Author: Burr Deming

 

David Frost:        So what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

Richard Nixon:  Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

David Frost:        By definition.

Richard Nixon:  Exactly, exactly..

— Nixon/Frost interview, April 6, 1977

The recent controversies involving journalistic explorations of National Security and the government investigations that followed raise serious questions about what the law ought to be.

What balance should be found between privacy and security? It is not a binary choice between freedom and safety.

Anyone who occasionally watches police dramas on television might have imagined the government would routinely be able to get court permission to check phone records while investigating a crime. In a computer age, we have come to expect that most anything transmitted electronically might become public. Facebook, google searches, dialed phone numbers, all involve an unfortunate sacrifice, perhaps even an outrageous sacrifice, of some degree of privacy.

A casual discovery of personal details often can take less effort than a search through the telephone book for a home address might have taken decades ago. Few people thought much about it back then. Fewer still went through the expense of obtaining an unlisted number.

Today’s secrecy of policy is disturbing. It is difficult to find what standards are followed by the secret FISA courts which were mandated by Congressional legislation after 9/11. They are, after all, secret. A national debate is worth having.

And we can expect some rhetorical excesses in an emotional debate about our relationship to our government and our responsibility toward each other.

We should also expect that sort of excess to meet with rebuke.

David Gregory of NBC has been meeting his share of rebukes of late. He not only suggested the possibility of a reporter going to jail, he implied the reporter might not even be a legitimate journalist.

I returned from Sunday service too late to hear the original exchange between David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, and Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who has worked with Edward Snowden of NSA fame. It is possible the excerpts I have seen lost some context.

Here is what I have heard:

David Gregory:          To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?

Glenn Greenwald:    I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.

Mr. Greenwald went on to what I regarded as the most legitimate part of his response, a semi-denial that he engaged in such activity:

The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I’ve aided and abetted him in any way.

“Completely without evidence” is probably as close as we will get to a denial.

He went on to provide what has become standard fare in US journalism. He decried the pursuit of federal employees who hand over classified documents as criminalizing journalism. He did not note that cases he mentioned had blown the cover of a British spy who had infiltrated al Qaeda and revealed the existence of a secret source in North Korea.

And this is what seems to have gotten David Gregory in as much trouble as his original question.

Well, the question of who’s a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you are doing. And of course anybody who’s watching this understands I was asking a question. That question has been raised by lawmakers as well. I’m not embracing anything, but, obviously, I take your point.

Let’s unpack this a little, shall we?

About 40 years ago, I moderated a series of public debates at a local political club in St. Louis County. Part of it involved taking questions from the audience. One audience member rose and asked if a debate participant was simply trying to keep racial minorities from enjoying our system of parks. I turned and said:

“Well, what about it, Joe? Are you trying to keep black people out?”

“Joe” correctly saw my rephrasing as an opportunity to refute, and he did just that.

I was surprised that, four decades later, Glenn Greenwald did not take the same opportunity. I thought David Gregory had offered up a softball question, which Glenn Greenwald regarded as too rude for words.

I am impressed that so few seem to have noticed that Mr. Greenwald threw the first “Are you a real journalist” hand grenade in that exchange.

I am more impressed, however, with a statement many regard as so self-evident that it needs no further argument to support it. Let’s review it again, shall we?

Glenn Greenwald:    I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.

So you are not worthy of even calling yourself a journalist if you think any other journalist is capable, even in theory, of committing a chargeable crime.

Richard Nixon:  Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

It seems Mr. Nixon’s mistake was his pursuit of a professional career unsuited to his aptitude. He should have become a journalist.

 
When Larry Craig, United States Senator from Idaho, entered the men’s room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2007, he had earned a reputation as a trustworthy Reagan Republican, conservative, even tightfisted, when it came to public expenditures for the poor and middle class. Unknown to most, his private life was a terrible mess.

He was well known as a moral individual, even a moralist. He had a grating way with words, combining derision with childish phraseology. He was outspoken about Bill Clinton’s tryst with a White House intern:

The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy – a naughty boy. I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.

He was against rights for same sex couples, and his voting record reflected that. He was even against laws to protect gay people from being targeted for physical violence.

His arrest for soliciting a police officer in an adjoining stall was a surprise.

Americans can forgive many things when it comes to public figures. Bill Clinton is phenomenally popular today. Newt Gingrich managed to come back from the politically dead, at least for a while, after public contrition and a series of Hail Marys.

Hypocrisy is a deeper cut. And the “nasty, bad, naughty boy” derision of others was a haunting public persona.

Almost everyone who is in favor of gay rights can recall a change of heart. It was not too long ago that an overwhelming majority was solidly against the idea. It is possible that those of us raised in an era in which gay rights was so remote that the issue could not even be considered controversial may have available to us a special insight. I don’t recall when I changed my mind about gay rights. I do remember youthful years in which the relegation of gay people to the role of outcast was a natural part of life. We didn’t think about it, even a little.

