A Short Course on Making a Silk Purse out of a Sow’s Ear

To make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear is an old expression. It means when someone makes something rich and beautiful out of something rank and of little worth, well the creator of the silk purse has accomplished something rare and beautiful out of something rank and even perhaps repugnant. So it goes with the creation of political images of candidates running for public office. The trainer, or campaign manager of a candidate for elected office, has the task of creating the most favorable image of the person possible while the other side is busy trying to destroy that image. This phenomenon involves billions of dollars changing hands between lobbyist groups in DC to get what their clients are willing to pay for to see their man elected.

Karl Rove, perhaps one of the most successful handlers of candidates ever had the dubious task of turning George W. Bush into a two-term president. Under Rove’s shrewd direction of this president with a 92 IQ, Bush managed to come out of it all smelling like a rose and going on a successful book tour and joking about his public service as president on the Oprah Winfrey show. During that presidency, Bush borrowed and spent an additional 4 trillion dollars that got tacked onto the National Debt. This money Bush spent largely on guns, missiles, Homeland Security, and other war corporation-interests. Bush started two wars, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq, where we still have boots on the ground after almost a decade. In addition, Rove made it palatable to the American voter for Bush to sponsor a 2-trillion dollar tax cut for the richest Americans, Bush’s proclaimed “base.” Karl Rove brilliantly made it okay for the new GOP (Neocons) to spend more money than the big-spending Democrats ever did, and to still blame the Democrats for being tax-and-spend enemies of America. Pretty good trick if you can pull it off. But Rove did. And Americans believed it enough to see Bush elected twice as president.

Karl Rove was first observed by President Nixon. In 1970 Rove had filched some Democratic Party letterhead in an Illinois election and had used the letterhead to discredit the Democratic candidate. It is no surprise that Rove’s mentors at the time were notorious dirty tricksters Lee Atwater and Daniel Segretti of the Nixon Watergate era. Nixon helped Rove get his start and later George Herbert Walker Bush helped Rove to rise even further. Rove became George W. Bush’s handler in the Texas gubernatorial races where George W. Bush won two terms, and later two terms as president of the United States.

Rove achieved success with Bush by keeping him off the microphone as much as possible, but on camera. Rove sold the sizzle, not the steak in promoting Bush as the good old boy who you would want to have a beer with. Not much substance, not much upstairs, but Bush could present a good swagger when he walked. The camera image of a macho president with a good smile is what Rove seized upon and used to sell a sow’s ear to the American public as a silk purse. Forget that he attacked Iraq who never harmed America. Forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction pointed at us. Forget that Scooter Libby lied and was convicted and sentenced by a federal jury only to be commuted by Bush later. Forget all the numerous signing statements Bush affixed to duly passed bills by Congress which destroyed the Constitutional separation of powers of our very government. Forget that Poppy Bush got W. into the Texas Air Guard where he would never see combat while the Viet Nam War raged. Forget that Bush probably went AWOL while in the Texas Air Guard and missed several mandatory drills. Forget all the missing Rove emails that could have meant some jail time for many White House officials, just sit back and relax. And know that George W. Bush is a good American, a Decider, who is just country enough for you to want to have a beer with. Yeehaw. Rove knew the important strings to pull and what to do with the Bush. 

The Gary Hart/Donna Rice scandal was another example of how the illusion becomes the reality. In April of 1987 Gary Hart, former Senator from Colorado, was the front-runner against Poppy Bush for president. Hart was supposed to win not only the Democratic nomination for president but the White House as well. 

Hart was in Florida on a yacht frequently docked in South Florida near Miami. The Monkey Business was an 83-foot motor yacht custom built and owned by the developers of a luxury resort. Famous guests included Elton John, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Nicholson, and others. The very name of the yacht made for tabloid press fodder to taunt Hart about inappropriately being seen during the campaign with young women in Florida.

The boat was used by Senator Gary Hart during his 1987 campaign for president. Hart had challenged the press to provide evidence of his alleged infidelities. Reporters for the Miami Herald, in a bold move, staked out Hart's townhouse near the campaign yacht The Senator was spotted with Miami model Donna Rice sitting on Hart’s lap aboard the yacht. The media released photos of Hart and Rice on the luxurious yacht, and Hart’s shot at the presidency had been destroyed.

It was as good as it gets for Democrats back then. Ray Strother, Hart’s political advisor and an old high school acquaintance of mine, explained it this way: “Gary Hart was one of the finest men ever to run for high office. The opposition had been stalking him for quite some time to get some dirt on him prior to the General Election. They finally got their snapshot of Donna Rice sitting on Hart’s lap on the Monkey Business when the team watching Hart happened to drop their guard for a split second and Rice and the photographer came aboard the yacht. When the press saw Hart alone, that’s all it took, so smile…you’re on Candid Camera.”

