the television drama demonstrates, Osama lived and so thousands died on American soil. It happened almost exactly that way.

Almost. Except it was not Clinton’s people who backed down from attacking bin Laden. It was the Bush administration. ABC had turned research for the drama over to a conservative ideologue who made the conscious decision to turn history on its head. Bill Clinton was shown as weak and clueless. President Bush was shown as unflinchingly heroic.

With the harsh memory of that administration not even beginning to fade into merciful obscurity, the distortions of loyalists begin. Viral emails, occasional television commentary, radio and print, carry a repetition of the familiar tale. President Clinton was weak, indecisive, letting bin Laden go, and leaving President Bush to face the consequence of near criminal negligence.

In fact, President Clinton was mocked during his term by Republicans who thought his focus on terrorism was obsessive. In an article published almost exactly two months before the 9/11 attacks, David Keane, head of the Conservative Union, pointed to specific anti-terrorism activities by the Clinton administration. He regarded everything from financial tracking to cut off funds to terrorists, to efforts within the United States to find and stop terrorism before it happens as unjustified infringements. He praised Republican statements opposing anti-terrorist actions, and urged Republicans to make these useless activities a major campaign issue in 2002 and beyond. President Clinton more than tripled funding for fighting terrorism. He multiplied the number of intelligence agents assigned to stopping terrorism by similar proportions, to 357 percent of what had been.

He and his people begged the new Bush administration to continue and expand those efforts. Their pleas were laughed away, with tragic results. Anti-terrorist budgets were slashed, agents reassigned to anti-porn projects, CIA warnings derided.

I don’t blame President Bush for disregarding the warnings, and discontinuing efforts by the Clinton administration against terrorism. He did not know, did not suspect what would happen. The Bush administration regarded Clinton as a little crazed on the topic of terrorism.

I do object to the continuing efforts of some sweaty palmed conservatives for whom the truth is just not good enough.

This year, as every year, we celebrate the bravery of those founders who quite likely would have been executed had their Declaration of Independence not prevailed in battle. It is noteworthy that that theirs was not the only independence declared during those uncertain days.

Of General Washington’s 100 or so slaves, 17 stole into the night in search of freedom. Thomas Jefferson, who unsuccessfully sought to retain a condemnation of slavery in the American Declaration, lost 23 of the 200 slaves he owned. They escaped slavery and fled their celebrated owners.

Continue reading “Patriotism and America”

I was moved as a friend once described how it was to be pursued and sometimes beaten as a child by those calling him “Christ Killer.” The worst part, at least for him, was the constant role of outsider: always being the other. An irony is that Jesus was not crucified because he was rejected by the Jews of their day. In fact, his great and growing popularity contributed to the determination of some to have him eliminated.

Fortunately, conservative Christian fundamentalist leaders have largely purged from their midst anti-Jewish bigots and haters. Sadly, those same fundamentalists are still plagued by other hatreds and a persistent literalism that seems willfully to miss the teachings of our Lord. Continue reading “Forgiving James Dobson”

For all the loathing many white Americans may feel toward the rhetoric of Jeremiah Wright, and the anger and bitterness expressed by others, we should be aware that the divide was started centuries earlier, and not at all by the people who then pretty much all lived in sub-Saharan Africa.

That much is so apparent that it is beyond cliché. The question that interests me is why the timeline is measured in centuries. Why not millennia? Continue reading “How Racism Began”

Key GOP radical idea:
State Legislatures can overturn any Presidential election result they don’t like.
 
Key winning oral argument against by Neal Katyal:

It is rejected by the Articles of Confederation, rejected by the early state constitutions, rejected by the founding practice, especially, New York where judges vetoed federal election bills. It’s also rejected by this court, and cases such as Smiley and Hildebrandt.