Right Wing Nut House

I hear Energizer Corporation is in discussions with Sandy Berger’s attorneys regarding his replacing the bunny as the mascot in its ad campaigns. It makes sense considering that the Sandy Berger Documents Odyssey just keeps going, and going, and going. . .

Today’s drip from the scandal’s faucet comes to us courtesy of the Washington Post and more evidence that the FBI was clueless about the true nature of Berger’s crimes as well as the startling admission by a couple of staff members of the 9/11 Commission that not only weren’t they told of the extent of Berger’s whitewashing expeditions to the National Archives but that they would have been more than eager to ask him under oath exactly what documents he destroyed.

It turns out, that despite what we were told initially about Berger’s crimes not involving the destruction of original, classified documents that in fact, the Archives have no idea how many documents Berger made off with.:

Brachfeld said he was worried that during four visits in 2002 and 2003, Berger had the opportunity to remove more than the five documents he admitted taking. Brachfeld wanted the Justice Department to notify officials of the 9/11 Commission that Berger’s actions — in combination with a bungled Archives response — might have obstructed the commission’s review of Clinton’s terrorism policies.

The Justice Department spurned the advice, and some of Brachfeld’s colleagues at the Archives greeted his warnings with accusations of disloyalty. But more than three years later, as Brachfeld and House lawmakers have pushed new details about Berger’s actions onto the public record — such as Berger’s use of a construction site near the Archives to temporarily hide some of the classified documents — Brachfeld’s contentions have attracted fresh support…

Zelikow (Staff attorney for the 9/11 Commission. ed.) said in an interview last week that “I think all of my colleagues would have wanted to have all the information at the time that we learned from the congressional report, because that would have triggered some additional questions, including questions we could have posed to Berger under oath.”

The commission’s former general counsel, Dan Marcus, now an American University law professor, separately expressed surprise at how little the Justice Department told the commission about Berger and said it was “a little unnerving” to learn from the congressional report exactly what Berger reviewed at the Archives and what he admitted to the FBI — including that he removed and cut up three copies of a classified memo.

“If he took papers out, these were unique records, and highly, highly classified. Had a document not been produced, who would have known?” Brachfeld said in an interview. “I thought [the 9/11 Commission] should know, in current time — in judging Sandy Berger as a witness . . . that there was a risk they did not get the full production of records.”

And to give you an idea of the outright stupidity of the Justice Department in this matter, it appears that rather than, you know, like, investigate Berger’s theft, they relied on what Berger was telling them when they told the Commission that Berger only took 5 documents:

In a letter to House lawmakers last week, Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling did not address the issue of why the department told the commission so little. But Hertling wrote that in numerous interviews, “neither Mr. Berger nor any other witness provided the Department with evidence that Mr. Berger had taken any documents beyond the five.”

Hertling said the department “stands by its investigation” and believes the guilty plea it negotiated with Berger on April 1, 2005, “was the best one possible in light of the available evidence.” He also criticized the Archives staff for failing at the time to confront Berger, search him or contact security officials, saying this failure “had to be weighed against the evidence.”

The “available evidence” was evidently supplied by the perp’s statements about how many documents he stole not on any evidence gleaned from a thorough investigation. But we can’t simply blame the Justice Department in this matter. Clearly, the custodians of our treasured national records must bear a large share of the blame:

In the Hertling letter, the department noted obstacles in its investigation. The FBI was not advised of the case until Oct. 15, 2003, almost two weeks after Smith concluded that Berger had stolen documents. By then, Archives General Counsel Gary Stern had called Berger and former Clinton lawyer Bruce Lindsey about it and obtained two documents from Berger, who surrendered them at home after first denying they were in his possession.

The letter also said that six months after beginning the probe and well after Berger testified to the commission, “the Department had not yet asked Mr. Berger any questions, as he had not yet agreed to an interview.” Berger’s lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said Berger first spoke to the FBI in March 2005 and was interviewed a second time in July of that year, after his April 1, 2005, guilty plea to unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Gary Stern, Archives General Counsel, was a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy during the Clinton Administration. In case you might miss the connection, about 70% of the Department of Energy’s budget has to do with the care and feeding of nuclear weapons. I will bet you a dollar to Navy Beans that Berger and Stern were good chums and that Stern wanted to make sure Berger had all his legal ducks in a row before siccing the Feds on him.

Of course, they didn’t talk to Berger for 5 whole months. And when they did, they swallowed his story about not stealing any originals and only taking 5 documents hook, line, and sinker. Not because they’re stupid. But because they didn’t want to know. These kinds of cases are huge embarrassments after all and the less anyone knew about it, the better.

This didn’t sit well with Archives IG Paul Brachfeld who agitated for a deeper investigation as well as informing the 9/11 Commission that Berger should be questioned about what he actually did:

Brachfeld pressed Justice Department officials on six occasions in 2004 to make a fuller statement to the commission about Berger’s actions, to no avail. He also contacted Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine, who organized an April 2004 meeting between Brachfeld and Justice officials that convinced him that “these issues had to go before the 9/11 Commission,” according to two people present.

But in a notification to the commission the following month, the department did not mention that Berger had cut up documents, that he reviewed uncatalogued originals or that Brachfeld worried that Berger’s theft was greater.

Incredible.

Even more jaw dropping is that the staff at the Archives is evidently miffed that Brachfeld won’t drop the matter like a good little bureaucrat:

Some of Brachfeld’s colleagues have not been cheered by his new congressional support. An Archives lawyer, who Brachfeld said was one of those involved in the Berger case, this month sent Brachfeld an e-mail accusing him of poor judgment and stating that “I don’t think it comes as a great surprise if I were to venture the opinion that senior management at this agency have serious problems with the manner in which your office conducted itself . . . during the Berger investigation.”

On Friday, Archivist Allen Weinstein assured Brachfeld in writing, however, that this criticism did “not reflect either my views or the views of the overwhelming majority of NARA employees.”

In short, after failing to give adequate security to the documents themselves, violating procedure by allowing Berger to access the documents beyond a secure area, allowing him to take the documents back and forth to the bathroom, not bringing the FBI in on the case immediately, lying to the 9/11 Commission about the extent of Berger’s whitewashing of history, contacting Berger’s lawyer and Berger himself before reporting the incident to authorities, and being unable to say just what documents Berger might have made off with, the lower echelon of employees at the Archives who bear responsibility for all of the above are mad at management because they want to get to the bottom of what happened?

Unbelievable.

This case gets weirder all the time. And you know what? I’ll bet that there wasn’t much in those documents that reflected badly on Clinton at all. But the former President, so obsessed with his place in history and how historians will view his presidency and so vainglorious about his own personal standing, that anything that would reflect badly on his leadership needed to be expunged - especially since historians would be paying close attention to the 9/11 Commission’s final report.

They better find a way to get around double jeopardy as it relates to this crime or what happened at the National Archives when Sandy Berger destroyed a part of American history will never be known.

And in a very large way, that is a much bigger crime than Berger committed by stealing the documents in the first place.

UPDATE

Allah weighs in:

Exit question: What’s the deal? Moran thinks the DOJ is embarrassed by the incident and just wants it to go away, but why? No one would fault them for trusting an ex-cabinet member to behave ethically, even one with the taint of Clinton upon him. I think they’re more worried about sensitive national security information coming to light, either in the form of documents that Berger has or stuff he knows from his time in office. You don’t bring down the hammer on a former NSA, especially one with no compunctions about shenanigans involving state secrets.

Actually, I think they’re embarrassed because they botched the “investigation” from the get go. When two weeks pass between the crime and the reporting of said crime and then months go by before getting the perp to agree to talk, it might be well that no one ask too many questions about what actually transpired. If the IG for the Archives hadn’t been pushing this story over the last few months, we would never have been any the wiser. Those Republican House members who were asking for some explanations were doing so because Brachfeld was frustrated about what he saw as a cop out by Justice in not informing the 9/11 Commission about the extent of Berger’s potential crimes. It was his report that started the House GOP members asking questions back in October (the report was released in December).

Tom Bevan has the jawdropper of the day from Berger’s attorney quoted in the WaPo article:

You have to read all the way to the end of this Washington Post article on the Justice Department’s willful neglect in handling the Sandy Berger case before being confronted with this astonishing quote by Berger’s attorney, Lanny Breuer:

“It never ceases to amaze me how the most trivial things can be politicized. It is the height of unfairness . . . for this poor guy, who clearly made a mistake,” Breuer said.
Stealing highly classified documents from the National Archives is “trivial?” You’ve got to be kidding.