“That’s all it took?” I asked. Apparently so. Ray said the other side did some splendid work getting Hart aside to where a photo could be taken with Donna Rice on his lap.

Nothing seems to be more damaging than an affair or an indiscretion when it comes to people in high office. Even though the charge is trumped up and false, the press wants to sell papers so they absolutely do not care about printing the truth. Insinuation seems to sell more copy. Gary Hart was caught (but not with his pants down) with a sweet young thing on his lap. It ruined him. Enough said. 

But is it? Is that all we care about the truth, or the lack of? Must we believe the illusion with all its circumstantial juiciness instead of the truth? Are we truly guilty until proven innocent when it comes to high public office and our elected officials? If the truth had been important to us as voters instead of falsely implied smut, would our lives had been for the better with 8 years with Gary Hart as president? Maybe so. But Poppy Bush would not have ascended to the White House. And it might have been much harder for his boy, George W. to get there as well. Everything is relative in the Universe, perhaps.

So the sultans of slime like Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Donald Segretti, and the like can use all their dirty tricks in their bag to foil the truth in the eyes of the American voter. Lies spun with big bucks from the rich GOP donors like Houston homebuilder Robert Perry and the Swift boaters to demonize Kerry back in 2004, work wonders when in the hands of the likes of Rove (Rove got $10 million from Perry alone that election year).

Segretti called foiling the Democrats by spin and lies, “Rat Fucking.” The truth gave way to the illusion. The big money made the illusion seem real. And the Illusion not only rat fucked the truth, but made Bush somebody you might want to have a beer with at Billy Bob’s. And Gary Hart into a womanizing married man that he truly was not. The illusion cost him the presidency. And most likely Americans a whole lot more.

So next time we get ready to pull the lever for who we think is an honest candidate who will serve us well, how will be know? How will we be able to perceive the illusions spin money generates when it successfully makes a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?

GREECE ON THE BRINK: Banking on a Bailout.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The recurrent cases of boom and bust in the global financial markets since the 1970s, culminating in the financial meltdown of 2008, may be seen as evidence in support of this maxim. Now, the burgeoning Greek debt crisis and its impact on the eurozone, looks likely to provide yet another example of the collective repetitive insanity syndrome. The policy-makers of the EU, the ECB, the IMF and the private financial institutions that have underwritten Greek debt over the past decade, are about to administer yet again a more extreme dose of the same toxic medicine that has so signally failed to lift the country out of recession. Such measures have failed in Spain, in Portugal and in Ireland. They are set to fail even more dramatically in Greece.

So inured have so many become to the superficial and partial treatment of the Greek crisis in the British media, that in so far as it is considered at all, the likely response is one of relief that the burden of a bailout will not fall upon the British taxpayer. Prime Minister Cameron was at pains to point this out at the recent EU summit in Brussels. Never mentioned is the fact that the real beneficiaries of the new 120bn euro bailout will be those banks and financial institutions around the world who have lent to Greece. They are refusing to take a “hair cut” – to roll over their debts and accept losses. The bailout is intended first and foremost to ensure that these creditors will be rescued from the consequences of their irresponsible lending, in just the same way as the banks behind the sub-prime mortgage crisis which led to the financial crash were rescued from collapse in 2008. And just as the working people of Britain, Ireland, Spain and Portugal are paying for the financial profligacy of the banks through the imposition of harsh austerity measures in the name of “deficit reduction”, so the Greek people are now being reduced to penury in order to prop up the international financial system and guarantee the survival of the Euro zone.

All this is reminiscent of the outcome of the banks’ lending spree to Latin American governments in the late 1970s. In a prescient review of Jeff Madrick’s “Age of Greed: the Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present” (New York Review of Books. June 2011), Paul Krugman and Robin Wells write:

“When the loans to Latin American governments went bad, Citi and other banks were rescued via a program that was billed as aid to troubled debtor nations but was in fact largely aimed at helping US and European banks. In that sense the program for Latin America in the 1980s bore a strong family resemblance to what is happening to Europe’s peripheral economies now. Large official loans were provided to debtor nations, not to help them economically, but to help them to repay their private sector creditors. In effect, it looked like a country bailout, but it was really an indirect bank bailout. And the banks did indeed weather the storm. But the loans came with a price, namely harsh austerity programs imposed on debtor nations.”