I try to imagine how it might have been for someone struggling against his own nature, and how that struggle must have been replicated for millions of people who found themselves, perhaps to their alarm, attracted to those forbidden to them. The inner denial, the exaggerated opposition, the importance of opposition, had to have been damaging.

In the early 1980s, whispers grew to gossip about sexual goings on in the halls of Congress. Young male pages were said to be the objects of the fancy of male Congressional Representatives.

Larry Craig, then one of those representatives, felt compelled to issue a denial. He complained of the unfair suspicion that seemed to automatically follow someone who was guilty only of being unmarried. The next year he got married. A life traveled along hairpin turns, meant to dodge any evidence of inner turmoil, has to be a terrible way to live.

Years later, after the sad encounter in an airport restroom, Larry Craig fought off ethics charges. His trip and the incident, he told representatives of a Senate Committee, involved “purely personal conduct unrelated to the performance of official Senate duties.” It had nothing to do with the Senate. And so, it had nothing to do with his ethics as a Senator. This week his lawyers told a federal judge that using campaign funds to pay for his defense against the lewd conduct charges was okay because he was on official Senate business.

“Not only was the trip itself constitutionally required, but Senate rules sanction reimbursement for any cost relating to a senator’s use of a bathroom while on official travel”

That contradiction seems emblematic of a life of contradiction and denial.

I don’t recall when I began thinking sympathetically about gay rights. I remember an attitude more than active thought that attraction between those of the same sex was unnatural. And I remember a later time feeling that it was terribly wrong to discriminate against those same folks, or to regard adult love as unnatural. I don’t remember a turning point or epiphany.

Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a lesson in racism that I suspect might apply to most sorts of bigotry. He protests the prevailing wisdom that segregates racism to evil people. “To suggest that bad people were racist,” he writes, “implies that good people were not.”

This is the Racist Child Molester Serial Killer theory of America. Racists–should they even exist–are not people we know, but people who existed either in some distant history or in a far off cave somewhere.

I look to the life of Larry Craig with something less than righteousness. In some way I feel apologetic, both on his behalf, and toward him, for the life of contradiction he felt forced to twist himself into. That force came from the rest of us. It was applied to millions of other lives in ways that escape the imagination.

We were not evil people. In fact, many of us were very good people.

We good people were just unmindful of our thoughtless participation in great evil.
 
– More –
 

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

The conservative movement doesn’t understand anti-racism as a value, only as a rhetorical pose. This is how you end up tarring the oldest integrationist group in the country (the NAACP) as racist. The slur has no real moral content to them. It’s all a game of who can embarrass who. If you don’t think racism is an actual force in the country, then you can only understand it’s invocation as a tactic.

It may be more general than racism itself. Facts themselves are regarded as nothing more than rhetorical devices. Truth is negotiable.

And the lack of content extends beyond conservatism, although that does seem to be the epicenter of a trend. Facts were once the aim, the very purpose, of reporting. Contemporary journalism regards fact-checking as a controversial practice. It is tolerable when placed at a respectful distance. Confronting brazen fabrication with documented truth, calling falsehood what it is, is thought to be kind of, well, impolite.

When falsehood becomes too huge to ignore, balance is sought. Any criticism of some side must find an equal and opposite criticism of the other side. “Factually incomplete” is a charge that can be tolerated. “Not balanced” is too harsh.

Thus hosts of Sunday morning interview programs have an open disdain for confrontational fact-checking. David Gregory is not a singular voice in self-righteously proclaiming that audiences can be trusted to perform their own fact-checking.

For a candidate in debate, the weapon of choice is sometimes what the National Memo calls the Gish Gallop:

Named after the creationist Duane Gish, the Gallop is a tactic wherein a debater spews so many lies and half-truths that rebutting each one is impossible. The technique leaves their opponent shaken and unable to make clear arguments.

The strategic question is how a candidate, or anyone else in a public forum, can debate effectively and honestly when confronted with such tactics.

Joe Biden’s approach was to interject staccato notes that matched, with precision, each dubious factoid, every deceit before the echo had faded. This is different than the Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly shout-down. It was not an excerpt from CNN’s old and bothersome Crossfire, where the contest goes, not to the fleet of foot, but to the loud of voice. And it was not the sort of filibuster designed to keep an opponent from making a point.

In fact, the experienced Joe Biden seemed to encourage young Paul Ryan to make just as many points as he wanted. Which was not to say he could make whatever assertions he wanted without challenge. With some exceptions, the machine-gun style misstatements were met with some minimal syllabic answer: “Nope” or “Not so.” When words failed, facial expressions didn’t.

Just as important, the Vice President went on to quickly and effectively make his own case.

Predictably, pundits reacted with some dismay. Tom Brokaw was in the mainstream of punditry:

It was the demeanor that he showed. And these are always combinations of the two, people are impressionistic when they look at these debates. And I don’t know how this is going to play out eventually, but sometimes you have to dial that down, worst instincts.

