Compiling the Somewhat Dangerous Absurd

As a service to future wags, recording what couldn’t be so, but was so, at a particular point in time, might be useful.  Time passes.  People forget.  So here’s a bouquet of odd blooms from Thursday, October 11, 2007 – should someone of a later generation try to figure out what we were up to way back when.

 

Will people remember Ann Coulter?  On this date people noticed she actually had said Jews need “perfecting” –

 

Appearing on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show, The Big Idea, on Monday night, columnist/author Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren’t any Jewish people. Asked by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like “the head of Iran” and “wipe Israel off the Earth,” Coulter stated: “No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. … That’s what Christianity is.”

 

Donny was not impressed, and you can click through to see all she said, if you care.

 

She’s a provocateur, of course – and there was a firestorm of commentary.  But this was part of a book tour.  She was promoting her latest tome, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans – “Witty, sharp-tongued, outrageous, and always faithfully conservative, here is Ann at her best, running circles around liberal pundits, pols and Leftist wackos before they even know what has hit them.”

 

Of course some liberals decided to think about the matter – they knew just what hit them.

 

For example, Matthew Yglesias did here, saying there’s something fishy in Ann Coulter’s desire to see Judaism wiped off the face of the earth so we can all be “perfected” by becoming Christians –

 

This is an uncomfortable thing for Jewish people to think about, but isn’t that actually a very banal baseline belief of all Christians and Muslims everywhere? Jews don’t evangelize like this, and I don’t think Hindus do either, but our world’s great crusading faiths certainly do and converting everyone is … the whole point!

 

This is one reason - probably the reason - that whatever the electoral politics of the matter, it’s probably not a great idea to encourage politicians to “talk about faith” more. For America to work as an enterprise you need people with deeply held but mutually inconsistent religious beliefs to all work and live together peacefully. Rubbing everyone’s noses in the precise implications of other people’s beliefs (Christians think Jews shouldn’t exist, Jews think Christians are worshipping a false messiah, Protestants think Catholics worship idols, etc.) isn’t really helpful.

 

Duncan Black (Atrios) agrees –

Well, yes, this is the point I’ve been trying to make for a very long time. I think the country has made great strides in the “put the genie back in the bottle” direction when it comes to religious disagreement. The “make politicians talk about their faith” stuff threatens to uncork it again, unless “talking about faith” means mumbling meaningless banalities which to me seems to be insulting to believers and nonbelievers.

 

Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad to have a full public debate about who is or isn’t going to hell due to their allegiance to the false church in Rome, or whatever. It might be a bit more honest than the de facto alliance of “believers” (pan-Christian) versus the rest of us. But it probably wouldn’t do wonders for the reasonable-if-certainly-imperfect climate of religious tolerance we have in the country, even if it means heathens like me are supposed to shut up and take our lumps.

 

Black may be onto something there.  Let’s have it all out.  Just who is going to hell, and why?  Some of us have always wanted to see some angry Baptist from the Deep South take on the “Cult of Mary” and that supposedly infallible pope business, and maybe some Lutheran could ask a Mormon Elder about John Smith and Palmyra, New York.  Let’s have a knock-down-drag-out about burning bushes that talk and whose miracle really happened, and whose miracle was obviously an odd hallucination and just absurd.  Uncork it all.  Clear the air.  Maybe all the giggling that would finally wash over everyone would suggest we ought to go back to the basics and have a government that shrugs at all those matters and keeps us reasonably safe, free to believe what we will, makes sure everyone plays fair and no one is allowed to hurt anyone else for fun and profit, and makes sure things run as smoothly as we can manage.  Isn’t that enough?  No need to bring God into it.  That was the original idea.

You don’t think that was the idea?  See Gary Wills’ news book, Head and Heart: American Christianities, reviewed by Tim Rutten in the LA Times here – the founders were of a “liberality of spirit which must forever and properly remain a scandal to the rank and file of professing American Christians.”

 

Wills points out that “believers in America as a Christian nation do not much like Jefferson the Deist. But they like his Declaration of Independence because of its reference to ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ Though this was not a legislative document, it is more useful to them than the supreme legislative document of the United States, the Constitution, which… does not mention God at all.”

  

Nope – “He” is not in there.  And anyway, the framers were deists, “who believed in a divine providence knowable only through reason and experience and not prone to intervene in the affairs of men” –

 

The reaction of the Great Awakening provided an American Unitarian boost that made Deism the religion of the educated class by the middle of the 18th century. Legal scholar William Lee Miller writes that the chief founders of the nation were all Deists - he lists Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Paine, though many more leaders of the founding era could be added (Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Aaron Burr, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Tench Coxe, to name some). Their agreement on the question of God crossed political and geographic lines. Federalist and Republican, North and South, an Adams and a Jefferson, a Hamilton and a Madison - all were professed Deists.

