FairAndUNbalanced.com

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.

---

– Podcasts –
 

“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat,” says our conservative friend T. Paine, as he quotes Article Twelve of the 1936 Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In the U.S.S.R. work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

It was not the first time the words appeared in Soviet literature. Vladimir Lenin regarded it as the first principle of socialism and it figured prominently in the fifth chapter of his 1917 book the State and Revolution. Lenin was quoting from Paul’s Second Letter to the Thessalonians from which, in fairness, T. Paine was also attempting to borrow.

Lenin knew, as it would seem our friend does not, that, as we are taught in the Acts of the Apostles, early Christian communities were organized as communes. In fact, the phrase “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” most probably originated with those early adherents to our faith. This may have been one of several reasons Christianity survived, and eventually thrived, in an increasingly hostile Roman world. Paul reacted to those would-be aristocrats who were too gentlemanly to get their hands dirty. Lenin regarded them as capitalistic bourgeoisie. Captain John Smith encountered a similar problem in early Jamestown, when former “gentlemen” from England were too good to toil. As with Paul, this was a matter of practicality, not value.

One key difference, of course, between the Apostle Paul and the Communist Vlad was that Paul saw intrinsic worth in every individual person. Vladimir saw human worth as inexorably dependent on productivity. In fact, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx joined him, explicitly rejecting the Christian formulation, changing it: “to each according to his contribution.”

The change away from early Christianity was applauded in those days by Communists, today by Republicans.

It was not always like that with conservatives. It is true they tended toward active hostility to those starving to death along roadsides during the Great Depression and even in later years. It was unremarkable in those days that a teenaged Dick Nixon would be photographed at a school event in old clothes and darkened cheeks, a caption congratulating him on his appearance as “a bum.” But Republicans also went through a Jack Kemp period not too many decades ago. Programs to help those in desperate need were greeted as well meaning but mistaken. There were, they said, better approaches. Kemp himself pushed for assistance but with incentives, regarding those who needed help as deserving a more thoughtful, responsible effort.

Today, the old conservative pattern reemerges, unfazed by actual conditions. When those actively seeking work number 6 times the number of open jobs, our friend discards the evidence. He knows the score, having been instructed by tales of long ago told to him by his mother-in-law. It seems she once worked in an unemployment office. We cannot temporarily rescue the many desperate for work for fear of contributing to the delinquency of the few who might latch on.

Other conservatives do not need even that wafer thin veneer of evidence. “Is the government now creating hobos?” asks Representative Dean Heller (R-NV). Representative Steve King (R-IA) dismisses the social safety net as having turned “into a hammock.” They are not at all alone in this new overt hostility. The unemployed are all suspected drug users who should all be tested, says one Senator.

Even the very sick are open to attack. Governor Haley Barbour (R-MS) articulates the new conservative theology as he regards Medicaid recipients. “We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.” Now, a couple with one child in Mississippi can’t qualify for Medicaid if they earn more than $8,150 a year. A used, very old, BMW might be gotten for about $4000.00 if you scour the state, someone checked. So, if a recipient earned the top amount and spent half their income, they could get an old, beat up BMW, although they would also be arrested for child neglect.

Republicans have always promoted policies that hurt folks. Sometimes they even quote scripture to back it up. We ought to be used to it. What is renewed, listen here Mr. Paine, is the open hostility, and a value system that says human worth itself is measurable only economically.

Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians notwithstanding, Jesus had a few things to say about wealthy folks and poor folks. As Al Franken once said, before he began running for office and had to watch himself: “From what I understand, if you cut out all the passages in the Bible where Jesus talks about the poor, about helping out the least among us, you’d have the perfect container to smuggle Rush Limbaugh’s drugs in.”

Chief Justice Warren Burger, accustomed to decorum and ritual, was said to have been startled by Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall one morning. One Justice after another, encountering the head of the Court, made customary greetings to “Mr. Chief Justice.” Then came Marshall with a jovial, “What’s shaking, chiefy baby.”

Michael Steele began his tenure as Republican chairman promising to attract urban young people to the GOP message. He would put together an “off the hook” campaign into “urban-suburban hip-hop settings” to appeal to minority youth, an untapped market for Republicans, to be sure.

President Obama composed a stimulus package to keep as many working people as possible from losing their jobs. Steele dismissed it, with an urbane flair, as “just a wish list from a lot of people who have been on the sidelines for years.. to get a little bling, bling.” I admit running to the urban dictionary. Did “bling bling” still mean the same thing?

