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Click for Radio Podcast: Public Servants Representing Ordinary People (5:36)

Transcript:

I suppose it was kind of gimmicky. The Democratic challenger to an incumbent Republican Congressional Representative pledged, if elected, to give back a tenth of his paycheck. Brad Ashford, the Nebraska Democrat, would keep doing that until members of Congress cut their own paychecks by 10 percent.

There are lots of good reasons to reject a proposal to cut Congressional salaries. Corruption is a lot more tempting when you kind of need the money. Junkets to foreign lands, lavish free dinners, implied future career opportunities, none are really illegal. Sometimes officials who have developed a part-time business of raking it in can cross ethical lines into outright criminality.

At some point, attacking the pay of politicians, however emotionally satisfying – and truly, truly, it does provide a buzz – might not be good public policy.

The incumbent Republican, Lee Terry, did not disagree with cutting the pay of Congress because it’s bad policy. His indignation was more personal. It seems Congress has already gone too long without a raise, and enough is enough.

What he’s not telling you is that Congress hasn’t had a cost of living increase since 2006, when I led the charge for a freeze.

– Representative Lee Terry (R-NE),
    Comments on KMTV, Omaha, August 11, 2014

Those bringing home considerably less than the $174,000 a year paid to their representatives in Congress might not be completely sympathetic.

Why would anyone in elective office say such a thing?

One possibility is a mere slip of the tongue. The pressure of live debate, the relentless presence of news outlets, can capture momentary lapses.

The problem with that theory is Representative Lee Terry has a bit of a history. It is not the first time he has complained about the financial hardship associated with public service. He was forced to apologize for similar comments during the Republican shutdown of government last year.

Federal workers and those working for companies doing business with the government were going without paychecks. Shouldn’t members of Congress give up their pay during the time they were forcing other families to live without?

…you know what? I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college, and I’ll tell you we cannot handle it. Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly.

– Representative Lee Terry (R-NE), interviewed by
    the Omaha World-Herald, Omaha, October 4, 2013

Similar stories surface from time to time. It is usually taken as evidence that some politicians are clueless, out of touch with the economic suffering endured by those they ought to be representing. In the case of Representative Terry, the seeming lack of concern is aggravated by his tireless opposition to any increase in the minimum wage.

Such incidents do illustrate a disconnect from life as it is experienced by those living with a significant level of financial anxiety. Comments like those for which Lee Terry is becoming known also illustrate an important part of human nature, a part most of us share.

I close my eyes and try to picture ordinary people. I find myself thinking of friends, co-workers, neighbors, worshipers at Sunday service, shoppers I meet in line at the pharmacy. And I find I’m thinking of people I meet and associate with. Ordinary people.

That is who most of us think of as ordinary, everyday people. Those we see and talk with. They are part of our daily routine. That’s human nature, and that’s part of the problem. What we see and who we see every day define what we know as ordinary.

As a young student studying government several decades ago, I participated for a few months in a special program that put me in Washington, DC.

I was impressed by one detail that I do not recall ever being reported. Senators and members of Congress do not open doors. Unless they deliberately look for doors, they probably never notice them. It’s part of a larger pattern.

As they walk the corridors, even walking the sidewalks near the Capitol Building, they are continuously surrounded by a circle of staff. Papers are passed and glanced at. Conversations continue. Schedules are changed. Decisions are made. It is all done without missing a step. Each elected official is surrounded by a moving, busy office.

The circle is sometimes broken by other office holders and by ever present money flashing lobbyists. Away from the traveling office, officials live near wealth. They shop and worship with the rich and powerful. It affects, it has to affect, what they think of as normal, daily routine, and who they regard as average, everyday folks.

In Congress, most work very hard, doing what they came to the nation’s capital to do.

They represent ordinary people.

Click for Radio Podcast: Degrees of Separation ‑ Still the Same Old Racism (6:41)

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Transcript:

Conservatism was so much simpler when I was a kid. Conservatives just didn’t much like black people.

Some were outspoken about it. Black people had all sorts of new privileges. Too many. They could vote. In fact, they could vote for the first time in some parts of the country. Lynching was now against the law. Segregation was still pretty strong, but it was technically against the law. Same with discrimination in housing and hiring. It was still going on, but it was against the law.