Indeed. And more:

Poor Sandy Berger. He had to pay a $50,000 fine and pick up some garbage on the side of the road in Virginia. Meanwhile, Scooter Libby had to face trial and might go to jail for, at worst, telling “a dumb lie” (to use the words of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald) about a non-crime.

Just as long as we’ve got our priorities right…

I wish I could summon up some outrage over this “comic book” that is being distributed to San Francisco high school kids but every time I look at some of the panels and try to think of something serious to write, I break out laughing.

The introduction by the author, Joel Andreas, reveals a member of the paranoid left in good standing:

The September 11 attacks provided an opportunity for George W. Bush to declare a “War on Terrorism,” which in practice turned out to be an endless binge of war-making. The second edition was published in early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The Bush Administration then turned to preparing for a new war against Iraq. A thin rhetorical veneer about combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction hardly concealed its underlying aim: to impose a new U.S. client regime in the Middle East and assure control over a country that has the world’s second largest known oil reserves. As the present edition goes to press, the U.S. is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. In an effort to quell armed resistance, the U.S. military is taking harsh punitive measures against the civilian populations of both countries, feeding a spiral of violence that has repercussions around the world and is placing us all in greater danger.

Holy Smokes! It’s like trying to fisk Chomsky! So many exaggerations, misinformed non sequiturs, and out and out falsehoods that all a sane person can do is throw up their hands and laugh at the utter stupidity on display.

As for the comic book itself, the reference notes explain much: Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Peter Wyden, William Blum, Robert Fisk, Charles Bergquist - an honor roll of leftist historians whose writings are colored to this day by a discredited Marxist worldview involving economic determinism (although Marxists reject the idea of determinism ever being a Marxist concept - now that it’s an abject failure), reductionism and other tried and true hyper liberal historical/sociological concepts that survive only in the dusty offices and even dustier heads of leftist academics.

This worldview enjoyed much popularity for more than 100 years because it purported to explain human behavior by looking at class and macro-economic factors. The problem, of course, is that determinism doesn’t do a good job of describing human motivations at all. It has never done a good job of doing so and never will. In fact, if the collapse of Communism proved anything, it showed that leftist scholars who adhere to this worldview have been more wrong in interpreting and commenting on historical events than any similar group of scholars since perhaps the Greeks who ascribed divine intervention to historical occurrences.

But don’t tell leftist academics this. Their heads might explode.

But beyond the author of this comic book and his sources, there is the weird, almost casual disregard for context that makes the book - which is supposed to be used as a supplemental text - little more than the kind of rant you might hear from brainless, uneducated goofs like Cindy Sheehan or Dennis Kucinich. Case in point: Chapter Two “The Cold War:”

Aside from the gross exaggerations and lack of context given regarding those 200 military “interventions” - the overwhelming majority of which were to protect American citizens and property in times of revolution or civil unrest in countries that could not guarantee such protections - I would call your attention to the panel in the upper left of the screen where the young boy is reading what the leftists see as sanitized American history that promotes militarism while keeping our young people ignorant of “the truth.”

Leftists believe that American history is locked in a closet guarded by CIA agents 24 hours a day. If a history textbook somehow fails to show how truly evil the United States is, the obvious reason is that we are suppressing the “true” history of slavery, or depredations carried out against Indians, or oppression of women, or some such arbitrary yardstick of historical accuracy that textbooks deliberately leave out to promote a mindless, patriotic agenda.

I will be the first to take American history textbooks to task for being incomplete, simplistic, and these days, full of politically correct narratives that reflects the desire of textbook companies to sell more books rather than any genuine effort to tell America’s story. But in the end, the kind of “history” promoted by the left is, in fact, anti-history. The schizophrenic nature of our national story - a nation that loves liberty above all else but kept millions in bondage for the first 80 years of its existence among other dichotomies - cannot be illustrated in any single textbook or even series of textbooks and certainly not in a comic book where context is deliberately excluded in order to promote an agenda. In short, the comic book becomes a parody of itself. That panel in the upper left above could show the young man reading the comic book in which his picture appears.

What kind of high school would purchase comic books in the first place, especially when trying to facilitate discussion on such an extraordinarily complex subject? It is apparent that either San Francisco is full of ignorant high school kids who can only learn by being exposed to reading material the level that a kindergartner wouldn’t find challenging or that school authorities themselves have precious little confidence in the cognitive abilities of students under their care.

My guess is the latter. This country is full of clueless school officials who not only fail to challenge students in developing curricula that would give them a fully rounded education, but also seek to promote their own agendas and foist their own ideas upon students with little thought to developing their critical thinking skills - the ability of the student to think and reason for themselves. This includes liberals in San Francisco and conservatives in Kansas.

Stupidity among school boards knows no ideological limits.

George Bush will go before the American people tonight and perform one of the only Constitutionally mandated duties of a President; he must “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient;” (Article II, Section 3).

It is not necessary that he give this speech before a joint session of Congress. Our first two Presidents felt it desirable to do so but from the time of the Jefferson Administration through President William Howard Taft’s final message in 1912, the “State of the Union” was an often lengthy report to Congress full of wish lists for various departments and boring summaries of the latest wars to kick Indians off their land. Woodrow Wilson invented the SOTU as a modern presidential dog and pony show, believing that the presidency was “dynamic, alive, and personal.”

Even modern Presidents have sometimes not bothered to deliver the SOTU in public and instead, simply handed one into Congress like a kid handing his homework. Jimmy Carter was the last President to forgo the pleasure of appearing before Congress. His final SOTU in 1981 was hand delivered to Congress and judging by its length, they may have had to use a crane to get the damn thing to the Speaker’s office. Reading it through, one is struck by the blindness, the moral cowardice, and the denial of reality that oozes from every page. Even after the whupping the Gipper gave him, Carter could never acknowledge either his own mistakes or that his worldview was warped, stupid and naive.

State of the Union speeches have since become grand civic theater - a cross between a classic melodrama when a President points to the American hero of the day in the gallery and low, bawdy house comedy as the reactions of the opposition party become as much a part of the speech as the words uttered by the President.

But there was a time when the State of the Union speech took on enormous drama and in a very real way inspired millions.

Ronald Reagan’s 1982 speech was his first SOTU. He was at the height of his powers, holding the Congress and the nation spellbound with soaring rhetoric and hardheaded assessments of both our domestic and foreign problems:

But from this podium, Winston Churchill asked the free world to stand together against the onslaught of aggression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke of a day of infamy and summoned a nation to arms. Douglas MacArthur made an unforgettable farewell to a country he loved and served so well. Dwight Eisenhower reminded us that peace was purchased only at the price of strength. And John F. Kennedy spoke of the burden and glory that is freedom.

When I visited this Chamber last year as a newcomer to Washington, critical of past policies which I believed had failed, I proposed a new spirit of partnership between this Congress and this administration and between Washington and our State and local governments. In forging this new partnership for America, we could achieve the oldest hopes of our Republic—prosperity for our nation, peace for the world, and the blessings of individual liberty for our children and, someday, for all of humanity.

It’s my duty to report to you tonight on the progress that we have made in our relations with other nations, on the foundation we’ve carefully laid for our economic recovery, and finally, on a bold and spirited initiative that I believe can change the face of American government and make it again the servant of the people.

Seldom have the stakes been higher for America. What we do and say here will make all the difference to autoworkers in Detroit, lumberjacks in the Northwest, steelworkers in Steubenville who are in the unemployment lines; to black teenagers in Newark and Chicago; to hard-pressed farmers and small businessmen; and to millions of everyday Americans who harbor the simple wish of a safe and financially secure future for their children. To understand the state of the Union, we must look not only at where we are and where we’re going but where we’ve been.

After detailing the dire straits he found the Republic upon taking office, Reagan ticked off a few of the measures he had taken to remedy the situation. It is important to remember that the recession at that time was really beginning to bite as Fed Chairman Paul Volker put the screws to inflation by jacking up interest rates. And yet Reagan insisted on staying the course with his economic plan, convinced in the end that it would work.