Conservatives remain apoplectic about the rudeness involved. The Vice President was so impolite, ungentlemanly. Michael Medved writes more eloquently than most:

The oddest aspect of his patronizing performance involved the complete disconnect between his derisive laughter and anything that Paul Ryan actually said. Where, exactly, did the GOP nominee make some point so ridiculous, or express himself so clumsily, that the only appropriate response would be the uncontrollable urge to titter or chortle?

Patronizing. Performance. Derisive. Disconnected. After all, Congressman Paul Ryan did not make any point in a manner that was clumsy or ridiculous. And that was the issue, right?

How dare Mr. Biden!

The initial, tentative, evidence is that independent voters were more impressed than the pundits or the ideologically committed.

There is not much discussion among mainstream pundits in their analysis about whether those points, the ones Biden said were false, actually were, you know, false. The overarching in-your-face point is that he was so rude as to point out falsehoods while the untruthful gentleman was sitting right there in front of him. You’ll never see that ruthlessness on Meet the Press.

Michael Medved and countless clones regard truthfulness and dishonesty as morally indistinguishable rhetorical devices. Like racism, playing disrespectfully with the truth is not a charge to be examined dispassionately. Is unemployment in Scranton really going up?

Rather, like racism, like any charge, dishonesty has no more moral value than any weapon of choice. Conservatives, like journalists, “can only understand it’s invocation as a tactic.”

So if they call us untruthful, we’ll just call them dishonest. What is there to examine? One insult calls for another. He pulls a knife you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way. And that’s how you deal with charges of dishonesty. We’re not dishonest! You’re dishonest!

Just not right in the guy’s face. That’s impolite.

It is not important that Biden was right. It is only important that he was so rude as to be right about his opponent being wrong while the fellow who was wrong was right next to him.

You get some news in the form of public announcements. The right lane will be closed on the expressway next week, but the Department of Transportation will see that it’s done after hours. The United Methodist Church Youth will hold a car wash to raise money for the local food pantry. That sort of thing.

But most news comes in two categories. It is news because it contradicts expectations, as when man bites dog. Or it is news because it confirms narrative, as when Mitt Romney insists corporations are people.

This was a story that did both.

Tennessee resident Dorothy Cooper, a 96 year old citizen, gathered up her aging documents put them all in a big envelope, and got a ride with a volunteer. She had heard about a new law that would keep her from voting unless she had photo identification. Most folks have a driver’s license, but she doesn’t drive. Never has. But the state of Tennessee says a free ID will be made available.

When she got to the license bureau, where she could get that free photo ID, she showed officials her rent receipts, a copy of her lease, her voter registration card, and her birth certificate. They said that wasn’t enough and ordered her to go away. She didn’t have the marriage certificate, her husband having died so many years before.

The story appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

She asked the volunteer, the one who gave her a ride, to call and find out what could be done. The volunteer did just that, asking if Dorothy Cooper could obtain and bring back a copy of the marriage certificate and re-apply for the ID that would allow her to vote. The volunteer encountered laughter from the state worker on the phone. The worker could not fathom anyone going through that much trouble just to vote. She said it had never happened before in her experience.

That this voter was willing to continue seeking rides and revisiting offices made it unusual. But then, she was not stopped from voting since she was in her 20s, not even during the Jim Crow era.

What made it part of a narrative is that the roadblock is not at all unusual. News reports have favored elderly women who have voted all their lives. Here’s an 83 year old widow in Wisconsin. But those affected include more than retired folks, encompassing the working poor, riding buses or walking to jobs. College students living within walking distance of classes usually have college IDs with photos. Legislators have pointedly excluded school IDs. Minorities are disproportionately affected.

Authoritative studies say as many as 5 million legitimate voters will be turned away this year. That’s legitimate. With an L. An exhaustive study pushed by the Bush administration found that over a 5 year period in hundreds of elections around the United States fewer than 2 dozen cases of voter fraud were found that could have been prevented by a photo ID.

2 dozen as opposed to 5 million.

One aspect of the massive voter suppression effort, one that is discouraging to me, is the reaction of some who could have been expected to know better. It seems to me to be part of the unfortunate historical tendency of liberals toward unwarranted conciliation. They (which is a polite way of saying we) too often surrender the rhetorical high ground in the spirit of verbal balance. This would not be more than an annoyance if it did not involve bartering with the rights of others.

Some of those I admire view the entire controversy as entirely political. If you are Republican, you should favor voter suppression. You may defend it as a legitimate defense against voter fraud, but the honest reason is political. Similarly, if you are a Democrat, you should oppose photo ID laws. You may oppose them as a denial of voter rights, but the honest reason is political as well. Nobody wants to lose. Everyone wants to win. End of story.