What more did they want?

The fact that, with the leadership of a Democratic President, some form of civil rights had become the law enraged enough conservatives that a migration of sorts had already begun. Lyndon Johnson remarked privately that new laws respecting the rights of black people would ensure that Democrats would lose the South for many decades. Conservatives left the Democratic party and became Republicans.

Even back then, outright racism, the kind spoken out loud, was confined to a vocal minority. Most commonly, the some-of-my-best-friends denial was a preface to each expression white resentment.

There was talk of whites organizing to counter newly enfranchised black voters.

Later, as overt racism became associated with pure evil, conservatives began using euphemisms. The wink and nod story was that black folks were too dim to vote for their own interests. So, someone was telling them how to vote. Organizing against black voters evolved into organizing against block voters. No kidding, that’s what some politicians campaigned on. Stand up against the “block vote.”

After a while, the “block vote” became too identifiable. Political language changed again. The “urban vote” came to represent for conservatives the enemy of all that was good and American and White.

In New York State, a liberal Republican – liberal by virtue of supporting civil rights – pushed for urban renewal. A conservative Republican legislature refused to allow bonds to fund Nelson Rockefeller’s hopes for building up New York State’s cities. After all, hadn’t urban folks already been given enough, what with civil rights laws?

Then Rockefeller enraged conservatives by issuing unofficial “moral bonds.” They weren’t backed by law, but investors were told the state government – specifically Governor Rockefeller – would regard repayment with interest as a sacred moral obligation.

Conservatives regarded that end run as one more unearned benefit given to black people – excuse me, urban people: a minority that had already been provided the gifts of voting rights, anti-discrimination laws, and anti-lynching protection by an overly generous government.

As time went on, spoken-out-loud racism became too much for polite company. It was no longer something to be voiced at your grandmother’s book and coffee club. Racism became a matter of degrees of separation.

The effort to maintain mental caution and verbal self-editing produced a kind of active resentment among conservatives.

Bill Clinton and, later on, Barack Obama came to be hated. That they do not have the same skin color is obvious. What they have shared is that conservatives regarded both with fear and loathing. Conservatives suspected President Clinton, and now suspect President Obama, of harboring sympathy for what one conservative calls “America’s pampered minorities.”

This is a character flaw that some black public conservatives do not have. This makes such politicians especially attractive to some conservative voters. These candidates do not sympathize with black people, and they offer a modern substitute for yesterday’s worn out cliché of some-of-my-best-friends: I may get laughed at for some-of-my-best-friends, but I can proudly get by with I-voted-for-Herman-Cain. So don’t call me racist.

Still the charge of racism, even the implication, still stings. It produces endless clarifications and occasional anger.

When Congressman Paul Ryan talked about the faltering work ethic of urban youth, we all paid attention. He later clarified. He had misspoken. He was not singling out African American young people. He should have applied his criticism to rural culture as well.

Recently, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) suggested that some Republican obstruction of President Obama was motivated by Obama’s race. “For some, it’s just we don’t want anything good to happen under this President because he’s the wrong color.” A Republican colleague went ballistic, charging Rockefeller with “playing the race card.”

“Please, don’t assume, don’t make implications of what I’m thinking and what I would really support,” said Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). You have no idea.”

Rockefeller stood by his criticism. “I actually do. God help you.”

“No senator,” said Johnson, “God help you for implying I’m a racist.”

It is an understandable reaction, one shared by most conservatives, in or out of government.

Soon after that, conservatives in the House of Representatives considered keeping up a pilot project that had been helping feed little kids from families struggling to get out of poverty. The project was an experiment to figure out how to feed hungry kids during summer months when they are out of school. It was pointed at “urban and rural areas.”

Hard to argue with a program designed so explicitly to help both white and non-white little kids in off-school months: “urban and rural.”

The House passed the bill. But only after the program was redirected by the Republican majority.

Only rural kids will be allowed to participate.

It’s possible that some brave soul in the House or Senate will offer an honest appraisal of Republican motivations at explicitly excluding urban kids.

That honest voice will provoke more angry indignation from Senator Johnson.

If you get my drift.

Albert Einstein proposed his new theory, special relativity, in 1905 and quickly became famous. It was a strange and exotic set of propositions. The follow up general theory of relativity really shook things up. It was pretty much accepted in physics within a few years.