This describes the Greek/Euro situation exactly. There is an increasing sense that the European governments attempting to come to terms with the implications of the Greek debt crisis are whistling in the dark. The traumatic experience of the 2008 financial meltdown is still a present reality, the consequences of which, far from having receded, are only now being felt to the full. But in Britain the media are complicit in encouraging a mood of complacent smugness, suggesting that Greece is a far-away country about which we know little and need care less. It’s a “eurozone” problem and as Britain, thankfully, is not in the eurozone, it will not affect us. But this is nonsense. The reality is that Greece will be unable to meet its debt obligations and sooner or later will default. Most serious commentators talk, not about “if” Greece defaults, but “when”. The new loan, to enable the government to pay its creditors, comes with tight strings attached, in the form of austerity measures unprecedented in their severity - twice as large as the draconian ones already in place. These include sacking 20% of public sector workers, massive tax rises and a privatization programme more extensive than anything ever attempted. What happens when Greece defaults? This is the nightmare prospect haunting the corridors of power in Europe – and almost certainly in the US also. Osborne’s and Cameron’s feigned insouciance cloaks what must (or should) be growing concern. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, was hardly reassuring when, asked if a Greek default might lead to a meltdown like the one caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, replied: “I am not sure that the sovereign crisis now and what happened in the case of Lehman Brothers have much in common, other than in the fact that it is a mess.” Note – he is not sure!

British banks hold £3bn of Greek bonds, a relatively small amount. This has led to the claim that the UK will have low exposure to any default, and that as Britain will not contribute to the eurozone bailout, taxpayers will be spared. But this is deceptive. It is not the direct involvement of the banks in Greek debt that is the problem, but the indirect involvement. As Keynesian economist Will Hutton points out in a recent Observer column ((19.06.11), the British banking system has outstanding loans of £6.5 trillion – more than four times Britain’s GDP. Against this the banks have only £300bn of equity capital – funds intended to support loans. The insurance policy for such loans exists in the form of so-called credit default swaps (CDS) and they are priced according to how the market assesses the risk of banks having difficulty servicing their debts. According to Hutton, three of the four riskiest banks, calculated by the pricing of CDS are Lloyds, RBS and Santander. Should Greece default on its debts and trigger a chain reaction engulfing Ireland, Portugal and Spain, followed by the collapse of the euro, he concludes that “the consequent losses could eliminate the capital underwriting the entire banking edifice.” In such a scenario, which is far from improbable, the CDS would be worthless bits of paper.

Most journalistic commentary on the Greek/Euro crisis is content to marginalize the main players – the working populations of Greece and the rest of Europe. It is as if they were at best bit-players in a drama the outcome of which would be settled in the corridors of political and financial power. But for those with eyes to see - those whose sensitivities have not been blunted by the luxuries and comforts of class privilege, those who have not been shielded from reality by wealth and power - it has become increasingly obvious that this is a crisis of the whole system of finance-monopoly capitalism. The outcome, sooner or later, will be decided by the masses of ordinary people throughout Europe and the world who are no longer prepared to tolerate a system that is literally ruining their lives.

It is to be hoped that the thousands who gather daily in Syntagma Square in Athens will grow in numbers, strength and determination until they constitute an unstoppable tide. They have adopted from their Spanish comrades the title “Indignados” - the angry ones – and they are determined to continue their struggle until they have thrown off this intolerable burden of impoverishment imposed upon them at the behest of a political and financial system whose culpable elites have escaped scot-free. We can be sure that those at the top of Greek society who operated a tax-evasion system to suit themselves, will feel none of the pain now being inflicted on impoverished public sector workers. The old interrogative maxim “Which Side are You On?” was never more pertinent than now. No specious form of words will do to suggest that the unbearable impoverishment of the people must somehow be endured for the sake of economic recovery. No resigned appeal for reasonableness should be tolerated on the grounds that unbearable impoverishment must be accepted for fear of something worse. We can be sure that those who argue thus, wherever they are, will not themselves have to bear the burden they would have others accept without protest.

The struggle for democratic freedom is indivisible. For all the differences in circumstances, those demonstrating and fighting for their freedom in the Arab world are part of the same historic movement as those protesting in Syntagma Square. And in Britain the coming wave of strikes and demonstrations organized by the trades unions against the unprecedented spending cuts here are also part of the international movement against a system that can no longer maintain the standard of living and public services for which working people have struggled and sacrificed over decades and centuries. And, as is to be expected, those in power who speak of democracy, when confronted with the organized power of the people in workplaces or on the street, will not hesitate to use the law to try to curtail the people’s right to exercise their democratic right to strike and protest. Be prepared.