Of course it did - mostly. The deficit soared when Reagan misjudged the Democratic Congress. He thought they would be forced to cut entitlements and other non defense spending in order to avoid all that massive red ink. He was wrong there. But if there is one thing all Americans can be grateful to Reagan for is that he let Volker wring inflation out of the economy. The medicine was bitter but absolutely necessary. It was a courageous choice, one that liberals never give him credit and one that every President since has had reason to silently thank him for.

While self congratulatory, the speech also pointed up the pain that was being inflicted and a warning that things would not get better anytime soon:

No one pretends that the way ahead will be easy. In my Inaugural Address last year, I warned that the “ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away . . . because we as Americans have the capacity now, as we’ve had it in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom.” ‘

The economy will face difficult moments in the months ahead. But the program for economic recovery that is in place will pull the economy out of its slump and put us on the road to prosperity and stable growth by the latter half of this year. And that is why I can report to you tonight that in the near future the state of the Union and the economy will be better—much better—if we summon the strength to continue on the course that we’ve charted.

I don’t believe any President since this speech has ever been anything except Little Miss Suzie Sunshine about the current and future state of the Union. And Reagan’s prediction about economic growth was almost spot on; it took until the second quarter of 1983 for growth to begin again. And this time, it was non-inflationary growth. The inflation rate had been whittled down from 12% to less than 4% in two years.

But where Reagan succeeded brilliantly was his inspiration in placing Lenny Skutnik in the gallery to be recognized for heroism. When the President does this nowadays, it seems trite and forced. But back in 1982, Skutnik really was a hero - a very ordinary guy who performed a truly heroic act.

Just two weeks before the speech, on a snowy icy day in Washington, D.C., an Air Florida jet taking off from what was then called Washington National Airport crashed a mile from the airport, hitting the 14th Street bridge and plunging into the icy Potomac River. Six passengers managed to get out of the sinking plane to take their chances in the water.

Traffic on the bridge was at a total standstill which delayed many rescuers from reaching the crash site. A few firefighters with inadequate equipment made it to the river bank and a helicopter began to rescue those in the river by dropping lifelines to the 6 passengers in the icy water. One of the passengers, Arland Williams, began passing the lifelines to others who were too cold to make a move toward them. This eventually cost Williams his life as he became the only passenger who drowned as a result of the crash.

One of the passengers that Williams gave a lifeline to could not hold on as the helicopter began to lift her out of the water. It was then that Skutnik, seeing what was happening and watching as the woman slowly began to go under, jumped into the water. A firefighter leapt in after him to keep Skutnik from drowning and together, they ended up helping the woman to shore.

The crash and aftermath had mesmerized the nation for days and Skutnik was hailed from coast to coast as a true hero. Reagan tapped into all that emotion and skillfully used Skutnik as a prop to underscore his message of courage and that ordinary people can make a difference:

And then there are countless, quiet, everyday heroes of American who sacrifice long and hard so their children will know a better life than they’ve known; church and civic volunteers who help to feed, clothe, nurse, and teach the needy; millions who’ve made our nation and our nation’s destiny so very special-unsung heroes who may not have realized their own dreams themselves but then who reinvest those dreams in their children. Don’t let anyone tell you that America’s best days are behind her, that the American spirit has been vanquished. We’ve seen it triumph too often in our lives to stop believing in it now.

A hundred and twenty years ago, the greatest of all our Presidents delivered his second State of the Union message in this Chamber. “We cannot escape history,” Abraham Lincoln warned. “We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” The “trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest [last] generation.”

Well, that President and that Congress did not fail the American people. Together they weathered the storm and preserved the Union. Let it be said of us that we, too, did not fail; that we, too, worked together to bring America through difficult times. Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Congress and another President, meeting in this Chamber as we are meeting, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of liberty—this last, best hope of man on Earth.

It is very hard to recapture the emotions one felt listening to those words, remembering the times in which they were delivered. Those too young to comprehend or who weren’t born at that time will never understand the rank pessimism that Reagan was fighting. Like today, the naysayers were talking about the end of American dominance. We’re through, they said back then. Might was well walk away and let the Soviets have the world if they want it so badly. We’re running out of oil, our economy will never be the same, and we’ll have to learn to live with inflation and slow growth. Better get used to the idea that from now on, we’ll have limits on our power, our hopes, our dreams.

Those warnings sound just as silly today as they did back then. I don’t see anyone anywhere trying to challenge the “broken” American military. No nation wishes to commit suicide. That domestic insurrection directed against Iranian President Ahmadinejad has many elements to it, not the least of which is the realization that unless they shut the guy up, they are liable to be paid a visit by our “broken” military.

And all that paper held by the Chinese and other foreigners? While not dismissing the problem outright it should be pointed out that 25 years ago it was the Saudis and the Japanese buying up the United States that had our doomsayers in such a glum mood.

Our “moral standing in the world” always suffers under Republican Presidents. In 1982, it was Reagan’s “bellicose” rhetoric that was frightening women, children, and the French and causing the rest of the world to hate and fear us. You should know by now that our moral standing can only improve when we fight in places where we have no national interest and then only when liberals can be convinced that we are killing people selflessly.

What we need to hear tonight is a dose of Reaganism - a very large, full measure of the man’s optimism, faith, hope, and will.

But what we definitely won’t hear tonight, what we need to hear tonight, is what we have not heard since Reagan’s 1982 stirring call to action; the kind of pep talk that would pull us together as a nation and send us out to do battle with our enemies if not united then certainly with a helluva lot more confidence in ourselves than we have at present.

George Bush is a lameduck coming before Congress to give a largely meaningless speech during which he will appeal for support on Iraq. The American people do not appear to be in a mood to give their assent. Whether it is because they don’t think him capable or whether they have lost faith in him as a leader is immaterial to the issue at hand; winning or losing what’s left of Iraq.

If there is victory to be had in Iraq - and if it comes it will be with caveats galore - George Bush must use whatever persuasive powers he has to convince the American people that the goals he sets up to measure victory are realistic and can be achieved in a relatively short period of time. No timetable but rather a ticking clock. And with every movement of the clock hand we get closer to the 2008 election where success or failure in Iraq will define his party and his legacy and the President’s room for maneuver will be lost (if it’s not already gone).

The stakes are just as high now as they were in 1982. Back then, Reagan was attempting to infuse the nation with the spirit of optimism. For Bush, he must give the country a reason to support our fight in Iraq. I wish I could be optimistic that the President will rise to this challenge and overcome his limitations to give the speech of his life. But past history suggests all of us will be disappointed and Bush will fall far short of what is necessary to rally the nation to him.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

What do you get when you throw a stick of dynamite into a room full of nitroglycerin?

Let me rephrase that: What do you get when religion, politics, and powerful symbols of American tradition all intersect to form a combination of controversy and conundrum?

The decision by newly minted Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) to take his oath of office on the Koran rather than the bible has many conservatives up in arms and many of the rest of us scratching our heads. There has been an enormous amount of ink spilled by those who believe that Ellison’s choice of the Koran as a symbol to seal his oath somehow threatens American civilization. Columnist and syndicated radio host Dennis Prager pulled no punches:

First, it is an act of hubris that perfectly exemplifies multiculturalist activism — my culture trumps America’s culture. What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison’s favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress. In your personal life, we will fight for your right to prefer any other book. We will even fight for your right to publish cartoons mocking our Bible. But, Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath.

I sincerely hope that Prager was able to take something to cure whatever was ailing him the day he wrote that article. Referring to Ellison’s “culture” (he was born and raised in this country) and the Koran as Ellison’s “favorite book” was evidence of someone either suffering from a severe case of hyperbole or Prager was demonstrating a towering ignorance about the tradition and meaning of oaths.

Prager wasn’t the only one to be caught up in this hysteria over where Ellison’s hand was going to be when he swore to uphold the Constitution. Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode felt it necessary to send an email to hundreds of his constituents warning them that Ellison was just the tip of the iceberg; that unless we followed the Mr. Goode’s advice and drastically curtailed the immigration of Muslims to America, we would end up with more Congressmen who would take the oath using the Koran:

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

I am glad that Mr. Goode vowed to use the bible when being sworn in. This despite the fact that no one in this country or on planet earth for that matter ever suggested that he would use anything else. Goode reassured us even more when he published a short column in USA Today where he dutifully informed us that he has a copy of the 10 commandments on the wall of his office (presumably not the original) and that he does not subscribe to any of the tenets of the Koran nor will he display the book in his office. I’m sure this comes as an immense relief to his constituents although what relevance it has to his duties as a Congressman remains something of a mystery. Perhaps Goode believes that populating the country with strawmen is in his job description.