You might say that Einstein generated a big bang of his own. There followed an explosion of sorts. The merging of time into spacial dimensions brought forth variations. Elementary particles begat lesser particles, then sub-sub-particles. Those particles were just theoretical, explained by strange twists of quantum mechanics in which opposite, mutually exclusive, states of existence could simultaneously be true.

Some scientists felt compelled to assure the public that the wonderfully bizarre reality that operated on a sub-atomic level had no relationship to the world we experience every day. One skeptic, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, proposed a thought experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of the only-true-for-submicroscopic-reality postulate. He suggested a set up involving a Geiger counter and a radioactive substance, a bottle of arsenic, and a cat, all in a closed box.

A random subatomic event might or might not trigger the Geiger counter which might or might not break open the arsenic which might or might not kill the cat. If the prevailing new theories were right, the cat would be both dead and alive until the box was opened and the state of the cat was settled.

As scientists predicted new particles and states of reality, math began to run ahead of experimentation. Little in science is truly static. Settled fact can become open to contradiction as new evidence is uncovered. In fact, mainstream science holds statements to be meaningless unless they are both falsifiable and verifiable by some path of evidence.

The laptop computer, the cell phone, the television, the nuclear bomb all depend on absurd, largely theoretical, operations of the subatomic universe. Many of the ever new particles that scientists visualize in the complexities of their advanced mathematics can only be inferred. There is hope that, one day, advances in measurement will combine with future epiphany to provide at least some tenuous proof of what will never be seen directly.

In the meantime, the theories work. All things wonderfully electronic and modern come from the counter-intuitive, often unproven, theoretical world of exotic subatomic physics. Who needs Schrödinger’s cat when we have cable television?

I had just microwaved dinner and was watching a broadcast on the device Isaac Newton would have dismissed, when I came across a political story that reminded me of the wonderful world of unproven particle theory that nonetheless works.

It has been documented past the point of redundancy that voter fraud is a rare, rare event. It most often happens when some public official wants to declare residency in order to run for office from a pretend residence. In one case it happened when a woman seeking to hide from an abusive ex-spouse tried to disguise her residence.

What doesn’t happen is individual voters trying to influence an election by voting illegally. That is true for three main reasons.

• It’s amazingly easy to get caught.
   
• Penalties against those who are caught are extreme. Fines and prison time can haunt a citizen for a long, long time after the debt to society is paid.
   
• Backroom tinkering with results is a lot safer, a lot more effective, and therefore a lot more common than any voter fraud.

There have been efforts to document voter fraud, the individual kind, not the backroom tally manipulation. In Pennsylvania, a city commissioner from Philadelphia found 700 cases of voter fraud over several years. When they were looked into, they pretty much turned out to be something else. The grand total was one.

In Colorado, the Secretary of State found 155 cases. Upon investigation, they were found to be legitimate voters. It seems the Secretary had included the names of immigrants who voted. He neglected to check, so he didn’t know they had become citizens first. It turned out that citizens can legally vote.

During the George W. Bush administration, a nationwide search for voter fraud involved a detailed combing of records for every national, state, and local election over 7 years. It took five years to pour through every vote, then follow up in a search for voter fraud. They did find a handful of double registrations and fewer than ten actual fraudulent votes. That’s nationwide over 7 years.

Around the country, voter ID laws have been carefully restrictive. Lots of minority voters and older folks and students just turned 18 don’t drive. So traditional forms of identification have been discarded. These folks are now required to have drivers licenses or their equivalent to vote. And the equivalent have been made hard to get.

The number of voting booths have been reduced in minority areas. Voting locations have been moved to places that are hard to get to. Voting times have been reduced.

A recent study confirms what is apparent to most folks who have thought about it. The idea is to keep a lot of legitimate voters from voting. The state of Texas is even arguing that it is okay to attempt to discriminate against minority voters if, in their hearts, politicians are only motivated against voters who will support Democrats.

A few observers have labeled the new tactic James Crow, esquire, or Jim Crow, Jr. or Jimmy Crow. It isn’t exactly the same as the poll taxes and literacy tests of old. The racial motivation is not always primary, but the target is largely the same.