 

So they thought that you know God through reasoning things out, and He (or She or It) doesn’t intervene here on earth anyway – God is simply the “prime mover” or the “divine watchmaker.”  That’s an embarrassment to folks these days.  No one likes to mention it.  Politicians ignore it.  They talk about their faith – what they believe because they believe it.  You have to do that to win votes now.  Times have changed.

 

Of course if we do have that knock-down-drag-out about burning bushes that talk and all the rest, as would be appropriate to these times, as we’ve moved far from the Deist view, we may not get giggles.  We may get a religious war – a local one, to match the one we decided to join in the Middle East.  Thanks, Ann.

 

What else?

 

Thursday, October 11, 2007, was also the day Democrats were wistfully hoping to hear Al Gore’s name when the Nobel Peace Prize was announced Friday (see this) – but Think Progress let us know that the New York Sun had a far different hope; in fact, we see here, if there were any justice in the world, General David Petraeus would get the Nobel Peace Prize.  Take it away, Tim Grieve –

 

The Sun says that Petraeus has “breasted an extraordinary amount of obloquy” - hello, thesaurus.com! - and that by honoring him, the Nobel committee could “underscore the point that however controversial our policies may be, the world recognizes - and we haven’t the slightest doubt that it does - the risks that our GIs, and their generals, take for all of us.”

 

The Sun seems to realize that the general is a long shot, but not because he’s prosecuting a needless war that has left tens of thousands of people dead. No, the Sun says, the odds are long for Petraeus because unlike most recent Peace Prize recipients, he “doesn’t seem to hate President Bush.”

 

No, that’s not it.  They have the concept wrong.  It’s a “peace” prize.

 

It’s not important – just an oddity.

 

What else?

 

Is Chris Matthews on NBC/MSNBC important?  Who knows?  But recently, at a tenth anniversary party for his show “Hardball,” he said some odd things –  that Bush White House officials, specifically some in Vice President Cheney’s office – had tried to “silence” him by putting pressure on executives at MSNBC.  Bill O’Reilly on Fox News then went on a multiple-day rant that for the first time in our history a major network, NBC, was controlled by a political party, the Democrats – and this proved that.  The irony was a bit thick.

 

The Matthews comments were off the cuff, but Matthews then gave an interview with TV Guide and now says that there was a “concerted effort” - carried out by three people linked to Cheney - to kill discussion of the role Cheney’s office played in goosing up a supposed nuclear threat from Iraq –

 

I thought on the 10th anniversary it would be good to celebrate the First Amendment, which gives us all our living.  We reviewed in brief the remarkable experience of covering the Clinton [scandal] and the defense of the war with Iraq. And the difference in these two cases was that although I was extremely tough on Clinton, there was never any attempt to silence me - whereas there was a concerted effort by [Vice President Cheney's office] to silence me. It came in the form of three different people calling trying to quiet me.

 

TV Guide of course asks Matthews why he’s “coming out about this now” and he replies –

 

I think people ought to know this.  There’s a lot going on among our producers, our young bookers, now that I never noticed before. There is an almost menacing call that you get whenever someone hears something they don’t like - their people call up and threaten, or challenge, and get very nasty. That’s now become the norm. I told people, “Just tell me this from now on.”

 

Every time someone calls and tries one of those things, whether it’s the Mitt Romney campaign or the John McCain campaign or whatever, I will put it on the air. I’m tired of this kind of pressure that’s now become normal among the young staffers on these campaigns. When it’s coming from the vice president’s office - there was a concerted effort to stop me from reporting on what the vice president’s office was doing in terms of making the case that there was a nuclear threat from Iraq. I wanted to remind people [that] having a talk show that is outspoken is not without its troubles.

 

Poor Chris – he doesn’t understand how things work now.  What did he name his show?

 

Oh well – just another day in the absurd “now.”  Garrett Epps says let’s abolish the Electoral College – “Created to protect the slave states, it is championed now by conservatives who fear the power of America’s true majority. It’s time to ditch the antiquated way we choose a president.”  Yawn.  That will never happen – but so noted, on Thursday, October 11, 2007 it came up, again –

 

Americans revere their Constitution but don’t understand it. Every year my students at the University of Oregon law school, channeling their 11th grade civics teachers, tell me that the Constitution is a brilliant document, conceived in near perfection more than two centuries ago. Virtually everything these students - and bright high-school graduates everywhere in America - “know” about the Constitution is wrong. That ongoing mystification is nowhere more glaring than in the justifications offered for the “Electoral College” (a phrase, by the way, that appears nowhere in the Constitution).

 

Yeah, yeah – but let’s think about the possible.