That the justification for voter suppression is ephemeral is seen as a good debating point. That the deprivation of a basic right is widespread is considered a rhetorical score. That the only real consideration is which politicians benefit is regarded as an immutable truth. The cynicism is regarded as a frank bow toward fairness, a knowing wink toward balance. Nobody is really right. Everyone is in it for pure partisan gain.

It may be part of human nature. It may be a national trait. I suspect it is part of the liberal psyche. We on the left do, after all, enjoy our position of balance, of moderation in all things. And cynicism has it’s own attraction.

It is not a conceit confined to this time and place.

After the Civil War, there was a concerted effort in the would-be-Confederacy to put down newly freed slaves. Intimidation went to violence, often deadly violence. The Republican Congress responded with Freedman’s Bureaus and laws guaranteeing voting rights. These were eventually overturned with the election in 1876 of Rutherford B. Hayes as President. Black people became fair game.

The conciliators of the 1870s and the historical researchers of a few decades later must have felt a certain compromising satisfaction as they crafted a middle course in national debate. No need for evidence. The truth being in the middle was a premise, not a conclusion. Efforts to keep alive the rights of former slaves after a bloody war became, in the politics of the day, “waving the bloody shirt.”

Many decades later, their desire for a balanced approach lived on, long after they were gone from this earthly realm. It infected the textbooks of my youth with misinformation and historical distortion. Republicans became, in the national imagination, Radical Republicans. The laws they passed protecting the rights of former slaves became, in later history, vindictive punishment on the South.

And so, as the torch was passed from one generation to another, then another, we were taught lies in our classrooms.

Today, when an elderly widow, when any legitimate voter, is told she cannot vote for frivolous reasons, we should be outraged on her behalf. That we could count it off as the debatable partisan violation of the rights of some politician to another tick in his election tally is … well … unfortunate. That the ostensible reason for this denial of a basic right is to prevent what virtually never happens is not simply “a good point.” The likely repetition of this injustice in varying degrees as many as 5 million times is not to be opposed simply as a political calculation.

Post-Civil War Republicans paid a political and popular price for going against the public fatigue about black rights. Nearly a century and a half later, we should be thankful for their courage. We should pray for some similar courage within our ranks today.

Perhaps we can be forgiven for the faint hope that some future generation will see past conciliatory balance and cynical rhetorical barter to what will be clear in retrospect to have been right.

And that, looking back on our lives, they also will have cause to be grateful.

The way he had the man killed, and how he acted later, reminded me of a long ago personal experience.

It was decades back. An elderly relative, one I love dearly, was distraught. Her Social Security check had never arrived. What would she do now? So much for her depended on that check.

Her husband was not a popular character within the family. He was pompous, preening, and had a tendency toward self serving untruth. He enjoyed spending money and forgetting to mention it to his wife. He also had a reputation of having sticky fingers.

He was sullen as I reassured her. The check was probably late. But if it was lost or stolen, she only had to report it. These things happened, and there were procedures.

The only people who had anything to worry about would be anyone who might have taken the check from her mailbox. Stolen government checks are always traced, I said, and thieves are dealt with harshly. If the check was lost a replacement check would be issued. If the check had been stolen, a replacement check would be issued and someone would later be caught and go to jail. She could count on it.

Her hard-to-take husband jumped to his feet in anger. How dare I threaten him with jail ! ! !

When wrong is done, it is often guilty action later that points to culprits. “Consciousness of guilt” is used as evidence of guilt. In some states, fleeing the police qualifies. Trying to cover up a crime can as well.

After the now infamous Susan Smith drowned her two infant children in an attempt to overcome difficulties with her boyfriend, her lawyers tried to argue a variation of an insanity defense. She had been abused as a youngster. She had an unstable childhood. She was not conscious that she was doing anything wrong when she trapped her kids in a car and let it go into a lake.

The insanity defense became pretty much impossible because she had lied about the crime. She maintained that a black man, a stranger, had hijacked her automobile with the kids inside. She tried to cover up her guilt. If she was divorced from reality or did not know it was wrong to kill her children, or was oblivious to what she had done, then why invent a story to keep it a secret? She had demonstrated a consciousness of guilt. And so she now resides at Leath Correctional Institution in South Carolina.

Twenty years ago, Cameron Todd Willingham could have tried to plead insanity. He was convicted of burning up his children near Austin Texas. But he tried to make it seem as if he hadn’t committed the crime. Outside the burning home, he acted like a crazy man, fighting to get back to his children, crying, begging firefighters to rescue his family. Local forensic analysts, however, concluded the fire had been set deliberately.

Willingham’s contrived emotions outside his home were just part of the clumsy coverup, just like the arson itself. He did not even try a defense of insanity. What was the point? He had demonstrated a consciousness of guilt. So instead, he continued, improbably, to maintain his innocence. He was sentenced to death in 1992.