But Goode does his level best to ignore history and generate hysteria when he tries raise the spectre of some kind of Muslim invasion that would not only overwhelm our “resources” but even worse, mean the election of more Muslim Congressmen, probably Democrats. In fact, Goode has very little to worry about. The history of every immigrant group who has come to America has shown that the same fears expressed by Goode about the newcomers undermining our values and culture were used by nativist and anti-immigration forces in the past.

For the Irish, it was questioning how they could be loyal to both Rome and the US government. For the Italians, it was the fear that their birthrate would overwhelm the “real” Americans and we’d wake up one day and everyone would have a last name that ended in a vowel. And don’t forget the mafia while your at it. Mexican immigrants in the past raised many of the same fears plus the added bugaboo of everyone having to learn Spanish in order to get by. I would argue that this has become more of a threat as the push to assimilate more recent Mexican immigrants has been blunted by many of those multiculturalists that Goode and Prager rail against. But Mexicans who have been here for generations turned out (not surprisingly) to be regular Americans who speak English, complain about high taxes, and even vote Republican sometimes.

The question is why we should expect anything less from Muslims than we did from Irish, Italians, or Mexicans? In fact, Muslims who have been here for several generations have adapted very nicely, thank you. Like all other immigrants in our history, they learn English, adapt American values, work hard, and are loyal, patriotic citizens. And like other immigrant groups, they have those who find it hard to fit in and adapt. There are enclaves of Muslims that wish to remain separate. And the lure of radical Islamism is certainly a reality that we must deal with. But are we to deny entry into this country for an entire religious sect because of the violent proclivities of the few? This has never been the American way and despite the fact that we are at war with Islamic extremists, we shouldn’t change now.

I’m sure Ellison is enjoying all the attention. It is distracting people from examining his hyper-liberal record as well as some curious connections the new Congressman has with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). For a stunning review of these connections as well as a close look at some of his jaw dropping positions on the issues, the boys at Powerline covered Ellison’s campaign so well that the local paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune didn’t even bother. Or perhaps what the Powerline crew uncovered would have been absolutely devastating to his candidacy which is why the liberal “Strib” never wrote a word about Ellison’s radicalism.

Be that as it may, as a political junkie I can always appreciate a good political maneuver. And Ellison has come up with a beaut. He will take the oath on a Koran owned by none other than the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson:

“He wanted to use a Koran that was special,” said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison’s 5th District, was happy to help.

Jefferson’s copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson’s collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn’t the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies — the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Pretty shrewd. And I’ll bet Mr. Goode and perhaps even Dennis Prager are having apoplexy over Ellison’s political master stroke.

All of this ignores two salient facts. The first being that the oath taken using the bible (or the Koran or the Hindu Bhagvad Gita if you’re so inclined) is actually the second oath taken by the incoming Congressmen. It is a photo-op, nothing more. The first oath is administered in private with no holy book at all. This not only raises the question of what the fuss is all about but also just what an oath or affirmation means?

An oath is a personal guarantee. Despite Dennis Prager’s contention that the Congressional oath is somehow a rite that belongs to America, anytime someone swears - with or without a sacred text - that individual is giving a personal assurance that the terms of the oath will be upheld. Until recently, the bible was a powerful talisman to use when taking an oath because it was believed (and still is thought by some) that if you break an oath after swearing it on the bible, you go straight to hell when you die and burn for eternity with no possibility of being given a reprieve. This had the salutatory effect of assuring one and all that the individual swearing on the bible really meant it.

Times change and few would make a similar argument today. Instead, the consequences for breaking an oath are entirely secular in nature. In the case of a Congressman violating their oath to be loyal to America, one would think a very long jail term would be in the offing.

But it is the symbolic power of the oath as a reminder both to a Congressman and to his constituents that the stakes of service are high and that being true to the United States is extremely important. And if one is concerned about the Congressman holding that promise sacred by using a symbol to denote the seriousness and gravity of the moment, shouldn’t that symbol reflect the deepest beliefs of the oath taker rather than some arbitrary construct that would be meaningless in a religious sense?

This is an issue that will not go away. Someday, a fundamentalist Muslim may be elected to Congress and questions will again be raised about “serving two masters” and whether or not someone who believes in the efficacy of Sharia law can serve after swearing allegiance to the Constitution. I don’t think that day will come anytime soon. But when it does, I hope the hysteria can be kept to a minimum and we can examine the issue with reason and tolerance. For a nation founded on religious diversity, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to manage without descending into the darkness of ignorance and bigotry.

And I just couldn’t in good conscience vote for a person who doesn’t believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other ninety five percent of us suffer from some form of mass delusion.
(Palmer Joss from the movie Contact)

Carl Sagan, who authored the novel on which the movie is loosely based, died before the production of the film Contact was complete. And while the film is fairly true to Sagan’s humanistic and atheistic outlook, the scientist was nevertheless fascinated by the the human mind’s need to seek out the mystical properties of the universe. It’s not that Sagan hated religion as some atheists demonstrate on a regular basis. He hated its dogmatic approach to seeking and explaining universal truths - something that offended his scientific soul to no end. More than anything however, Sagan railed against the impact of religion on politics in America, seeing the self-evident danger of connecting the zeal of the true believer in religion with any political movement or politician.

Now it’s not often that I rise in defense of a belief in the supernatural, the mystical, or simple faith in a power greater than ourselves. Being something of a befuddled atheist, I tend to look at the impact of religion on politics and how the threads of religious belief have been woven into the very fabric of our society rather than examining the efficacy of a belief in God itself. But Sagan was much too broad in his condemnation of the confluence of religion and politics in America. He consistently ignored the fact that most of the mass reform movements in America have been animated by religious fervor; abolition, temperance (which affected the nascent womens’ rights movement), “prairie” populism, civil rights, and the moral basis for the anti-war movement of the 1960’s.

The positive impact of those reform movements on American life can sometimes be described as uneven at best. The temperance movement was allied with anti-immigrant forces. The “prairie populism” of the late 19th century was hijacked by large eastern money interests and manipulated for their own ends. The civil rights movement has degenerated into a lobby of special pleaders, no different than those who advocate price supports for wheat. And the moral underpinnings of opposition to Viet Nam morphed into the moral absolutism of the new left. Nevertheless, religion’s impact on our politics has been a plus over the years, supplying a moral basis for change as well as animating and inspiring some of our most important historical figures.

Religion and politics in this country are joined at the hip. But that doesn’t mean that our citizens are drunk with it - the “drug” that Communists believed religion to be. Americans look with an equally jaundiced eye at politicians who profess their faith too vigorously as well as those who give short shrift to any kind of religiosity. Part of this is certainly due to our Puritan roots, a movement against the outward manifestation of religion, reacting against the rites and rituals of the Church of England. But it also reflects the eminently practical side of the American citizen; the majority of us don’t think about religion that much and when we do, we tend to be surprisingly tolerant of how someone else worships their god.

That there is intolerance in America of other religions among a significant percentage of the population is born out in FBI statistics of hate crimes directed against people based on their religious beliefs. But what is truly remarkable is that there so few incidents to record. Out of a little more than 8,800 hate crimes committed in America in 2005, there were 1407 victims of crimes based on religious bias. And out of those victims, by far and away the largest group offended against were Jews (364). The next largest religious sect targeted were Muslims - 89. This is down from more than 500 Muslim victims of religious based hate crimes in 2001.

I might note that there was exactly 1 atheist who was victim of a hate crime that year. And the number of hate crimes against Protestants and Catholics totalled 54. So much for persecution of us atheists.

What these statistics don’t tell us is how many American citizens stared in disapproval when a Muslim woman walked by in a Chador. Or how many people razzed a Hasidic Jew for their distinctive facial hair (payoth). Or how many articles skewering Scientology as a scam and a farce were written. Or how many websites are on the internet that write the most laughably ignorant screeds against a “Papal Conspiracy” or even how anti-Catholics have latched on to theThe DaVinci Code to prove one nefarious thing or another about Catholicism.

Committing an overt act of aggressive violence against a practitioner of a particular religion is one thing. It is the intolerance visited upon religions in the form of a lack of respect for custom and beliefs that I believe to be a more significant problem in that this aspect of bigotry is not only becoming more common, but also more acceptable to both sides of the political spectrum.