Governor Bobby Jindal, Republican governor of Louisiana gave a speech that went fairly flat. Steele came to the rescue. He offered “some slum love out to my buddy.” He confronted the Republican pattern of garnering white votes with race baiting campaigns. “Tonight, we tell America: we know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad.”

And so it went. Thurgood Marshall had engaged in a bit of humor, gentle disrespect combined with a little self-mocking. But Michael Steele? You didn’t have to be a hip hop enthusiast to be provoked into embarrassed eye rolling by his meat locker cool. Anyone who, as a youth, ever encountered an uncle or neighbor trying to act the part would squirm just a little.

Republicans loved it, of course. Well. Some did. At first. Michele Bachmann reflected fond visionary hopes of some that the GOP would at last achieve a sort of coolness, as she lapsed into a demented chant, introducing Steele to CPAC with “You be da man! You be da man.”

But then he started impacting the first principle, the prime directive. The Republican Party has a problem. It has accomplished a mathematical anomaly, winning huge in November, but still managing to shrink. It’s largely the tea party effect. The GOP drives out liberals, then moderates, then conservatives who are not extreme enough, then extremists who do not howl at the moon. But the party was to maintain the lead in, as they say, the key demographic. Money flows. And that’s where Steele put a dent.

The “naked lady place scandal” as Rachel Maddow adeptly called it, changed the money raising dynamic. Well publicized visits to sex bondage clubs, and subsequent argument about it, painted political donors as sexually weird and very uncool. Country Club boasts about donating to the GOP became less a status symbol than something to hide. The bottom fell out of the barrel for Republican fund raising. Conservatives still gave, but not to the Republican Party. The GOP Governor’s Association and right wing PAC’s took over. Michael Steele is more than an embarrassment. He is an active participant in the remarkable shrinking party that is now the GOP.

Last night, Steele is reported to have promised supporters in a telephone conference that he will run for re-election as head of the Republican National Committee. Here’s wishing him well in that endeavor. You be da man, Michael Steele! You be da man.

This week the staff of a Democrat, incumbent Congressman Tom Perriello of Virginia, called his Republican opponent a carpetbagger. So the Republican National Campaign Committee got the home addresses of several staffers working for Democrat Perriello.

Republicans were hot to demonstrate that the Democrat was disloyal to his district, hiring workers who lived in other areas. Sometimes any campaign issue will do, and turnabout being fair play, Republicans published the names of half a dozen workers, all living outside the district. One of them was Perriello’s chief of staff. Republicans said the he should fire them all.

It all reminded me of a small town I once did some business in. I made a few friends, but there was a reserve that bordered on iciness from some others. One new friend explained it with a story of local parochialism. He had once voiced a mild disagreement on some minor matter during a group discussion. It was not a sharp rebuke, rather an on-the-other-hand sort of comment. “Oh, that’s right,” said a woman in the group. “You’re not from around here.” He had lived in the community all his life, but she was using her “you” in the plural. She meant that his family had not been multi-generational residents.

So last week, Republicans published the names of those half a dozen staff members. They. Added. Their. Exact. Home. Addresses. As in HOME.

This is not the first experience this Congressman has had with home addresses. Last year, some enterprising Republican published the Congressman’s home address and urged conservatives to “drop by” and pay their respects. Well, it was almost his address. Seems there was a mistake and the address was wrong. It was actually that of the Congressman’s brother. One person who dropped by the brother’s home in the dead of night did not ring the bell, but rather cut the gas line leading to the house.

This sort of address publishing thing has become a pattern. Remember Congressman Mark Foley, who hit the headlines in 2006, after making suggestive advances on young Congressional pages? Conservative bloggers were outraged, but not all of them were angry at the Congressman. One published the names and home addresses of the minors who were the objects of the Congressman’s desires. Seems they were guilty of tattling. Major conservative sites then linked to the article containing the addresses.

The following year a couple of small children in Maryland became living examples of what government assisted health care could do. The little kids had been in a serious car accident. One of them would almost certainly have died of brain injuries had not medical care been available under a government program. Conservatives got angry. They not only published the address of the kids, but included driving directions to their door.

This new approach may seem harsh. But the well being of staff members, the privacy of the young objects of Congressional urges, and the safety of injured little kids must not stand in the way of conservative principles.

It must have been a fearful journey. It was a time in which women were commonly viewed as property, to be given over from father to husband. The young Marie, my grandmother, had been promised in marriage to a man she did not love. So she fled her native Ukraine and came to America. I do not know whether she entered by way of Ellis Island. It was a common port of entry. It seems likely that she would have been among those processed by overworked officials of varying degrees of sympathy for newcomers.