Death sentences take time and, over the years, cracks appeared in the case. It turned out the forensic analysts didn’t really know much about science. One outside fire investigator after another questioned the initial conclusions. The evidence did not support the accusation of arson. Finally, one of the biggest reputations got involved. The case attracted the attention of Dr. Gerald Hurst. He was an Austin fire investigator and a scientist in his own right. He worked the case pro bono.

The case quickly became cut-and-dried. The original findings were based on ignorance and superstition. Assumptions about science that were well known to be wrong at the time were presented as fact. It was the fire science equivalent of witchcraft. Completely predictable effects of electrical faults were needlessly termed suspicious, then conclusive. It was outrageous. Dr. Hurst called it junk science. He sent his report directly to the Governor of Texas.

We have a legal system that, at present, puts severe restrictions on death sentence appeals. Guilt or innocence seldom plays a part. It’s all procedural. And there were no discernible procedural errors. The courts rely on a final non-judicial appeal. A governor may issue a pardon or commute a sentence if the judicial system is unable to get close to justice.

Indications are Texas Governor Rick Perry took 4 hours less time looking over the Hurst report than the OJ jury took examining the Los Angeles mountain of evidence. Which is to say zero. He didn’t take the time to read it at all.

Cameron Todd Willington’s last words before his execution in 2004 was to say once again that he was innocent of killing his children.

In the years after the execution, interest began to balloon. The Hurst report began to make the rounds and it looked devastating. Texas, in particular Rick Perry, had ordered an innocent man executed, ignoring obvious evidence that had been placed in the Governor’s hands.

In 2009, a review of the case was ordered by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. Renown scientist Dr. Craig Beyler was put in charge. Governor Perry’s ofice insisted there was plenty of evidence to indicate the executed man could be guilty. But as he looked into it, Beyler appeared increasingly skeptical about the evidence, the verdict, and the execution.

Two days before the Texas Forensic Science Commission was to meet and consider Beyler’s conclusions, Governor Perry moved in. He fired three of the commissioners, and replaced the chairman. The new chairman cancelled the meeting on the execution.

It was Governor Rick Perry’s coverup.

Consciousness of guilt.

At the conclusion of a traditional, and for the most part reasonable, discussion of the limits of government in determining economic movement, David Brooks manages this:

Over the past decades, Americans have developed an absurd view of the power of government. Many voters seem to think that government has the power to protect them from the consequences of their sins.

Steve Benen calls him on it.

Has Brooks ever actually spoken to anyone who’s falling further behind? As poverty rates reach one in six, does the columnist sincerely believe systemic sin is responsible? With unemployment over 9%, is Brooks convinced that all the jobless deserved to be forced from their jobs?

He goes on to quote Matt Yglesias about bus drivers suddenly laid off in Clark County, Nevada.

Are those soon-to-be-unemployed bus drivers really suffering for their sins? Is it really true that a federal government currently able to borrow money at a negative real interest rate can’t do anything to protect them? The amazing thing about this crisis is the extent to which suffering and responsibility are completely out of proportion with one another. If you think about the people who are really suffering in the developed world today, none of them were executives at major banks, none of them were politicians involved in the construction of the euro, none of them were senior financial policymakers in any government, etc.

So Brooks achieves the scorn of others. And he has it coming. And yet.

It seems to me that a careful reading of the Brooks analysis does not reveal a rejection of the bus drivers leading a blameless professional life. He does not condemn those who are hurting through no fault of their own. He simply does not consider them. This is not heartlessness. Or at least it may not be.

David Brooks joins a fraternity of limited vision established before antiquity. Most of us belong. We form judgments based the clarity of personal observation. And we fail to think beyond that except in the occasional statistical analysis that breaks through. We react less to numbers than to real people. And people are real if we know them.

Washington pundits declared for over a year that the issue real America was concerned about was lower taxes and eliminating the deficit. Kitchen table discussions they were familiar with were not really about who had lost a job, but rather about investment portfolios. And so that is what was real for them. The rest existed, but mostly as numbers.

When Rick Santelli of CNBC launched his famous rant against economic losers, he stood in the middle of a cheering group of stock traders, employed by the financial houses that had brought ruin to the nation. That so many had been saved by taxpayer money was a part of normal business. Gesturing expansively toward his audience of money managers he yelled as they roared their approval. “This is America. President Obama, are you listening?”

While Santelli was angry about the injustice of rescuing the homes of “economic losers,” it may be that he was not thinking about teachers, workers, police officers, and bus drivers. His personal experience had been with the economically exclusive. In fact, his outrage was more specific than generally recognized. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills? Raise their hand.”

It could well be that the some in the cheering crowd had themselves made the agonizing choice of postponing expansions of the McMansions they owned. Perhaps a few even knew about others who were in trouble as a result of adding more rooms to their estates. Bus drivers? Who said anything about bus drivers?

A Missouri Republican state representative recently suggested that cuts in breakfast programs for kids could be easily made up if families would eat out one or two fewer times each month.

Sure there are hardships. But they don’t affect everyday people. People I know.