The Curse

America is scarred by a prominent fault-line. It’s been there since the nation’s birth. Geographically, it follows the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, tracks roughly the 32^nd parallel, then drops to the Rio Grande east of New Mexico. Conversely, the great divide cannot be simplified as purely geographic, for it cuts through households in all 50 states. On the other hand, the Blue-Red state schism resembles the Blue-Gray split 150-years before. The Old Confederacy has risen again in the 21^st, and you can see it clearly displayed on election night maps.

Yet it’s more complex. The divide is also apparent between religious bodies. Fundamentalist denominations are on one side; mainline denominations on the other. Traditional class warfare also plays a dynamic on the fault-line; the “have’s” (and those that identify with the rich ‘cause they want to be also) are principally on the red team while the “have-not’s” (and those that empathize with the poor and middle class) are on the blue.

At this time in U.S. history, the divide is widening again to dangerous levels, and there are several factors contributing: Political polarization, income disparity, unemployment, homelessness, unfair global trade agreements that re-sanction slave labor, the “dumbing-down” of society, corporate takeover of media and elections, and burgeoning religious movements identifying with the affluent in contradiction to original doctrine.

And at the heart of the great divide is the modern Republican Party. Its political operatives made a conscious decision three decades ago to win at any cost, including compromising traditional values that moderated our political system to civility and accepted standards of discourse. No longer is there a conscience to constrain; all tactics are on-the-table. As part of the conscious decision to include the unconscionable, the GOP has embraced deceit, fear, greed, and hate as part of its fabric. The composition is damaging to the nation as a whole, not just the party, and they care not. All that matters is objective; winning is the only thing that counts. The end justifies the means.

Nixon coined the new political reality that widened the gap, “Southern Strategy.” He and many other politicians recognized the passing of Civil Rights legislation in the mid-60s would lead to the end of Democratic domination over the Old South. Republicans quickly moved to fill the vacuum by converting former Dixiecrats and Klansmen into the GOP. The process is practically complete after 46 years.

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting in their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.” – Rod Serling, 1964 Los Angeles Times

This is America’s curse, her fault-line. Canada’s may be the French and English gap, Britain has its Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; India is divided by the traditional caste system; and China is plagued by its Tibet and Taiwan. In perspective, nearly every country has a fault-line that, if inflated, could resuscitate civil strife.

But America’s curse now seems more inflamed due to calculated Republican strategy, as mentioned.

America’s curse is the same for all fading empires – destructive division. Rome fell from within, not from without. History tells us more Romans died during the decaying period from domestic disputes and religious rivalries than from outside barbarians. The scene was neighbor against neighbor; kin vs. kin. In addition, the distant provinces became more detached from Rome over centuries.

Internal decay is far more lethal than external. Invaders are usually stopped at the gate. But only when an empire is defeated internally may external forces penetrate to finish the job. Of course, Rome’s fall was over a period of centuries, plus the Western Empire fell nearly a thousand years before the Eastern. If only America could be so lucky.

I see the Republican Party [with all its tentacles and artificially spawned groups] as America’s curse – its decadence. Republicans are always demonizing Democrats, I realize. But I actually believe Republicans are the element of the nation’s decay. Nothing good for the country can be passed because Republicans stand in the way. Their immaturity blocks everything America needs to recover, and if they don’t get their way in concentrating wealth into their rich friends’ hands, they throw childish tantrums – literally.

The Republican curse is like a method of Roman torture whereby a rotting corpse is strapped to a healthy person’s body until the decomposing excrement and bacteria infects the living tissue and the healthy individual succumbs to a slow, torturous death. The dead body is the GOP and the living human – carrying around the weight of the decaying body while at the same time attempting to survive and provide necessities to sustain that existence – is the nation.

Admittedly, this is a grotesque metaphor of the current condition. But the end justifies the description. Aren’t we dying as a nation because the Republican Party – with its obsession with guns, violence, wars, myths, fear and hate – is tied to our backs? Somehow we can’t rid ourselves of their influence; neither can we escape to another planet. We’re married to the mob and tortured forever.

The Nazis Party, with its nasty little prejudices and cultic myths, was Germany’s dead corpse strapped to its back. Republicans are ours.

Pastor Perry's Plan to Rouse God from Inaction, the Better to Help America and Perhaps the Pastor's Run for the Republican Nomination

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a selfless patriot and defender of the constitution, has taken a bold step designed to bring the nation back to God, despite an absence of evidence America was ever with God or, for that matter, that there is such an entity. Never mind details concerning separation of church and state - the fearless governor has set another day of prayer, this one for August 6 in partnership with the American Family Association at a stadium in Houston. 