The story in North Carolina’s Raleigh News Observer was about voter suppression, moves against voter fraud that will only keep actual voters from voting, and voter fraud itself that is pretty much nonexistent. It seems Republicans are pushing local voting boards pretty hard to keep voters from voting, even when local officials know better.

The story begins this way:

RALEIGH — One of the longstanding arguments against voter ID laws has been that there is no history of significant elections fraud.

But advocates of North Carolina’s new elections law have been making their way across the state to county elections boards to try to make the case that fraud has existed but has been inadequately investigated.

– Raleigh News Observer, January 12, 2014

That’s what brought the higher mathematics of subatomic physics to mind. Illegal voters are like the newest class of particles.

Republicans are sure they exist. They simply haven’t found any way to observe them.

But in the world of voter suppression, the theory works. Yes indeed, it does work.

Click for Radio Podcast:
John Kennedy and the Seven Football Games (5:04)

 
The concussive violence of football, the long term damage to players, was never in the national consciousness in those days. Back when I was a kid, such thoughts never intruded. We had no idea.

There is something about football crowds. I’m not sure exactly what it is. But if most of us were blindfolded and put into the middle of a crowd at a professional game, we’d be able to tell if it was football or some other sport. The raucousness of the crowd, maybe? The yelling of the vendors? The play-by-play enthusiasm? Hard to say what the rhythm is, exactly, but it is unmistakable.

The Redskins vs Eagles game at Franklin Field in Philadelphia had been billed as a big deal. The stadium itself seemed like the setting for it. It was the oldest stadium in the country. The Eagles had been there only a few years.

By the time the coin was tossed that Sunday, there were over 60,000 fans in the stadium. But, on that Sunday, you would not have recognized the sound as happening during a football event. In fact, there was an eerie silence during the entire game.

A 25 yard pass from Jurgensen to Brown provided some hope for the home team. Yet, even during the breakaway run for the goal, the entire stadium was still. No cheering. No reaction. The vendors selling hotdogs and drinks worked without any of the normal shouting. Money and food were wordlessly exchanged.

The Redskins won the game. The home team lost. Nobody seemed to notice. It was as if 60,000 people had simultaneously lost their voices.

The same strange silence was reported from every stadium in which a professional game was played. There were 7 games in all that Sunday. Each one played out before a silent, sullen crowd. Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, everywhere the same. The Cardinals narrowly beat the Giants in New York. Nobody reacted. The New York crowd seemed more interested in the National Anthem than in the game.

It is hard to give a sense of those days to anyone who did not experience the times in which we lived. That Sunday, two days after the assassination, provides only small anecdotal illustration. It was a choking sort of grief.

In those days of the Cold War, the terror of nuclear conflict combined with fear and loathing toward the Soviet empire. The domino theory of international Communist conquest was considered an established fact, with debate reserved for the dangerously naive. As President Kennedy called for personal vigor, office personnel, secretaries, clerks, and managers, actually worked overtime just to feel they were contributing to the national effort.

Civil Rights was a noble struggle against evil itself, and segregationists were a national embarrassment.

It has been described as a time of innocence, with innocence lost on that bloody Friday in 1963. But it was more than that. It was less an innocence than a sense of national purpose that seems almost childlike from today’s jaded weariness. There is a sadness in many of us at the loss of that purpose, now seen through cynical eyes as something other than what we experienced then.

The carping was as severe as it is now. Pamphlets were distributed in Dallas that day with a photograph of the visiting President and the words: “Wanted For Treason!” The antecedents of Tea Party-ism existed in Birchers. Racism was evident in KKK sympathizers. Violence was met by peaceful demonstration.

A very large proportion of Americans thought that reasonable balance required a stand somewhere “between the two extremes.” Yes, voting rights and safety of black citizens in the south were considered one of the extremes.

John F. Kennedy was on a national wave. But he did more than ride that wave. He seemed to those who wanted to join the effort, as having channeled and directed it into a mighty force for progress. The country was deeply flawed, but America was working, growing, toward national redemption, leading the world on a similar path.

I was very young back then. I remember adults joining children in public sorrow, men and women crying unashamed. I remember a sort of communion of grief. It was as if we were, briefly, an extended family.

I had nightmares through my teenaged years. My imagination tells me I was not alone.