There were certain issues in the past that have graduated to non-issues. They are now considered by most of us to be settled questions.

In some cases, it is because the weight of accumulated evidence has pretty much crushed any doubt. Very few of us take seriously any debate on whether the sun goes around the earth. Those who wonder if President Obama was actually born in America seem to be split between those who think he was born in Kenya and those who do not realize that Hawaii is a part of the the United States.

In other cases, settled questions are settled because simple fairness has become obvious over time. Gay rights, in at least some form, has gone a long way toward being a universal view. There are some who simply regard a same sex romantic relationship as a perversion that should be outlawed. But the number of adherents to that view has shrunk to the point of near non-existence. There is still debate over actual equal rights. Equality in marriage is less controversial than it was even a year ago. Even Republicans are beginning to dodge questions they once demagogued.

Racial equality once was controversial. Now the denigration of minorities is distasteful to even die hard conservatives. We have a philosophical objection to discrimination that goes beyond argument. It is a settled question.

Many things that were once open to debate are now settled simply because people thought about them enough to approach them with a very solid point of view. Slavery. Death camps. President Nixon.

But on most issues, those before the public, people are swayed by evidence. My friend John Myste disagrees with me on this, and his view holds up to observation to a point. In a single discussion, in even multiple discussions, most folks do not want to concede an argument. But, over time, evidence does tend to affect enough folks to bend the arc.

The difficulty with the shrinking minority that consider themselves Republican is that the most influential consider the very basic fabric of social organization to be a closed question. Government intervention in the form of public safety, pollution control, employment compensation, a healthy economic environment, even nuclear safety, is rejected.

Those Republicans who reject government activism do not, for the most part, reject government solutions because they believe these problems do not exist. They believe these problems do not exist because they reject government solutions. At least on most things.

There are some issues on which most Republicans favor governmental activism. Sex education is favored as long as it is “abstinence only” sex education. Immigration restriction is favored. But, for most, even these issues are closed questions.

Their point of view is philosophical in nature. When they formulate it that way, this can be quite legitimate. In fact, most of us apply a philosophical conclusion to many of life’s situations.

“My mind’s made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” That is the caricature, but it is only a caricature to a valid approach. We do not challenge the logic of an argument. We challenge the premise.

Consider a recent viral video of an interview with Texas Governor and recently announced Presidential candidate Rick Perry.

Steven Benen summarizes:

I can’t find a full transcript, but to offer a flavor, the clip shows a reporter passing along a question from the audience to the governor: “Why does Texas continue with abstinence education programs, when they don’t seem to be working? In fact, I think we [in Texas] have the third-highest teen-pregnancy rate in the country right now.” Perry responds, “Abstinence works.”

So, the reporter tries again. “But we have the third-highest teen teen-pregnancy rate among all states in the country. The questioner’s point is, it doesn’t seem to be working.” The governor answers again, “It — it works.” Perry then spends two-and-a-half minutes on a meandering answer that doesn’t really make any sense.

Perry might have answered that statistics are not the only measure, that if it works in just one case, it works. He might have elaborated that what matters more than if it works is whether it is right, that a society should stand for something, that the benefit of a moral stand goes beyond it’s immediate utility.

Challenge the premise.
Philosophical objection.
Closed question.
Legitimate approach.

The problem is this: Most Republicans do not seem to have the patience. And so we end up with a reflexive denial of even the most obvious facts. Queen of Hearts reasoning drags at the mind.

It works!
Hey, I’m telling you.
It works!

Amid the Calee Anthony murder, and the release of mother Casey Anthony, the almost-miracle story seems lost forever to the American public.

There can’t be a much worse nightmare than a child suddenly gone missing. This English schoolgirl was 13 years old. Milly Dowler disappeared in 2002. She had used her cell phone to call her folks to let them know she had stopped on her way home with friends at a little cafe and that she was walking home.

She never showed up.

The family held out hope, even when hope seemed pointless. Police began to focus less on finding the girl and more on finding a body and a killer. But, as weeks became months, the family held on, searching. They called Milly’s cell phone until the voice mailbox reached capacity and no more messages could be left. And still, they kept trying.

It was a time of horrifying torment. Threatening letters to the mother were traced back to a convicted child molester. Calls came to the family from a young female voice claiming to be Milly. A woman was caught and jailed for the malicious impersonation.

Journalism. such as it was, added to the misery. One tabloid in particular, Rupert Murdoch’s The News of the World, seemed to have an inside track, publishing details the police were trying to hold back. It was not responsible journalism. Their sources were a mystery. Where were they getting their information? The paper had a history of following police officials and hacking celebrity telephones. Apparently they had developed sources in Scotland Yard itself, an astonishing accomplishment. Perhaps there may have been some comfort in the possibility that Milly, if alive, might notice the publicity and call home.

A body was found. Tabloids proclaimed it to be Milly, but it was later identified to be a missing 73 year old woman who had died naturally outdoors.