In fact, both right and left are increasingly using religion as a political club, attempting to “prove” one horrible thing or another about their opponents. What makes this a matter of curiosity to me is that not all religions are targeted. For the left, it is Christians (or more generally, historical Judeo-Christian beliefs) who have borne the brunt of some of the most vile, hate filled speech imaginable. On the right, it is the simple minded attack of equating the entire Islamic faith with terrorism and/or world conquest while raising the specter of collusion in this fantasy by the left.

This is not to say that there should be no criticism directed against the followers of these religions for their stupidities or villainies. I have taken both Christians and Muslims to task for their excesses and their fake piety on many occasions. It is not criticism that is intolerant but rather the gratuitous, unthinking, unreasonable, shallow critiques that are passed off as “analysis” or “the way things really are” that reveal a profound bigotry disguising itself as political commentary.

Both sides are equally guilty of this calumnious behavior although, perhaps being a conservative, I see the left’s gratuitous Christian bashing as more obscenely casual than the sometimes laughably earnest efforts on the right to connect the left to Muslim extremism (while denigrating the entire Islamic faith in the process).

Trying to prove that the left is sympathetic to Islamic extremists is fairly simple - as long as you ignore the facts and concentrate on the left’s lack of enthusiasm for fighting the War on Terror the way that many of my fellow conservatives believe it should be fought - by bombing any number of countries who are clear enemies of the United States or who don’t speak out vigorously enough against the Islamists in their midst. In this case, it is simply a matter of using illogic to make the charge that since liberals don’t condemn the Islamists loud enough or often enough, they somehow support them - a bit of sophistry that understandably infuriates the left.

And always present in these charges is the belief that the left is somehow complicit in what many conservatives refer to as the “dhimmification” of America - the belief that by being too tolerant of the Muslim faith, we are actually playing into the Islamist’s hands and readying ourselves for domination by Muslims. What my conservative friends mistake for submission is no more than a strain of Political Correctness toward religion that manifests itself in many ways - including bending over backwards not to offend evangelicals:

Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees. Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah’s flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

“In order to avoid offending religious fundamentalists, our National Park Service is under orders to suspend its belief in geology,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “It is disconcerting that the official position of a national park as to the geologic age of the Grand Canyon is ‘no comment.’”

(HT: C & L)

Having said all of this, there is ample reason for criticizing the left’s myopia regarding the real threat of Islamic extremism and their apparent sanguinity in the face of Islamists using their favorite talking points when criticizing the United States. This doesn’t make them supporters of the extremists nor does it make them any less patriotic. It only reveals them to be the useful idiots of the Islamists, a charge they refute by trying to point to all the ways in which the Islamists resemble religious conservatives. This is a laughable argument that fails to address the fact that a tape from al-Qaeda can sound very much like many a diary that appears on Daily Kos or many columns that appear in Raw Story or on Juan Cole’s ever more conspiratorial-minded blog, Informed Comment.

On the other side of the coin, it has been shocking to watch over the last few years as the left has thrown off all restraints and attacked the Bush Administration and their supporters using some of the most nauseating anti-Christian invective imaginable. It isn’t enough that the left denigrates the use of devout Christian beliefs by the Bush Administration to advance a political agenda (such as the above example regarding the Grand Canyon). Such criticism (if carefully done) is valid and necessary. The problem has been the stomach turning way in which not only the beliefs of evangelicals and Christians in general have been denigrated, but also the lifestyle, the manners, the customs, and concerns of these folks which have been turned into fodder for ruthless parody or outright hate filled rants that reek of cultural and intellectual superiority:

But there is one number that stands out among the rest as absolutely unbelievable. Twenty-five percent of Americans believe that Jesus Christ will return to earth in 2007. TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT! IN 2007!

These people are nuts. There’s no polite way of saying it. If I sound superior, too bad. Sanity has its advantages.

If some of the famed cultural warriors of the right want to take me on and defend their cherished Christian cohorts, step on up. I’ll take every one of them on and win very, very easily.

Here’s my plan for victory - wait till 2008. When Jesus doesn’t come - again, for the 2,007th time - I will be proven right. Will the people who believed he was coming in 2007 change their minds? Of course not. They’ll just say he’s coming in 2008. And on and on it goes.

I will gladly step up and defend the 25% of Americans who believe in the second coming of Christ - a belief that many protestant denominations teach is imminent and that their congregations should expect Christ’s return at any time.

How “sane” the author, Cenk Uygur, of this vicious, anti-Christian piece actually is can be gleaned from this jaw dropping passage:

You people are seriously disturbed. You think a magic man is going to appear out of the sky and grant you eternal bliss. If the man’s name was anything other than Jesus, that belief would get you locked up as a psychotic. And the fact that you have given him this magic name and decided to call him your Lord doesn’t make it any more sane.

Imagine for a second if instead of Jesus, some psycho was waiting for a magical creature named Fred to come save him this year and suck him up into the sky. Now, who doesn’t think that man needs serious counseling and perhaps medical supervision? Now, you change Fred into Jesus, and you have 25% of the country.

Sometimes the world scares me. It is full of psychotics who go around pretending to be rational human beings. You think that’s offensive, then prove me wrong. I dare you. Show me Jesus in 2007 and I’ll do whatever you demand of me.

It should go without saying that it is not “psychotic” to believe in the tenets of any religion - the operative word being “belief” which denotes that which cannot be empirically proven but rather “a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing,” according to Dr. Johnson. And as far as rationality is concerned, I suggest Mr. Uygur read Thomas Aquinas for proof that reason and faith can, in fact, compliment one another. Indeed, as Pope Benedict recently elucidated brilliantly, reason is the basis for belief in God.

Why then, should the author stop at poking fun at The Last Days? For a “sane” and “rational” person, the idea of the son of a dead carpenter rising from the dead is ludicrous, the height of idiocy. Everyone knows once you’re dead, you’re dead. And what about all those “miracles?” Helping the blind to see and the lame to walk? You’ve got to be kidding. Except that this belief has animated and inspired scientific giants, none more prominent than Isaac Newton whose faith in God and that dead son of a carpenter led to discoveries that are universally recognized as the greatest in the history of science. “I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired. I study the Bible daily,” he wrote. And there is absolutely no difference between his beliefs and the beliefs that Mr. Uygur so sickeningly describes as “psychotic.”

This is but one example of the left’s despicable attack on people of faith. To find others, I suggest you Google up “American Taliban” - an outrageous, exaggerated phrase that seeks to tie the religious political right in America to the murderous tyrants who bullied the Afghanistan people until they were overthrown by American arms in 2001.

Intolerance is not confined to those with religious beliefs. As Mr. Uygur proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, the disease can manifest itself even among “sane” and “rational” bigots on the left. And the air of insufferable superiority and condescension by the Uygur’s of this country is so ripe that the stink of their ignorance permeates our politics to the point that rational discourse regarding the very real threat of religious influence affecting reason and science in society is impossible.

For I actually agree with some of the left’s critique of the religious right and their drive to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, although I think the threat is vastly overstated for purely political purposes. And the religious right’s intolerance of gays, of the teaching of science that contradicts dogma, and of the “godlessness” of the political opposition all contribute to a coarsening of political dialogue.

And it isn’t just the hard, evangelical right that exhibits this kind of intolerance. Many of my fellow conservatives, in their zeal to prosecute the War on Terror, much too often use too broad a brush in condemning Islam and, by extension, the left itself for what they see as failures to stand up to the extremists or worse, sympathize with their goals. The fact that moderate Muslims are too eager to play politics with Islamism by piggybacking their grievances on the attention garnered by the terrorists doesn’t mean that they support violence. They should be roundly criticized for their moral blindness not for the fact that they share a general belief system with the murderers.

I regret to say that even though many conservatives may deny it, their criticisms of Islam as a religion that seeks to enslave the rest of us smacks of the same kind of prejudice and ignorance exhibited by the left toward Christianity. It has the same out of control feel to it - as if by its very shallowness, it can cover a multitude of sins, both real and imagined. Both critiques should be rejected for what they are; muddled thinking born out of a desire to score political points rather than objectify the nature of the threat - be it radical Islamism or radical Christian fundamentalism.

I don’t expect any of this to change anytime soon. The echo chamber here in Blogland is a powerful instrument that enslaves adherents to a particular worldview and will brook no opposition. Apostasy on both sides is punished severely. One wonders if we’ll ever be able to get back to a place where we can all view the intersection of religion and politics with a wary but welcome attitude, seeing the moral underpinnings supplied by religion as a plus for our politics while recognizing the dangers of using politics to trash the belief systems of others.