There will be fasting, praying and bible reading and no doubt some whooping and hollering and flag waving. Every governor in the country has been invited to attend. All have been asked by Rev. Perry to proclaim their own shout outs to Jesus ir order to rescue the nation and world from disasters economic and natural, social and spiritual, not to mention saving us from terrorism, the debasement of our Christian culture and ObamaCare.

So far, God has done squat to help out in any of these realms, so the governor wants a big show and a lot of prayer energy sent skyward to get God off the dime, so to speak. 

The day will be modeled after a similar event described in the Book of Joel, so bring your slaves, goats and miracle requests and help the governor speed up the healing of the country, the rebuilding of communities and restoring those enduring values that somehow have not endured so well, whatever they might be. 

Never mind the naysayers who want to spoil the fun, like the head of the Secular Coalition for America, who said, "The last thing our officials should do in times of national struggle is promote a divisive religious event that proposes no real solutions to our country's real-world problems." The godless heathen Sean Faircloth went so far as to suggest that the governor's selfless call was "an insult to the millions of upstanding citizens who practice religions other than evangelical Christianity, as well as the millions of secular Americans who contribute to society without pushing their views on others and that religion should be a private matter, especially for elected officials in a secular government."

Well, what else would you expect from infidels and Pastafarians? 

Even more upsetting, a minister of the cloth, one Welton Gaddy, said Perry's call "raises serious concerns about his commitment to the boundaries between religion and government. It has been my experience that when elected leaders invoke religion in this way, it almost always has more to do with furthering a political agenda than a religious one."

Another nitpicker! What malcontents. Imagine suggesting that this sincere call to the faithful could in any way be associated with Rev. Perry's attempt to woo social conservatives. How cynical these blasphemers are. 

Many if not all our great Republican god-fearing governors will support the event, particularly Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, Haley Barbour in Mississippi, Bob Riley in Alabama, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, Rick Scott in Florida, Nikki Haley in South Carolina and Christine Gregoire in Washington. In fact, all these governors already have.

It's going to be a great day for Jesus in Houston - and maybe throughout the whole wide world. Maybe it will be good for Pastor Perry, too. Not that this is of any concern to him, however. 

For a smart summary of the event, watch this short video -  It's a commentary on the event from the Rev. Barry Lynn entitled, "I'm not a Cowboy." It kind of puts things in perspective.

Dispatches From The Edge | The New Face Of War

The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off America’s Public Enemy Number One, it formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”

It is also one that requires a vast intelligence apparatus, one that now constitute almost a fourth arm of government that most Americans are almost completely unaware of. Yet, according to the Washington Post, this empire includes some 1, 271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies in more than 10, 000 locations across the country, with a budget last year of at least $80.1 billion. 

“At the heart of this new warfare,” notes the Financial Times,” is high-tech cooperation between intelligence agencies and the military” that blurs the traditional borders between civilians and the armed forces. And it fits with the U.S.’s penchant for waging war with robots and covert Special Forces.

But, by definition, the secrecy at the core of the “new warfare” removes decisions about war and peace from the public realm and relegates them to secure rooms in the White House or clandestine bases in the Hindu Kush. When the Blackhawk helicopters slipped through Pakistani airspace, they did more than execute one of America’s greatest bugbears, they essentially said another country’s sovereignty was no longer relevant and consigned Congress to the role of spectator.

Over the past several decades U.S. military theorists have clashed over how to use the armed forces, though it is a debate that gets distorted by the requirements of industry: the U.S, does not really need 11 immense Nimitz class aircraft carriers, but the Newport News Shipbuilding Company—and the aerospace giants that fill the flattops with fighter bombers—do.

The arguments have revolved around three different approaches, the Powell Doctrine, the Rumsfeld Doctrine, and the Petraeus Doctrine.

The Powell Doctrine is essentially conventional warfare a-la-World War II: massive firepower, lots of soldiers, clear goals. This was the formula for the first Gulf War, which, after a month of bombing, lasted only four days. But it is a very expensive way to wage war.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine merged high tech firepower and Special Forces with a minimal use of Army and Marine units. It also relies on private contractors to do much of what was formerly done by the military. The doctrine routed the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and quickly knocked out the Iraqi Army in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Once the shock and awe wore off, however, the Doctrine’s weaknesses became obvious. It simply didn’t have the manpower to hold the ground against a guerilla insurgency. The 2007 “surge” of troops in Iraq, like last year’s surge in Afghanistan, was an admission that the doctrine was fundamentally flawed if the locals decided to keep fighting.

