What This Country Needs Is A Good Civics 101 Course

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While certain aspects of the right-wing political yowling in this country have made perfect sense to me, other aspects didn't--until I realized something, that is. What I realized is that social studies, or civics [as opposed to straight "history"--Ed.] education seems to have disappeared from our educational system.

When the Tea Partiers, for example, yammer about their rights and freedoms being taken away by an oppressive government, and when idiots like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich pontificate about the current administration being "the most radical" secular, socialist government in US history, and people take them seriously, what other conclusion can be drawn?

The Tea Partiers have taken the name for their movement in honor of the Boston Tea Party, which I hope even people with virtually no knowledge of American history recognize was a protest against a British imperial tax on tea imposed upon its then-colonies in North America. Fair enough. Empires, almost by definition, are despotic and largely opposed to the will of their subjects. But the Tea Partiers in fact are more like the governments in southern states before and during the US Civil War

The distinction the Tea Partiers have failed to recognize or even acknowledge is that the British government imposed its taxes on its American colonies without the colonials [more precisely, the colonials' representatives--Ed.] being able to vote on the imposition of those taxes in Parliament. The secessionists, on the other hand, were (as they well knew) a minority population in the country as a whole. They HAD representation in the national government. They HAD legal recourse and access to get their opinions known and their voices heard. They HAD a place within that very government they railed against. They just didn't like being on the losing end of the votes.

I remember social studies in junior high and high school. One of its most fundamental teachings was that when people come together to form a government and participate in an attempt to form "a more perfect Union," their obligation under that social contract or social compact is that everyone agrees to accept, peacefully, the outcomes of the votes that go against them, and that their recourse is to work within the system to win enough votes to change the outcome in the future--and unless and until they regain that majority, that they abide by the results they do not like, and peacefully comply with the law. WE all ARE the government. It is not some alien thing being imposed upon us by some distant, evil, nefarious "them" which wants to destroy us and take away "our freedom."

This teaching seems largely to have been lost on members of the Tea Parties and the GOP toadies who further incite them. This teaching is so basic, so fundamental to what being a responsible American citizen is all about, that its failing to have taken hold in the minds and hearts of the Tea Partiers mystifies me. I conclude, therefore, that this teaching is no longer offered in our school systems, and I for one mourn its passing. In the long run, it means the end of what the American dream really constitutes.

And I know that rhetoric often gets heated in the course of the discussion. But I'm not talking about heated rhetoric. I'm talking about people threatening to "take back" what they feel has been "taken away" from them by force of arms or even revolution. I'd have said "or secession," given the proclivity of numbskulls like Texas Governor Rick Perry to resort to that language, but anyone who knows the outcome of the US Civil War should know that secession as an idea is dead. The Confederacy lost. Get over it, already.

What scares me at this point is the increasingly violent stridency with which these allegedly disenfranchised people are pushing their agenda. America, it seems, is for everyone--only so long as everyone is just exactly like them [which is the unstated but essential linchpin of their equation--Ed.]. And they are willing to say they'll shoot people who disagree. Watch very carefully all the pro-gun, pro-Tea Party rallies that have been scheduled to take place near Washington, D.C., on April 19th. The tone of our political discourse is changing in some fundamental--and I use that term deliberately--way. Threats of violence should not be a part of everyday politics, but of late, such threats have become all too common. Two quick examples: I remember a sign at one of the Tea Party rallies. It said "We left our guns at home. This time." Second, a recent political cartoon in the Washington Post may be about to come more literally true than anyone with even half a brain should want. The cartoon depicts the exterior of the US Supreme Court building, with bullets whizzing everywhere all around it, and a speech balloon coming from inside the building [probably from Justice Scalia--Ed.] saying in a self-satisfied tone, "Ah, a robust Second Amendment in action!"

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I Get Mad At The Mass Media, Too, You Know

I realize that the mass media are under considerable time and space constraints, and that they feel obliged to report the news as succinctly as possible . . . but I don't think that excuses the media from misreporting facts for the sake of communicating quickly.