UPDATE

Frank Martin (of the excellent blog Varifrank) in the comments points out that the National Park Service does indeed gladly give the age of the Grand Canyon on its website.

What’s more, it appears that the group of park employees who sent the letter, vastly exaggerated their charge that the age of the Canyon could not be disseminated to the public.

What they’re bitching about is that a book that posits the notion that Noah’s flood caused the Canyon to be formed is still on the shelves after a year of dithering by Park bureacrats. I can’t tell if this is bureaucratic stupidity or the imposing of religious beliefs by Bush appointees on scientific questions. Whatever it is, the book should be taken off the shelves, especially after a directive stating that Park bookstores should be akin to schoolrooms rather than libraries was handed down.

And I can’t find anywhere in the linked letter where they actually say no one is allowed to give the true age of the Canyon (about 550 million years). It appears that Frank’s belief that this is simply more BDS on display is correct.

I see nothing remotely funny about the impending hanging of Saddam Hussein - a verdict I agree with but devoutly wish could have been handled better by all parties concerned.

Neither do I see anything at all to celebrate. It is embarrassing the way that some of the righty blogs are playing with this story. It is not a time for snark. Nor is it a time for juvenile posturing or ginned up, testosterone-laden high fives. Before you engage in such celebratory behavior, please imagine the million ghosts Saddam and his henchmen created and then imagine them screaming out their last agonizing moments on this earth. Think of the grieving families they left behind. If that doesn’t sober you up, try conjuring up images of the tens of thousands of women who were brutally raped in front of their fathers or husbands or the many thousands of children who were tortured in the presence of their parents.

No, there is nothing funny about killing this brute, a man who has shown no remorse nor the slightest flicker of regret at the trail of dead bodies he has left in the wake of a life spent torturing and murdering anyone who opposed him. The fact that the world knew of this brutality and did nothing about it - including the US government who marginally assisted the beast in his war of conquest against Iran - only goes to show that anyone who believes in the efficacy of the UN is only kidding themselves. Tyrants like Saddam will exist as long as the governments of the world carry on business as usual with the despots while trying to block the screams of their victims from conscious thought.

Saddam may have been a particularly brutal tyrant. But the difference between his regime and the regimes of dozens of others around the world is only a matter of degree - thousands dead or tortured instead of hundreds of thousands. It says a lot about humanity at this stage of our evolution as a social species that we can be so sanguine about the murderous depredations of a Robert Mugabe or a Islom Karimov simply because the body count hasn’t achieved the elevated status of a Saddam or a Kim Jung Il. We in the civilized world can tune out the cries for succor from the oppressed rather easily - international law, free flow of oil, international commerce, even the War on Terrorism - take your pick. One excuse is as good as another.

I wish I could believe that hanging Saddam will make other tyrants pause and clean up their acts, hoping to avoid suffering a similar fate. But you and I know that is wishful thinking. What is more probable is that the dictators will redouble their efforts to stifle opposition thinking it will guarantee their security - at least from their own people.

But in the end, whether it’s having your neck snapped by a taut rope or dying peacefully in your bed, the criminal oppressors who cause so much human misery and suffering will all come face to face with their own mortality. And I have to believe that as the curtain rings down on their existence, the cold hand of fear will grip their failing heart as they contemplate an eternity that may include torments far surpassing those they meted out during their useless, failed existence on this planet.

UPDATE

Allah thinks that the deed will be done by 4:00 PM eastern time today. He says he will have the video if its available.

We’re all adults and can make up our own minds whether to view someone hanging until dead. I will say that Ogrish (no link - find it on your own) had some video of a hanging (from Burma, I believe) that was, in the words of Henry Tunstall from the John Wayne movie Chisum , describing a hanging he witnessed as “ghastly.” A good descriptive for what I saw. The beheading videos were much more graphic and actually caused me some queasy moments.

Will I watch it? I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Also, make sure you keep a window on your screen open for Michelle Malkin’s expected round-up of react from blogs, from the MSM, and from her readers.

It appears that the President of the United States will also forgo the proceedings in the Rotunda on Saturday in favor of staying at his ranch for another day.

Lest anyone think my displeasure is reserved exclusively for the Democratic LEADERSHIP (Note: The Republicans on the junket are not a part of the leadership in the Senate. Those in the comments from my last post who have demonstrated their towering ignorance by not being able to tell the difference between the Majority Leader of the Senate passing on this event and two relatively unknown GOP members skipping out might want to deepen their thinking faculties a bit.) anything I said about Reid above goes double for Bush.

Look, friends. Hearken to me.

A nation is an organism, a life form. And what animates this life form, what gives it the power to unite our people - so diverse, so different - are its traditions, myths and legends; in other words, the symbolic over the substantiative. The Constitution does a fine job in defining the powers of government. But its real power is in its iconic symbolism in which we have bound up all the hopes and dreams of our citizenry for a better life.

The United States is a very young country by any standard. We are so young, we really have no “myths” or “legends” per se. That’s because even our greatest mythic heroes like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett left a written record behind along with friends and acquaintance who were able to tell biographers and historians what those two larger than life characters were all about. A “legend” is hardly legendary if we know that the myths surrounding the legend are untrue. And yet we continue to try and conjure up symbolic representations of our mythic heroes because it is through them that we like to see ourselves reflected in our national mirror.

And tied up in these efforts to create legends has been the dominant truth about American public life since George Washington; the presidency as a symbol of nationhood. We have no king, no royal family. Our continuity is the result of civil compact among all of us that the office of the presidency belongs to no man, no party; that it is the one aspect of public life in which we invest enormous power and place enormous trust in the occupant not to abuse that power. Hence, the presidency as a symbolic representation of us, the citizens of the United States imbues the occupant of that office with the status of civic god - especially after he is safely retired and unable to do any damage to our liberties.

I think Bush should be widely criticized for not attending every event related to the Ford funeral rites. The symbolic life of the nation demands that he attend and participate. I believe he and Reid’s failure to take part in the ceremonial, the tradition of laying to rest a former president and former Commander in Chief lessens the hold that office has on our emotional bonds with America - what Lincoln referred to as the “mystic chords of memory” - that allow us to rise above that which separates us and unite in common cause to remember a dead icon.

I fully expect the lefty commenters to belittle this rationalization. So be it. It is probably why in 50 years, long after I’m dust thank god, the way citizens feel about the United States will be unrecognizable to my generation.

It says a lot about the character of the new Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that he would blow off the state funeral of Gerald Ford, the least partisan of our most recent presidents, in order to get in a little holiday sight seeing and engage in some hobnobbing with South American leftists. In fact, I think it a precursor of what we can expect from the Democrats in general for the foreseeable future. Out of power for a decade, I think it safe to say that these ain’t your daddy’s Democrats. In fact, I’m certain that these aren’t the Democrats of the 1970’s either.

The Majority Leader of the Senate during Ford’s tenure as President was Mike Mansfield. The craggy faced Montana lawmaker served in that leadership position longer than anyone in history. Perhaps his greatest moment occurred during the service in the Capitol Rotunda for the assassinated John F. Kennedy when he delivered what is considered one of the most moving eulogies in American political history:

There was a sound of laughter; in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a wit in a man neither young nor old, but a wit full of an old man’s wisdom and of a child’s wisdom, and then, in a moment it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a man marked with the scars of his love of country, a body active with the surge of a life far, far from spent and, in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

Somehow, I don’t think our Harry quite measures up, do you?

Mansfield was a brilliant man, an accomplished diplomat. Harry Reid is a political hack. But the differences go beyond talent, beyond intelligence. The fact is, Mike Mansfield was a gentleman. Harry Reid is not.

Mansfield could be as hyper-partisan as any politician today but he always behaved in a way that reflected his belief that the feelings and sensibilities of others was something to be considered. In other words, Mansfield demonstrated the number one trait of a gentleman; empathy.

Harry Reid seems to have a dead spot in his soul where empathy usually resides in the rest of us. Blowing off the government of the United States, his colleagues, the Ford family, and history itself is just the latest in series of actions and statements that show Reid to be unfit to follow in the footsteps of giants like Mansfield, LBJ, and the venerable wise man George Mitchell - all of whom would have blanched in horror at the prospect of the Majority Leader of the Senate missing a high affair of state such as a presidential funeral.