Today, the President we knew back then was not simply a reflection of an innocent country in innocent times. Partly because of his youth, his leadership, the way he spoke the words he gave to us, he, and we, were something more.

Not so much an innocent country in innocent times.
We were an inspired nation in inspired times.

---

– More –
 

Offering Obamacare in 150 languages is absurd. If someone can’t speak enough English to fill in forms, what will they explain to a doctor?

– Dana Perino, Fox News Contributor, via Twitter, October 1, 2013

We lose so many details of those from whom we came. What I know of my grandmother comes from dim and faulty memory combined with distant family lore. She died before I was ten.

I know Marie came from the Ukraine as a young woman. I have a sense that it was around the time of World War I. It was called the Great War then, in a time before we knew we had to number them. She was fleeing a forced marriage.

She arrived in New York City without much knowledge of America’s customs and laws. She spoke no English. She must have found others who spoke her language. She somehow got word that the man to whom she had been promised had come looking for her.

She avoided the authorities. She had no way of knowing whether they would hand her to the man who felt he owned her, the one to whom she had been promised. And people in her part of Europe carried a long tradition, one that came from generations of unfortunate experience. Survival dictated staying away from police.

I remember a story. I believe it is accurate, as far as I can take it. I’m not sure whether it came from my own momma. The words have faded from my mind. I have an image of a young Marie, lost in the largest city on earth, bewildered by the labyrinth of streets, not knowing the language, afraid to talk with police who could be seen at every few intersections. She somehow found her way back without help.

After she was told she was being pursued by the man she did not love, she migrated out of New York, following the waterways, the Hudson River, then the Barge Canal, finally finding refuge in a small community outside of Syracuse. She met and married a fellow Ukrainian. They raised a family.

I know nearly nothing of my grandfather. He served in the Polish army. That is consistent with my understanding of history. Poland expanded and contracted over time in a sort of historical oscillation. He died when my mother was five.

Every once in a while, I will think of my grandmother. She was little more than a shadow in my memory for decades. I remember her from my childhood, when she lived with my parents. I remember my mother translating for her. For some reason, she comes to my mind more often, now that I have come to an age I once thought of as near elderly.

Every once in a while some remark or incident brings me to her. I thought of my grandmother as I read of the eugenic theories of Republican Steve King. He tells audiences America’s greatness comes from making life hard for immigrants, so only the strong make it to bear children. I suspect that, like her, many immigrants bring to our shores something Steve King will never know. It is not a stronger genetic disposition borne of a weeding out, but a brave tradition of adventure and an intolerance for oppression. My imagination tells me my grandmother would not care for Steve King.

The “English Only” folks who would limit benefits and rights, even restaurant service, to those who speak “American” remind me of Marie, who never could speak English. That is how Dana Perino brought her to my mind again.

We all know such anti-immigrant discussion does not really target my grandmother. It is an often darker, closer, Spanish speaking part of humanity that suffers the wrath of nativists. Were she alive now, she would be only collaterally injured by proposed policies aimed at others.

Dana Perino, who imagines that my grandmother could never have been treated by a doctor, was the Press Secretary to a President of the United States. Steve King, who believes America is strong because life was made harder for folks like young Marie, is a member of the United States House of Representatives.

Perhaps my reaction can be ascribed to simple ancestral pride. I don’t sense a pride that is tied to ancestry or restricted to family. But I have to believe the brave young woman who left her home and homeland, her friends and her family, everything she had ever known and loved, on a mad dash for freedom, deserves more admiration than most of those who live in comfort and judge those in other parts of the world as their natural inferiors.

Years after my grandmother died, my mother mentioned an incident that stayed with me. My parents were talking quietly about the day’s events, sharing their lives, while my mother’s mother listened, interested but without comprehending.

My dad left, I suppose on some errand. Marie spoke to her daughter in Ukrainian. Wondering if they been talking about her, she asked if she should move out.

My mom called to my dad and told him what her mother had just asked. My parents embraced my grandmother together, while my momma whispered reassurance and love.

We are taught to hate the sin and love the sinner, to hate the bite and not the biter. Still, it is not easy for me to be around those who speak of language differences as a natural barrier meant to keep people out, one more way God makes sure America stays the same.

The Marie I barely met and never knew proves otherwise.

 

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.
 
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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.