We can only imagine how, in time, hope must have become reduced to a sad routine, a mechanical going through the motions of hope when hope had become no more than a shadow. One of those motions was the continuing attempt to leave messages on a lost cell phone no longer able to accept any messages.

But suddenly, hope came alive. Cell phone messages were unexpectedly being accepted. The voice mailbox was no longer filled to capacity. Messages were being listened to and deleted from Milly’s voice mailbox. She had to be alive. Police were notified and began devoting resources. After all those weeks and months of dismay and grief, a miracle was on the horizon.

Then came the crushing news. Another body was found. Workers picking mushrooms stumbled across the remains. Dental records were used to identify the remains. Milly was dead. The killer was identified years later, arrested, and convicted just days ago.

And this week, two final sad mysteries were solved.

Milly’s cell phone had been hacked back in 2002, the messages listened to by the Rupert Murdoch tabloid, The News of the World. That is how investigative information had found its way into the press. They listened to tearful calls from anxious family members.

And that’s not all.

An employee of the paper, instructed to get more information, began deleting messages to empty Milly’s voice mailbox, making room for more frantic messages from the newly hopeful family. The tabloid then began gleaning more information from the new messages, picking out bits and pieces between the tearful pleas from the family. Please, Milly. Please call. Please.

Police are now re-investigating other missing child cases that happened since 2002, this time for similar journalistic patterns by the same tabloid. As of yet, we have no evidence that any of the other killings of children and young women committed by this individual were caused by the diversions and delays. Until Scotland Yard finishes their probe, we will not know whether there were additional killings due to any hampering of other police investigations.

There is no link, none, between Murdoch himself and this latest hacking horror. In fact the woman Murdoch hired to run the tabloid for him says she had no idea, no idea at all, of how the publication she directed managed to get hold of such a continuous flow of secret information.

Murdoch publications in the United States have a documented, well known bias toward conservatism, in some cases becoming an arm of the Republican Party. But this was not a case of political partiality or ideological spin.

This was a quantum exaggeration of the most common bias held for ages by irresponsible journalism of all stripes: If it bleeds, it leads. The Murdoch tabloid just helped the bleeding from that family flow a little redder.

Good for circulation.

It is certainly not impossible for a fundamentalist Christian organization to violate the Ten Commandments. Examples are easy to find. We don’t even need to go back to Jim Bakker’s PTL club, although our search can end there. It can be argued that the sex scandal was not organizational, being the downfall only of individuals. But the organizational defrauding of loyal contributors would seem to be a violation of the prohibition against stealing.

In some interpretations of the Talmud, this is actually a commandment against kidnapping, not against the taking of anything material. This might leave some evangelic organizations in the clear, except for more earthly authority, like Chuck Grassley (R-IA) or the the IRS (Pitbull from Hell).

Lesser offenses like false witness are more common. They just carry fewer civil penalties when directed against public figures. When President Obama was still candidate Obama, he was accused by angry evangelicals of distorting the beliefs of conservative professional Christian James Dobson. Obama had suggested that Christians of good will could have differing interpretations of scripture. Here was the Obama libel:

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson‘s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount — a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bibles now. Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles.

It was the only reference Obama made to Dobson in the disputed speech. To be fair, those false-witness conservatives were not speaking for Dobson’s organization. And it should not be surprising that conservatives can be inflamed by political passion into distortions that occasionally cross the line into falsehood. But Dobson himself accused Obama of … well … having an incorrect interpretation of the Bible. Okay, actually, Dobson went a little farther. Obama had deliberately distorted Biblical teachings. Well, this could be defended as an innocent misinterpretation by a rigid old man. Or it could be dismissed as a violation of the 9th Commandment by an individual, rather than an organization.

What about when an organization lies about policy debate? Would that count as false witness?

Dobson’s organization, the Family Research Council, recently did a Breitbart style editing job on a document issued by the Congressional Budget Office. They put ellipses to clip out part of the document in order to change the meaning. They were attempting to reinforce their position on morality, that work on reducing debt must never ever reduce tax breaks for the extremely wealthy. The part they edited out is highlighted:

To restore investors’ confidence, policymakers would probably need to enact spending cuts or tax increases more drastic and painful than those that would have been necessary had the adjustments come sooner.

They then omitted completely the words immediately following:

To keep deficits and debt from climbing to unsustainable levels, policymakers will need to increase revenues substantially as a percentage of GDP, decrease spending significantly from projected levels, or adopt some combination of those two approaches.

The CBO then cautioned against acting too quickly while the economy is still in recovery. This was also left out by the Dobson organization.

Making such changes while economic activity and employment remain well below their potential levels would probably slow the economic recovery.

Here is the CBO document. And here are the Dobson organization claims. The altered bit that was left in was placed within a series of quotes from prominent Republicans so that it seemed to validate their veracity.