The Petraeus Doctrine is old wine in a new bottle: counterinsurgency. In theory, it is boots on the ground to win hearts and minds. It draws heavily on intelligence—what Gen. David Petraeus calls “bandwidth”—to isolate and eliminate any insurgents—and attempts to establish trust with the locals. It is cheaper than the Powell and Rumsfeld doctrines, but it also almost never works. Eventually the locals get tried of being occupied, and then counterinsurgency turns nasty. Building schools and digging wells give way to night raids and targeted assassinations that alienate the local population. According to U.S. intelligence, the current counterinsurgency program in Afghanistan is failing.

So, what is this “astounding change” that Nagl speaks of? If you want to put a name to it, “counter-terrorism” is probably the most descriptive, although with a new twist. Like counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism has been around a long time. The Phoenix Program that killed some 40,000 South Vietnamese was a variety of the doctrine. Phoenix, too, paid no attention to sovereignty. During the Vietnam War, Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols secretly went into Cambodia and Laos. 

In recent years, the U.S. clandestinely sent Special Forces into Syria and Pakistan in a sort of shadow war against “insurgents.” A number of other countries have done the same.

But the Obama administration openly admits to sending a Special Forces Seal team into Pakistan to assassinate bin Laden, and it was prepared to fight Pakistan’s armed forces if they tried to intervene. And when Pakistan asked the U.S. to curb its use of armed drones in Pakistani airspace, the Central Intelligence Agency said it would do nothing of the kind.

It is as if counter-terrorism reconfigured that classic line from the movie “Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges, we got drones and Seals.”

The principle behind counter-terrorism is eliminating people you don’t like. There is no patina of “hearts and minds,” and the new strategy makes no effort to practice the subterfuge of “plausible deniability” that has deflected the ire of target countries in the past.

While clandestine warfare is not new, the boldness of the bin Laden hit is. Certainly the people who planned the attack wanted to make a statement: we can get you anywhere you are, and impediments like international law, the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Charter be damned.

 “Targeted assassinations violate well-established principles of international law,” says law professor Marjorie Cohn. “Extrajudicial executions are unlawful, even in armed conflict.”

From the U.S.’s point of view, the doctrine has a number of advantages. It is cheaper, and its expenses are generally hidden away in a labyrinth of bureaucracy. For instance, the $80.1 billion figure is only an estimate and does not include the cost of the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan, or Homeland Security.

Recent moves by the White House suggest the administration is putting this new strategy in place. “Petraeus’s appointment to head the CIA is an important indication that the U.S. wants to fuse intelligence and military operations,” a “senior figure” at the British Defense Ministry told the Financial Times.

In the past the division between military and civilian intelligence agencies allowed for a range of opinions. While the U.S. military continues to put a rosy spin on the Afghan War, civilian intelligence agencies have been much more somber about the success of the current surge. That division is likely to vanish under the new regime, where intelligence becomes less about analysis and more about targeting.

The new warfare opens up a Pandora’s box, the implications of which are only beginning to be considered. What would be the reaction if Cuban armed forces had landed in Florida and assassinated Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, two anti-Castro militants who were credibly charged with setting bombs in Havana and downing a Cuban airliner? Washington would treat it as an act of war. The problem with a foreign policy based on claw and fang is that, if one country claims the right to act independently of international law and the UN Charter, all countries can so claim.

In the end, however, the biggest victims for this “new” warfare will probably be the American people. Once an enormous intelligence bureaucracy is created—there are some 854,000 people with top-secrecy security clearance—it will be damned hard to dismantle it. And, since the very nature of the endeavor removes it from public oversight, it is a formula for a massive and uncontrolled expansion of the national security state.   

Wading Into the Shallows, Part 2

The shallows I’m talking about are virtual cesspools of right-wing religious dogma that pollute the cultural and political landscape of the U.S., especially in the South (where I live) and the Midwest. The outrages being committed in the name of dogmatic religious myths are growing, as the faithful and their political cohorts in God’s Own Party continue their relentless assault on vulnerable people’s lives and our democratic traditions.