Reid has demonstrated on numerous occasions that his rank partisanship gets in the way of him acting like a normal human being; to wit:

Reid made headlines in May 2005 when he said of George W. Bush, “The man’s father is a wonderful human being. I think this guy is a loser.” Reid later apologized for these comments. Reid also called Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas an “embarrassment” and referred to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan as a “partisan hack.”

He also called the President a “liar” and refused to apologize. Whether true or not, the idea that one politician calls out another for lying is loony. It is beyond the pot/kettle analogy, moving into the sublime territory of stratospheric irony usually reserved for Communists when they name their country a “Peoples Republic.”

Reid’s snub may be unprecedented, although I doubt whether statistics about such insults to the United States government are kept. And I doubt whether we’ll hear a peep of criticism from any sitting Democratic politician either. At bottom and with few exceptions, the values of tradition and etiquette mean very little to the left. After all, they’ve spent the last 40 years trying to overturn tradition and violate etiquette in order to “speak truth to power” or “challenge convention” or some other such nonsense that more often denotes agitating for change simply for the sake of change itself rather than any specific goal for improving society.

The fact that Reid’s deputy, my home state senator Dick Durbin is also on the junket (along with Kent Conrad, Judd Gregg, Robert Bennett, and Ken Salazar) means that the task of delivering the eulogy may fall to Senator Robert Byrd, President pro tempore emeritus of the Senate. Byrd, for all his faults, is a creature of the Senate and one who reveres and worships its traditions and precedents. I have no doubt that the West Virginia Senator will do a fine job in eulogizing Ford. But frankly, it’s not his job. It’s Reid’s. And the absence of the new Majority Leader at the state funeral of a former president sets a very bad precedent that I hope Republicans will never take advantage.

Jimmy Carter is no spring chicken. There will come a day in the not too distant future when his remains will lie in the Capitol Rotunda and the Honor Guard will stand their solemn watch. And Members of Congress will gather to pay their respects and deliver eulogies to the dead Commander in Chief. Will the Republican leader recall this insult by Reid and find other pressing matters to attend to? I hope not. For if there is one occasion where partisanship should be left at the door, it is in honoring those special men who took up what the Smithsonian referred to as “A Glorious Burden” and guided the United States and the Ship of State through perilous waters.

I’m with Hugh Hewitt 100%: “Turn. The. Plane. Around.”

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey:

What a classless act, and Reid, Durbin, Kent Conrad, Judd Gregg, Robert Bennett, and Ken Salazar should be ashamed of themselves. If Harry Reid can’t figure out that his new position as Majority Leader carries some extra responsibilities, then perhaps the Democrats need to find someone who does understand it.

Amen. Although with the exception of Byrd, I doubt there are more than a handful of Democrats who see anything wrong with Reid’s excursion and would therefore be equally unfit to lead.

And Heather at my blog bud Raven’s site - And Rightly So - wonders “What ever happened to respect?” Indeed.

UPDATE 12/29

It appears that the President of the United States will also forgo the proceedings in the Rotunda on Saturday in favor of staying at his ranch for another day.

Less anyone think my displeasure is reserved exclusively for the Democratic LEADERSHIP (Note: The Republicans on the junket are not a part of the leadership in the Senate. Those in the comments who have demonstrated their towering ignorance by not being able to tell the difference between the Majority Leader of the Senate passing on this event and two relatively unknown GOP members skipping out might want to deepen their thinking faculties a bit.) anything I said about Reid above goes double for Bush.

Look, friends. Hearken to me.

A nation is an organism, a life form. And what animates this life form, what gives it the power to unite our people - so diverse, so different - are its myths and legends; in other words, the symbolic over the substantative. The Constitution does a fine job in defining the powers of government. But its real power is in its iconic symbolism in which we have bound up all the hopes and dreams of our citizenry for a better life.

The United States is a very young country by any standard. We are so young, we really have no “myths” or “legends” per se. That’s because even our greatest mythic heroes like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett left a written record behind along with friends and acquiantances who were able to tell biographers and historians what those two larger than life characters were all about. A “legend” is hardly legendary if we know that the myths surrounding the legend are untrue.

And tied up in these efforts to create legends has been the dominant truth about American public life since George Washington; the presidency as a symbol of nationhood. We have no king, no royal family. Our continuity is the result of civil compact among all of us that the office of the presidency belongs to no man, no party; that it is the one aspect of public life in which we invest enormous power and place enormous trust in the occupant not to abuse that power. Hence, the presidency as a symbolic representation of us, the citizens of the United States imbues the occupant of that office with the status of civic god - especially after he is safely retired and unable to do any damage to our liberties.

I think Bush should be widely criticized for not attending every event related to the Ford funeral rites. The symbolic life of the nation demands that he attend and participate. I believe he and Reid’s failure to take part in the ceremonial, the tradition of laying to rest a former president and former Commander in Chief lessens the hold that office has on our emotional bonds with America - what Lincoln referred to as the “mystic chords of memory” - that allow us to rise above that which separates us and unite in common cause to remember a dead icon.

I fully expect the lefty commenters to belittle this rationalization. So be it. It is probably why in 50 years, long after I’m dust thank god, the way citizens feel about the United States will be unrecognizable to my generation.

(This update has become a separate post.)

The year was 1980 and Gerald Ford was on a mission. The last two weeks of October, the 38th President of the United States was fulfilling a promise he made during the tumultuous Republican Convention to the GOP standard bearer Ronald Reagan; that he would campaign his heart out for Republican candidates running for the House and Senate. He would help “extend Reagan’s coattails” to bring as many GOP lawmakers to Washington as he could.

The Republican party had placed a jet at Ford’s disposal and he criss crossed the country, speaking at 3 or 4 events (sometimes more) everyday. It was a killer schedule, designed to maximize Ford’s appeal to traditional “Main Street” conservatives as well as moderate members of the party. The Thursday before the election, the former President landed at Washington National Airport (now Reagan National) at 7:00 AM, coming in from California where he had been campaigning until late in the evening. He was to speak to the faithful at a breakfast fund raiser for candidate Frank Wolf, making his third effort to unseat Democrat Joe Fisher in Virginia’s 10th district.

As a volunteer for the Wolf campaign, I was working the registration table that morning, handing out name tags and accepting late donations to the event. Taking a short break, I wandered out into the hallway behind the hotel’s ballroom for a smoke when I saw a lone man walking toward me. There was something familiar about him that I couldn’t quite place. He was striding purposefully but the rest of his body language denoted utter exhaustion. His shoulders drooped. His face, sagged so that the wrinkles came out in bas relief. His eyes were half closed, the circles under them pronounced.

With a shock I realized it was the former President. There were no Secret Service Agents. No clutch of sycophantic aides trailing in his wake. It was just me and the former President of the United States. I was thinking that he might not make it through the speech, so tired and careworn he looked. And then, magic.

He didn’t notice me until he was almost even with where I was standing against the wall. But when he saw me there with what must have been a dumbfounded look of disbelief on my face, he grinned and extended his hand. At that exact moment, his face lit up, the wrinkles disappeared, the eyes snapped open, and he drew himself up to his full height. It was like someone had thrown a switch. He clasped my hand firmly while all I could do was stutter out some meaningless platitude. I think I murmured “Thanks for coming” or some such nonsense that he probably didn’t hear anyway. And then he was gone, striding down the hallway toward the front of the room where he was to be introduced.

Making my way back to the ballroom, I stood along the wall opposite the podium and saw him in the doorway. His body and face had resumed their exhausted demeanor. But after the introduction, someone threw the switch again and he strode confidently to the lectern to deliver a barnburner of a political speech. Ford may not have been noted for his speaking ability. But I can attest to the fact that the wild applause and standing ovation he received was fully deserved. He skewered Carter and the Democrats for defeatism. He praised Reagan to the skies (despite his long standing anger at him for what Ford believed was the unnecessary challenge Reagan made for the nomination in 1976). And he talked about America as only a Midwestern politician can; with a hushed and reverent tone and a catch in the throat.

I always admired Gerald Ford for what he did during that campaign. The results speak for themselves. The GOP won back the Senate for the first time since 1958 winning 12 seats while the party picked up 35 seats in the House. To extend himself physically and emotionally the way he did was an act of selflessness that seemed to be the hallmark of his political career.