The social networking that went on in those days is unclear to me. She somehow got word that the man to whom she had been promised was on his way to find her, claim her, and take her back to the Ukraine. One story my momma told me illustrates the terror a new land must hold for new immigrants. After being in her new land for a few months, Marie became lost in New York City. She spoke no English. In the country she had fled, authorities were always to be feared, and she did not know what reaction there would be in America to a woman fleeing the man who owned her. She avoided the police. She confronted the confusion of the streets alone.

Her stay in New York was one of watchful waiting, looking for some sign of the man who was searching for his escaped bride. Eventually, she packed up and continued her odyssey, journeying up the Hudson River and then westward, finally settling between Syracuse and Rochester. She met a man, fell in love, and married.

I never knew my grandfather. He died when my mother was a young child, I have the impression her memories of him were vague. He served in the Polish army at some point. My mother was the youngest of several sisters born of that marriage. It was an insular existence. My mother did not speak English until she was old enough to go to school. My grandmother never knew any language than that of her own upbringing. My mother translated.

The arguments for English-only policies would have applied to my grandmother, although people of her origin are not the targets. Anti-immigrant sentiment of today would not have been aimed at her either. Those who argue against citizenship for children born here do not have my mother in mind. But my grandmother’s ethnicity, and that of my mother, was very much an issue in their community when my parents were married. My momma was eventually accepted by his family, but the thin residue of ethnic separateness was always present.

Eastern Europeans, with their strange language, their strange names, and their stranger Catholic religion, were not an easy fit in the community of my birth. Nativism has a long tradition in this country, although the targets shift over time. Today, bigotry is directed against those of Latin descent. It is most distinctive, for me, among those who hate illegal immigration because the undocumented cut ahead, not following the rules. When those same enforcers of immigration etiquette also push to restrict legal immigration, I suspect the niceties of waiting in line are not their real concern.

Michael Medved was once a movie critic with a reputation for stretching pretty far to preach conservative political commentary in his reviews. I saw Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood, on cable. It was a bit of a downer, I thought. I later came across a Michael Medved review that I had missed. It should have contained a spoiler alert. He didn’t like what he saw as a right-to-life violation in the movie, so he gave away the ending. He later explained, “there are competing moral demands that come into the job of a movie critic. We have a moral and fairness obligation to not spoil movies. On the other hand, our primary moral obligation is to tell the truth.”

It’s hard to find Medved’s review on line anymore, so I’m going by memory here. I recall his summary of the theme as having the title character, Hilary Swank, needing to prove her self-worth by boxing. It supported Medved’s attack, though not his giving away the ending. But there was another problem. It lacked the virtue of truth. I remember trying to recall anything in the movie that would suggest such a thing.

And that is a serious drawback to political passion. The temptation to veer away from truth is a powerful one. Lately, Medved has been a frequent victim. Driving to the office a few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Medved concerning the Islamic Cultural non-Mosque in Manhattan.

The point of the Cultural Center was, in part, to put a thumb in the eye of terrorists. This show of American unity was to be a rebuke to the bigotry of Islamic extremists, a demonstration that American Muslims not only pointed an accusing finger at bin Laden, but were supported by mainstream America. Conservatives and liberals joined in supporting them, until American bigots parroted al Qaeda bigots. Medved chuckled at the controversy. It would be so simple to solve, he said. Just move the center a few more blocks away than the 12 block distance now planned. Opposition would vanish.

Then Medved had another chuckle at the self-contradiction of President Obama, who questioned the wisdom of the planners, but who had originally said, according to Medved, “Opponents of the mosque (sic) want to take away religious freedom.” Medved added “No we don’t.” Strangely, Obama neither questioned the wisdom of planners of the center, nor characterized opponents in any way. Medved was simply not telling the truth.

Medved is sincere in his conservative beliefs. He argues that those who see American slavery as historical evil exaggerate. His reasoning is that slavery was unfortunate, but not that bad. More recently, he says if God voted, the ballot would be for Republicans only. His reasoning there is that conservative evangelists have invested more study in God’s word, so they should know best. They tend to support Republicans, so there you have it. Liberals sympathize with the poor while biblical law supports equal treatment of both.

Biblical scholars, friends as they are of Michael Medved, may forever debate the unusual ethic that conservative politics demands. The Ten Commandments are important and people should hold to them. Except the one about false witness. It’s always okay to lie in service to the Lord.