True believers – those Biblical literalists who buy into the Talking Snake of Eden, the 6,000-year-old earth/universe, the idiotic Noah’s Ark story, the coexistence of dinosaurs and humans, homophobia, creationism, etc. – are no doubt offended by the term, dogma. I’m sure they would prefer something more respectful, such as beliefs, or faith. So I thought about it, briefly, but I kept seeing images of blathering fundamentalist gasbags like John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham strutting their shtick. And I thought of all the “Left Behind” rapture lunacy; and regressive “leaders” like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, recent Catholic convert Newt Gingrich, and Texas Governor Rick Perry. And religion-inspired denial of established scientific facts, coupled with intimidating pressure on school systems and teachers to present creationism alongside evolution in science classrooms. So my first thought was, “What a huge and obscene blot on the image of the world’s most prominent secular nation. Followed quickly by a second thought: It’s late in the game and those fanatics are winning! Just consider how much damage they will yet do in all those state legislatures they control.

Too bad the Constitutional separation of church and state that has been a defining feature of our nation is rapidly being relegated to a mere technicality, honored, if at all, in the breach more than the observance. The religious majority, aided by conservative courts, always seem to find ways to impose their 14th-Century values on the rest of us. And now that they’re on a roll, it seems only a matter of time until the ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court gets the separation-of-church-and-state issue clearly in its crosshairs. The majority of those justices are right-wing Catholic ideologues first, legal scholars second. They are of the same ilk as religious apologists who can rationalize any belief, regardless of the preponderance of disconfirming evidence. And also lawyers, whose modus operandi is finding plausible ways to cherry-pick evidence, to obfuscate, and to frame issues to support pre-determined positions. And they share the extreme political goals of the latest breed of radical conservatives. It’s enough to make us long for the good old days of the “moderate” Bush administration. So what we have here is a Supreme Court majority that’s an integral part of a well-organized right-wing movement that holds the “Holy Word of (their) God” above the Constitution. Far above. So when the chips are down, they will manufacture legal justifications for siding with the religious-right on church-state Constitutional issues. I doubt that any Republican these days can be trusted to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Anyway, if the term dogma upsets the dogmatic, that’s too damn bad. When dealing with fanatics, no good can come from phony respect, especially at the expense of accuracy. And the fanatics who are bent on theocratic domination will only view any respect from the left, feigned or otherwise, as a sign of weakness to exploit to their advantage in their long-term war against all forms of enlightenment.

All that said, I am happy to acknowledge that there are still a great many non-fundamentalist persons of faith in this country who are tolerant and open-minded, including some long-suffering friends who have put up with my intemperate rants for years. And let me add that I reserve the respectful term “person of faith” for those believers who, like my liberal and moderate religious friends, support our democratic traditions, value cultural diversity, and consistently strive to be tolerant, fair and compassionate. I realize that the great majority of liberals and moderates, like most readers of this column, are people of faith and, despite our differences, I don’t want to alienate them. Now If only they will join us freethinkers in vigorous condemnation of the religious right and the threat it poses to Constitutional democracy. I fear their silence has the unintended consequence of lending support to the fundamentalist theocratic fascists, who constantly boast about the Christian majority in this country. But not all Christians are cut from the same cloth – far from it; and I like to think that liberal and moderate Christians are closer, in most ways that matter, to rational, evidence-respecting non-theists like me than they are to fundamentalists who support the likes of Palin, Bachman, Perry, et al. Like their cohorts on the political right, the religious right operates from arrogant, dogmatic certainty and is perpetually in attack mode. Bipartisan fantasies like those espoused by our president simply play into their hands.So does silence.

No one disputes that organized religious groups do much good; but in the case of fundagelicals, there is abundant reason to think their primary goal is proselytizing – saving souls from eternal damnation. After all, if you were totally convinced that this life was but the briefest audition for an eternal role singing in God’s choir in the hereafter, saving your own and others‘ souls would quite sensibly be your highest priority. But if you turned out to be wrong, you might have wasted a lot of time and effort, and also done a lot of harm inculcating children and impressionable adults with fears of hellfire and damnation.

In the unlikely case it isn’t obvious, let me go on record as saying I hold the religious right in contempt. Their primitive, shallow belief system violates virtually everything I value – logic, reason, sound evidence, and good sense. They proudly promote a simplistic abdication of our legacy of knowledge and understanding, a retrograde submission to natural tendencies that evolved to enable us to cope with the rigors of physical survival during the Stone Age. They dogmatically (not rationally or evidentially) reject the powerful intellectual and problem-solving tools of science. Too bad, because we didn’t attain our current level of knowledge and technological achievement based on our natural tendencies, but in spite of them.