No great monuments will be built to honor Gerald Ford, dead yesterday at age 93. Nor will there will be any post mortem scandals that will tarnish his name or sully his image. His quiet retirement, in contrast to other ex-Presidents, assures him a measure of anonymity with most younger Americans today. To the extent that he lives on in popular culture, it is in the hilarious but unfair cheap shots taken by the Saturday Night Live crew who always portrayed the All-Star athlete as a bumbling klutz in their skits. It can fairly be said that Gerald Ford made Chevy Chase and to a large extent, put SNL on the map. And it is to his eternal credit that Ford was always fairly good natured about the spoofs which almost certainly helped defeat him in the close election of 1976:

Question: Really, what DID you think of Chevy Chase’s impersonations of you? Did you ever meet him? — Mrs. Arlene Gaudioso’s Fifth Grade, Rohrerstown Elementary School, Lancaster, PA.

President Ford: I enjoyed, up to a point, Chevy Chase’s impersonations. Yes, my wife and I have met and had an opportunity to get acquainted with Chevy Chase. He is a very skillful entertainer who had a sharp and penetrating sense of humor. I have learned over the years in the political arena that you cannot be thin-skinned. You have to take the good with the bad.

Simple, common, decency.

His political career was a testament to his sunny disposition and good natured, inoffensive personality. In 1959, he was named “The Congressman’s Congressman,” an accolade he relished. Serving as long as he did (1947-73), Ford rose to the post of Minority Leader if not quite by default then certainly as a result of his durability. He served during a time when the Republicans in Congress were not only on the outs but also usually on the wrong side of history as well. Opposing many of LBJ’s wildly popular domestic programs, House GOP members were disorganized and dispirited.

When Vice President Agnew was revealed to be a common criminal, Nixon reached out for the most non-controversial choice possible. Most observers believed that Nixon would have no choice but to name Nelson Rockefeller Vice President, seeing that he was the only nationally known Republican who possessed what Beltway Insiders considered the “heft” or “gravitas” to be President if worse came to worst. But in 1973, Rockefeller’s divorce was still an issue and rather than risk problems, the President reached out to Ford both because he was popular in Congress and because his reputation as an honest and decent man assured his confirmation.

I reject the notion that Ford was in over his head as President. I think history has shown that ordinary Joe’s like Ford have risen to great occasions in the past when the times demanded it. All you have to do is look at Ford’s decisions when he was tested by history to see he performed more than adequately. The Nixon pardon -controversial as it was and still is - nevertheless was perfectly in keeping with Ford’s character as well as his belief that it was of paramount importance that Watergate be put behind the country so that the business of the United States government could continue. People tend to forget that for more than a year the Presidency was an empty shell of an office with Nixon consumed by his defense. Ford rightly thought that the times were too dangerous not to have a presidency free from the ghosts of scandal that would have been resurrected during any trial of the former President.

It is unfair but historically accurate to say that the Ford Presidency (and Carter’s) was an interregnum between the Johnson-Nixon imperium and the Reagan revolution. The nation almost seemed to catch its breath following the devastating shocks of assassinations, race riots, war, protests, and minority agitation for full participation in American life. It was less than a decade between the race riots that began in the “long, hot, summer” of 1964 to the Nixon resignation in August of 1974 - 10 short years that saw dramatic changes in American life, American politics, and American mores. If Ford is to be known as a “caretaker” president, he did indeed, take good care of the country while he was in office. For that reason alone, he should be remembered with fondness by all.

I will always remember him; the only President I ever met. He was a good and decent man who served our country in war and peace the best he knew how. And considering some who succeeded him, I daresay his stellar character stands the test of time much better than some who believe themselves his better.

It’s bad enough when some B-List blogger and wacko talking head like Debbie Schussel runs off at the mouth about the danger of electing Muslims. That kind of idiocy can be partly ascribed to Ms. Schussel’s desire to move up the blogging ladder, bashing Muslims being a quick way to fame and fortune when plumbing the extreme depths of the conservative sphere for audience and links.

But when a Congressman of the United States sends a letter to his constituents that raises the false specter of some kind of Muslim invasion of Congress while simultaneously warning that “traditional” values would be threatened by Muslim immigration, it forces me once again to take up the Cudgel of Righteousness (already bloodied from yesterday’s pummeling of Schussel) and give Representative Virgil Goode, Jr. a few well deserved whacks upside the head:

In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., left, said Keith Ellison’s decision to use a Koran in a private swearing in for the House of Representatives was a mistake.
Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

In taking the good Mr. Goode to task for this stupidity, allow me first to slap all of you lefties around a bit for once again overgeneralizing when it comes to Values Conservatives by attempting to make the bad Mr. Goode a poster boy of sorts for that constituency.

Goode isn’t even a good example of an extremist. That’s because his letter is so transparently a political calculation that it doesn’t even come off as sincere. No Congressman can be this stupid, can they?

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Goode’s spokesman has informed us that the Congressman actually is that stupid; he declines to apologize and “stands by” the letter.

Of course, such incidents help Ellison enormously. They allow him to appear the reasonable, bemused, aggrieved party while anyone who has a passing familiarity with the devastating series of articles published by the Powerline boys knows that “reasonable” is not the way to describe many of the new Congressman’s views.

But beyond the shameless, shallow pandering by Goode is a revealed truth; that too often Republican politicians are using this “traditional values” theme to capitalize on some unimagined fear as in the case of Goode and his phantom Muslims. We also see other individual groups like gays targeted as somehow being in conflict with traditional American values - as if these values are practiced by people solely as a result of their religion, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, or any other qualifier that a politician seeks to use to drive a wedge between us.

There are plenty of gay people who practice what, by any definition would be “traditional” American values. They are as monogamous as heterosexual couples. They raise children. They are god fearing folk. The cry when the flag passes in front of them. They fight and die for their country. Aside from their sexual orientation, there is absolutely nothing to differentiate them from your average Joe American. (Don’t believe me? Visit Gay Patriot and any one of a number of Republican/center right gay blogs and read a little bit about what they believe.) And yet, because of the actions of some so-called “Gay Rights” groups - who are much more about advancing a leftist agenda then they are about advancing gay rights - most conservatives look with distrust upon gays who believe in traditional American values.

There are traditional values that are under attack - but not by gays, or Muslims, or any specific group. Rather it is leftist ideology that seeks to remove religion from public life not separate it as they claim. It is leftist cant that seeks to change the narrative of our nation’s founding, substituting the basest of motives for Independence instead of the truly heroic and improbable way our freedom was achieved. The left has spent the last 40 years degrading our culture, denigrating our heroes, altering our history, deriding the simplicity and patriotism of the most common of folk among us, and in the end, trying to tear down 200 years of tradition and decency that our ancestors fought to pass down to the rest of us.

Whether this is their intent or not is a moot point. Their actions are having this affect. Whether it is the “no holds barred, anything goes” cesspool of a culture they have created via Hollywood or, in the name of “civil rights,” erecting a structure of separateness and discrimination via “affirmative action,” the left has done its best to destroy what many Americans cherish and believe in.

But none of this excuses idiots like Goode - and many others who use the battle cry of “Traditional Values” to advance their own agendas - from responsibility for engendering fear and loathing among those who are susceptible to the siren call of nativism. This strain has a long, dishonorable history in America, going back to the first days of the Republic when the first wave of immigrants began to unload onto the docks in New York and Boston. Then it was mostly Swiss and Germans with a smattering of Scots and Irish. Later waves of Irish immigrants would raise the spectre of not only aliens who didn’t possess “American values” but arrivals who were papists to boot. And each successive wave, the nativist impulse would rear its ugly head and find something scary and alien about the newcomers.

Goode is no different. From his letter:

“We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country,” Goode said in the letter. “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America.”

Right out of the nativist playbook.

I’m all for controlling our borders. I’m all for enforcing the law. But I am also in favor of increasing legal immigration. If someone wishes to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole that it takes to get here legally and then work toward citizenship, that alone should denote a person’s interest in the “traditional values” of America. There are plenty of Muslims here today - second and third generation Muslims - who embrace the same values you and I do and are no more a threat to those values than my pet cat Snowball.

For Goode to posit the notion that Muslims are incapable of adopting and embracing traditional values not only flies in the face of history and everything we know about immigrants but also bespeaks a shallow and corrupt mind, incapable of grasping the shining truth about America as a melting pot that embraces all cultures and ethnic groups.

And that may be the most traditional of all American values.