Case in point: Troopergate. The Alaskan legislative panel's report about Gov. Sarah Palin's involvement in the firing of her erstwhile brother-in-law did NOT say that her firing of his boss (the Alaskan Public Service Commissioner) violated state law, even though every recap of the story I saw, heard, and read claimed that was the report's conclusion. What the report said was that the pressure Palin and her husband and her staff put on the Commissioner violated state ethics laws. The firing was perfectly within her power as chief executive of the state.

The reason this locks my jaws is that it provides those who want to whitewash or otherwise downplay what Palin did both a scapegoat and a diversion. Blame the "liberal" media! They are reporting it wrong because they have a political agenda! So the argument will be about the press coverage, the political make-up of the legislative panel (something on the order of 10-4 Republican, but the panel's head was a Democrat who made intemperate comments to the media before the report was released, thus adding more ammo to the GOP attack), whether Palin really did improperly fire the Public Service Commissioner . . . anything except what the real issue is--which is her ethics.

Alaska law makes it plain that no one is to use his/her office for either financial gain or personal advantage. There is no doubt that Palin's pressure on the Public Service Commissioner violated that ethics law. "I'm your boss and I want this guy fired because he's my sister's ex and is fighting with her over their kids' custody." That's the quintessential illustration of using one's office for personal gain. [Do we really want someone with such non-existent ethical standards sitting one heartbeat away from the Presidency? I say not. Our system runs on our mutual faith and trust in the idea that everyone buys into the system, that the system is greater than the powers of any individual person, and that the people we select to run it will do so properly. Hence Dubya's increasingly record-breakingly negative polling numbers, among other things.--Ed.]

But the ethics issue is going to get lost in the shuffle and the noise of all the imprecise news summaries and arguments about that instead of taking the center of the stage the way it ought to be doing.

So, thanks for nothing, "liberal" media! You're not supposed to be part of the story--you're supposed to be reporting the story--but you sure screwed it up in this case.

Pardon, Your Myopia Is Showing

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The Omaha World-Herald is at it again. The editor on Monday chastised the Huffington Post for running articles about unnamed individuals hacking into Sarah Palin's email accounts. It showed "election-season hysteria" and a "disturbing disregard for someone's privacy."

Of course, what the World-Herald failed to note was that the reason Palin's email accounts were hacked is that she deliberately created and used personal accounts to conduct official Alaskan government business while avoiding the oversight legally required of anyone sitting in the governor's office.

Don't get me wrong. I do not condone illegal activities (as a rule) such as hacking. But I don't condone illegal conduct of official government business, either. There's plenty of wrong to go around on all sides in this slimy little scenario.

I wish the World-Herald had spoken out as strongly against the improper and probably illegal behavior of the one being hacked as it did against the hackers . . . who, for all we know, are the moral equivalent of whistle-blowers.

What He's NOT Saying Is As Important As What He Is Saying

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Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) has been indicted for accepting all kinds of goodies in connection with a second story renovation and expansion of his home . . . goodies made at the behest of a company with big oil drilling interests. Stevens has protested his innocence, claiming he paid every invoice he received regarding the redo on his house.

What he didn't say is whether he recognized that whatever invoices he received totaled a great deal less than the actual supplies and labor of the work done. That isn't exactly difficult to calculate. If he got bills totaling, say, $5,000.00, one would have only to look at the work done to see how short that bill fell of covering the actual expense. One does not have to be a construction genius to figure this out. One needs only a Menard's ad showing its charges for materials like the ones used on Stevens' house.

OK--I know what you're going to say. If President Bush (I) had no idea about grocery scanners, and Sen. John McCain wears a pair of $500+ Ferragamo shoes while claiming to be "just folks," it's possible Stevens had no clue about the actual expenses of the work on his home. Possible, but not plausible. As I said, one does not have to be a genius to have a clue.