Certainly this is is an example of false witness. But is false witness always against God’s word? The commandment, in most translations, reads “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.” This would seem to exclude lying that is not against someone. The classic hypothetical case involves lying to Nazi authorities looking for hidden Jews.

And truth telling is not always right, Wikileaks notwithstanding. When Tom Foley (R-FL) was outed for making sexual advances to young boys serving as Senate Pages, angry conservatives published the youngsters’ home addresses in retaliation for tattling. When two seriously ill children, siblings, survived with the help of a government program, they served as examples of why the program needed expanded funding. Fox contributor Michelle Malkin defended the publishing of their address and driving directions to their home. Both times, conservatives were completely truthful. In both cases, the conservative ethic was reprehensible.

Some translations of the Ten Commandments show the prohibition against false witness as applying only to formal testimony in a legal forum. This interpretation would liberate even Andrew Breitbart clones. Lying is okay, even smearing innocent people. God does draw the line at perjury.

It could be that religious conservatives violate none of the Ten Commandments when they lie, smear, or publish the home addresses of children. There may indeed be divine loopholes. Besides, they believe themselves to be untruthful in the service of the Lord.

But the case they are making, and conservatism itself, may be seen more skeptically if they do not have enough confidence in their beliefs or themselves to defend that case honestly.

It was in a chat room a few years ago. A pompous, judgmental personality was busily condemning those who were not professed Christians. Of those who were Christians, many were condemned for not holding the right hatreds. “Apostasy” was a favored word.

Chat rooms are often dens of overstatement and bravado. Anonymity allows a level of daring that polite company might otherwise inhibit. His boasts were, at least in part, an attempt to goad his opponents into anger. For him, an insufferable persona was a weapon.

So I began posting. I asked him if he took full credit for his evident moral superiority. No, he responded, he was much too humble to accept full credit. I speculated how grateful he must be.

BurrLand: You must offer prayers of gratitude fairly often.

Mr. Z: I am grateful that I can pray in humility.

BurrLand: Not like others of inferior morality.

Mr. Z: yes, the inferior do resent my greatness.

And so I posted an obvious scripture from the Gospel of Luke:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others:

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, `God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, `God, be merciful to me a sinner!’

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

What held my interest was Mr. Z’s furious answer. It was as if my screen was about to be flecked from the inside with angry spittle. As a Christian, I had no right, no right at all, to use scripture for the unholy purpose of rebuking a fellow Christian.

I am reminded of that indignant reaction of years ago by a couple of appearances, both on television, by self-proclaimed Christian historian David Barton. Barton famously holds to the discredited belief that the founding fathers intended the United States to be an explicitly Christian nation. One famous tactic by the relentless Mr. Barton is the partial quote. He often quotes a passage written by John Adams which proves that Adams wanted Church and State to be intimately involved.

The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered, but by the Holy Ghost, who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the bishop upon the heads of candidates for the ministry. … There is no authority, civil or religious; there can be no legitimate government, but what is administered by the Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it; all without it is rebellion and perdition, or in more orthodox words, damnation.

Well, there you have it. Adams really objected to any separation of Church and State! Right?

Except for one little detail. Adams was summarizing a view to which he was opposed. In fact he thought it was kind of silly. Two sentences Mr. Barton likes to leave out immediately follow the misleading passage he likes to quote. Adams laments that weak and ignorant people believe the view he just summarized, the view Mr. Barton says Adams believed. The weak minded, says Adams, believe it so much they would be willing to face the executioner’s ax or be burned at the stake for what he regards as a silly artifact.

Although this is all artifice and cunning in the secret original in the heart, yet they all believe it so sincerely that they would lie down their lives under the ax or the fiery fagot for it. Alas, the poor weak ignorant dupe human nature.

Mr. Barton does to the historical record what Andrew Breitbart does to video tapes of innocent people. The fellow, not to put too fine a point on it, falls short of the truth. On television, interviewed by Jon Stewart, he protested that he could not possibly be misleading anyone, because the original letter can be found on his website by anyone who looks enough to drill down to it. The interview was exceptional. For the most part, no mention of the inconvenient sentences are to be discovered in his public pronouncements.

But now he comes up with another tale. The founding fathers, he insists, rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution. Oh my. It is true that some form of the idea of natural selection goes back to Aristotle, but it was not accepted or even widely discussed in scientific circles until the second half of the 1800’s. That is because, until Darwin, scientific evidence simply hadn’t been gathered. Mr. Barton insists a full Evolution vs Creation Science debate took place during original Constitutional deliberations.

Many of us oppose mixing up religion with government support for a simple reason that goes beyond Mr. Barton’s parsing of words. It is simply unfair to use government to support religion. Religion should be voluntary. Period.

But the tolerance of some Christians for demonstrable falsehood is still jarring. The ethic seems to be that of my chat room buddy, Mr. Z. Christians should never call other Christians on the carpet when a lie is told in the service of the Lord.

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