To use a religious cliche, I’m well aware that a lot of what I’ve said can be classified as preaching to the choir. Except for this: far too many liberals/progressives underestimate the seriousness and urgency of the threat from the religious right. We liberals have been steeped in respect for the Constitution and its clear provisions supporting religious freedom, including the freedom to reject religion. We have a long history of tolerance and respect for differences, and it goes against our nature to attack people based on their religious beliefs. But we err, I think, far too much on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt to people who vilify us without mercy, who vocally deride and distort almost every value we stand for. Like our well-meaning president, we are far too nice and far too understanding towards a group that’s at war with the Enlightenment values that shaped our Constitution. These fundamentalists are bent on nothing less than gaining control at any cost and remaking America as a Christian theocracy.

So while I hate to do it, I must chastise my liberal and moderate friends, irrespective of their religious views, for being far too tolerant of the madness of the religious right. It is very late in the game, and the well-organized religious fanatics already have a lock on one of our major political parties. So, contra President Obama, it is way past time to abandon the suicidal notion that we can reason with them or work with them constructively. Instead, we must match their determination. How about we start by dropping any pretense that they are rational people or that anything they are saying is even worth talking about? How about recognizing that our overriding goal must be to do everything in our power to prevent them from expanding their power, before it’s too late? We can start by publicly rebuking them any time they express their crazy ideas and by exposing their anti-democratic agenda at every opportunity. We need to match their determination, go into attack mode on all fronts, and make our voice heard in the timid, bought-and-paid-for mainstream media before they completely own it.

So let’s stop acting like the current crop of democrats, stop treating brainwashed fanatics like they’re worth talking to. If you doubt this advice, please read these three credible voices of reason, three former religious-right insiders who are sounding the alarm about what’s happening to us. I’m speaking of Frank Schaeffer, John Lofton, and Dan Barker. And there’s a fourth, Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, who may be the most important insider voice of all.

Okay, I’ll wrap this up. As I said in my previous column, I have no interest in debating deists about the existence of a creator-god/intelligent designer who jumpstarted it all but otherwise takes no active role. However, some readers might be interested in a small sample of the kinds of questions that cause me to reject Bible-based theism as even a possibility. The theism of the Abrahamic religions (and also Mormonism) goes far beyond deism and purely logical argument, making very specific and detailed claims about the nature of an anthropomorphic, personal god, mostly based on the alleged truth of “His” Holy Books. Now in this day and age it shouldn’t be necessary to point out that a great many of those claims about creation and the nature of reality are provably false, making claims of Biblical inerrancy ludicrous.

Believers also make unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims that their god takes an active role in the world, works miracles, and even “speaks” to them. The latest prominent right-wing buffoon to put his primitive superstition on display is Texas Republican governor, Rick Perry. Can you believe that he actually expects to make an impact on real-world problems by holding a mass prayer rally in Houston? It is becoming increasingly evident that prayer rallies are among the best ideas Republicans can come up with. They sure has hell can’t govern effectively.

Anyway, here are a few questions for Biblical literalists:

Why would the omnipotent Creator of the Cosmos hide himself and go to such great lengths to make his existence seem improbable?

Why would He make it evident, based on the best science, that the earth and the universe are actually billions of years old? For example, why would He distribute the fossils in strata so as to create overwhelming evidence for gradual evolution over millions of years? Why would he create a 6000-year-old universe and give it the appearance of great age (13.75 billion years, to be precise)?

Why would such an incredibly sophisticated Being choose to hide Himself and all evidence for His existence and yet deem believing in Him to be the most important virtue? That is, why does He make “faith” in Him a condition for eternal bliss and avoiding eternal torment? (If you listen to the Southern Baptists and other fundamentalist sects, an “eternal hell” is real and is where most humans are going to end up.)

Supposedly He knows Everything that has happened or ever will happen – every thought and action, from the most sublime to the most depraved. Now that’s way beyond mere sophistication! In fact, it is so ultra-sophisticated that it makes His petty concerns “recorded” in the Old Testament seem totally absurd. Doesn’t it?

Why would the book He wrote, or inspired, make the laughable claim that the entire earth was flooded at the time the Sumerians were happily brewing beer without noticing that they were breathing under water?

Why would His most strident believers be so conspicuously ignorant and bigoted?

As I said, these are just a few questions off the top. There are many, many more.

So in conclusion, religious fundamentalists talk and act like they expect some special privilege to be granted to their religious beliefs; but as soldiers in the cultural and political wars, they deserve no privilege to be protected from criticism. Everyone understands that democracy is meaningless unless it permits vigorous debate. But they have no commitment to Constitutional democracy, which is an obstacle to the domination they seek.

Finally, a closing quotation from Christopher Hitchens:

“Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.”

Amen.