But even if he honestly did have no idea, are we sure we want such people voting on how our taxes are spent? Stevens has been in office a long, long time . . . methinks he got a little too comfy and cozy with being Alaska's designated "Senator for life," as he was (until now) regularly called in the Alaskan media.

Turn, Turn, Turn

Or "Spin, Spin, Spin." Better yet, as Bill Cosby once said (in a completely different context), "You go around in a circle for five minutes, and then puke."

As much as I enjoy watching and discussing politics, I am officially sick to my stomach. Not so much with the Pennsylvania primary, but with the political and media spins on same. How can a 10-point win be a "big" win for Hillary Clinton when she very recently held a nearly 30-point lead over Barack Obama in the Keystone State? Looks more like a squeaker that Clinton won largely because rural PA voters were less afraid of a woman running for president than they were of a black man running for president. I extrapolate this by comparing what PA voters told pollsters to the exceedingly vituperative letters to the editor I've read of late in the Omaha World-Herald. The similarities are alarming. They are positively vicious in their expressed hatred of Obama--which they state in terms of the press not adequately chastising Obama for his association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racially-inflammatory sermons. They claim the media are giving Obama a free ride, which is diametrically opposed to what I see when I examine TV, radio, and printed press coverage.

At least in part, this is America's traditional anti-intellectualism mucking up the voting in a big way. [The Founders expected people to make rational, informed decisions. Of course, they didn't expect the rise of political parties . . . nor did they expect people like me to be voting. Their vision of the electorate was of educated, land-owning, white men.--Ed.] Obama has run into the same problem Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and John Kerrey had--and a problem I still have--which is believing in the basic intelligence of the American voter. They were willing to speak sometimes unpleasant truths about America and then-current events, and they were running against people who in Carter's case, was the genial grandpa reassuring us everything was OK (Reagan), and in Gore's and Kerrey's case was a morally conservative good buddy (Dubya). The typical voter much preferred "sweetness and light" to reality, judging from the actual election returns. [I have previously addressed the issue of Dubya's stealing the 2000 election by fraud in Florida--while I believe that to be true, I also maintain that had Al Gore won his own home state of Tennessee, Florida would have been rendered irrelevant, and what Dubya's minions did there would not have put Dubya in office.--Ed.]

I remember voters actually saying they were voting against Kerrey because he was too brainy and thus they didn't trust him.

UGH!

I'll give Clinton this: when she's on her game, she understands how low a candidate needs to go to win. What really fries me in all this is that I saw part of her interview on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann late last week, and she was rational and sensible, and actually had excellent proposals for dealing with some of the policy issues about which Olbermann asked. But I just don't trust her anymore, and I still think I may have to boycott the election if it's her vs. McCain in November.

I also am still steamed about her illogic in claiming that since Obama can't seem to beat her in the big swing states, Obama wouldn't win them in November, either. That's simply not true. That's apples and oranges. Maybe Obama is a bit less popular than Clinton in those places in the primaries--it's irrelevant to how Obama would do against McCain in the general election were Obama the Democratic Party candidate. Clinton knows better, I'm sure. But "win at any cost or take everyone down in a truly Pyrrhic victory" seems to be her guiding principle at this point.

Furthermore, why isn't the press confronting Clinton with her real problem in terms of electability? I know I am repeating myself, but since no one else is saying this, I am going to continue saying it: McCain can recast himself as a Dubya clone all he wants. Among the really rabid right wing of the GOP(i.e., in places like Nebraska), however, he will never be trusted. Republicans around here would rather not vote at all than have to vote for him--unless Hillary Clinton is running against him. In that case, they will break records just to come out to vote against her. She says she's been in the public eye so long that the GOP can't touch her, as all her baggage is already "out there," but she's ignoring the lightning rod her very self has on those opposed to her politically. Why aren't the media confronting her about that?

What A Couple Of Hypocritical Pigs

Both Matt Drudge and Bill O'Reilly (who is an embarrassment to people of Irish descent everywhere), self-proclaimed paragons of decency and champions of family values, are trying to blame the congressional pages for the sins of now-disgraced (and now former) US Representative Mark Foley, R-Fla. Foley is the adult here. He's the one who sent raunchy emails to the pages (all boys). He's the one responsible for his actions. Blaming children--who did nothing to lead Foley on, BTW--is just plain disgusting. Drudge and O'Reilly care more about their politics and their chosen party's hold on power than they care about protecting the most vulnerable among us.

At least some conservatives have enough principles to call for further investigation and even to call for House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign. Facts are coming to light which suggest that the GOP Powers-That-Be in the House knew a lot more about Foley's sick desires than they were--and are--letting on. They, too, apparently were willing to put political expediency ahead of the safety of children. I am glad to know that at least some in the GOP are decrying this whole sordid mess.

This should not be a question of politics at all. It's a simple matter of "right" and "wrong." Messing sexually with children, in any form, even just emails, is WRONG, period. Anyone caught doing such things, and anyone aiding and abetting such behavior, should suffer maximum consequences. And Drudge and O'Reilly ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

If You Don't Want Your Thoughts Provoked, Don't Read This

Jonathan Zimmerman, a teacher of history and education at New York University, yesterday had an op-ed piece published in many newspapers, among them the Omaha World-Herald. He challenged his fellow liberals to come up with specific instances of when it is necessary to abrogate civil liberties to wage the War on Terror successfully.

He used as his example Abraham Lincoln's actions in suspending the writ of habeas corpus and otherwise trampling on the rights of fellow citizens who were suspected of being Confederate sympathizers. And he argues that Lincoln was right to do so, even though he defied the Constitution (as interpreted by the Supreme Court) to do it.

In short, Zimmerman contends that Benjamin Franklin's admonition that "[t]hose who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security" was [Gasp!--Ed.] wrong.

Zimmerman goes on to note that Dubya's actions to date in riding roughshod over civil liberties are not justified--so far. His weightiest reason for the difference between Lincoln's actions and Dubya's? Lincoln was in a 19th century war--a war requiring the taking of the enemy capital--and Washington, D.C., was geographically surrounded by Confederate sympathizers. Yes, Maryland did not secede, but Maryland was a slave state and a great many Marylanders hoped (and acted to fulfill that hope) that the Confederacy would win. Virginia, forming D.C.'s fourth border, had seceded . . . and took many of the best American military men, such as Robert E. Lee, with her.

Their loyalty was to their states. Lincoln's loyalty was to the Union, as a whole.

Since we are no longer in a war whose winning will be defined by the capture and contol of geography, Dubya cannot ride Lincoln's coattails to justify his wholesale stomping on civil liberties.

I for one do not disagree. But Zimmerman has challenged all his readers to iterate when Dubya's actions would become justified. Despite the historical concensus that Lincoln, as a matter of law, was in the wrong, Lincoln, as a matter of fact, was right. He saved the Union. Ultimately, he freed the slaves. He breathed life into the concept of the United States. Before the Civil War, people spoke of "the United States are . . ." After, people spoke of "the United States is . . ."

As a practical matter, we can either become martyrs to our belief in civil liberties or we can fight as dirty as we need to in order to survive . . . and restore those liberties once the immediate threat to them and to our survival is gone.

What an uncomfortable moral place in which to be! If we sink to our enemies' level, how are we any better than they are and thus more deserving of survival? Yet if we don't, and we fail to survive, our ideals will die with us. But how can we claim them to be our ideals if we do not live in accordance with them?

"Forgive us our trespasses, O Lord, as we forgive those who trespass against us" cuts two ways. We are human, thus by definition imperfect. It is not merely understandable, but expected, that we fail to live up to our stated ideals. But if we don't forgive those who trespass against us, and we instead wipe out those who trespass against us, have we not sunk too far below our ideals to justify claiming them as our own?