 

There’s Wesley Clark’s new memoir, which Joe Conason discusses here.  That’s all about the possible.  It seems there really is a memo in which the Bush administration lays out a plan to topple seven countries in five years – starting with Iraq of course.  Now that is new stuff, and raises the issue of just what is possible these days.  A passage in the memoir suggests that another war, or two or three, is part of a long-planned Department of Defense strategy that anticipated “regime change” by force in no fewer than seven Mideast states.  As Conason notes, critics of the war “have often voiced suspicions of such imperial schemes” – but this is the first time that a high-ranking former military officer, former four-star general, has claimed to know for a fact that such plans existed.

 

Wow.  Cool.  That’s news.  And it goes like this – Clark recalls two visits to the Pentagon following attacks on September 2001, and on the first visit, less than two weeks after 9/11, he writes, a “senior general” told him, “We’re going to attack Iraq. The decision has basically been made.”

 

That’s old news, but then it gets juicy –

 

Six weeks later, Clark returned to Washington to see the same general and inquired whether the plan to strike Iraq was still under consideration. The general’s response was stunning: “‘Oh, it’s worse than that,’ he said, holding up a memo on his desk. ‘Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [then Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.’ And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran.”

 

While Clark doesn’t name the other four countries, he has mentioned in televised interviews that the hit list included Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan. Indeed, he has described this same conversation on a few occasions over the past year, including in a speech at the University of Alabama in October 2006, in an appearance on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” broadcast last March, and most recently in an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.” On “Democracy Now” he spoke about the meetings and the memo in slightly greater detail, saying that he had made the first Pentagon visit “on or about Sept. 20.”

 

But then Clark says he didn’t actually read the memo from Rumsfeld’s office –

 

When the general first held it up, he remembers asking, “Is it classified?” Receiving an affirmative answer, he said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” He also says that when he saw the same general last year and reminded him of their conversation, the officer said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”

 

Yipes!

 

Conason notes that during the CNN interview, Clark backed off slightly – the memo “wasn’t [necessarily] a plan. Maybe it was a think piece. Maybe it was a sort of notional concept, but what it was, was the kind of indication of dialogue around this town in official circles … that has poisoned the atmosphere and made it very difficult for this administration to achieve any success in the region.”

 

But Clark does quote Paul Wolfowitz in a conversation after the first Gulf War.  Clark dropped by the Pentagon to congratulate Wolfowitz, who was number three there at the time, and got this –

 

We screwed up and left Saddam Hussein in power. The president believes he’ll be overthrown by his own people, but I rather doubt it.  But we did learn one thing that’s very important. With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe ten, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria before the next superpower emerges to challenge us … We could have a little more time, but no one really knows.

 

So more than fifteen years later they’re still working on that?  Conason thinks so, as Cheney pushes for the war on Iran –

 

The stated reasons range from Iran’s suspected sponsorship of attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to its worrisome pursuit of nuclear power, but Clark’s allegations strongly suggest American policymakers chose war years ago, no matter what Tehran ended up doing.

 

Perhaps it is time for the appropriate Senate and House committees to start asking harder questions about this administration’s secret strategies for the Mideast. They might begin by interviewing Clark behind closed doors about that classified memo - and to what extent such extreme ideas have promoted the “permanent war” policy that is fundamental to neoconservative ideology.

 

Yeah, that’ll happen just about the time everyone agrees to dump the Electoral College.  No one will see that memo.

 

And anyway, it just got more complicated, with Turkey threatening to send troops across their border in to Iraqi Kurdistan –

 

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has suggested that a vote could be held next week in Parliament to allow military incursions into Iraq, and Sadullah Ergin, a senior government official, said today that the motion could come as early as Monday, according to the state-run Anatolian News Agency.

 

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported from the town of Sirnak that Turkish warplanes and helicopters were attacking positions along the southern border with Iraq that are suspected of belonging to Kurdish rebels who have been fighting Turkish forces for years.

  

The prospect of military action by Turkey has been raised following a recent upsurge in violence blamed on Kurdish rebels. On Wednesday night, a policeman was killed and six others were injured in a bomb attack in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, the Anatolian news agency reported.

 

It seems the Turks are worried about the Biden Senate resolution which acknowledges the reality that Iraq will most likely end up some kind of loose federation with significant autonomy for the Iraqi Kurds.  Not good.  This background item notes that the Iraqi Kurds love it – “but because it would make permanent the Sunni Arabs’ failure to control Northern Iraq and further weaken the already anemic Maliki-led government, Maliki has said it’s a catastrophe,” and it has generated a major backlash in Turkey and the Arab countries –

 

Regardless of the intent of the Senate resolution, it has been used to further alienate Arab states, and add strain to already tense ethnic relations inside Iraq. The Iraqi Turkoman Front, a party with close ties to Turkey, took the opportunity to comment on the resolution by claiming it would establish its own region and seek Turkish military support to that end, should partition be implemented.

 

And then, this didn’t help -

 

Turkey, which is a key supply route to U.S. troops in Iraq, recalled its ambassador to Washington on Thursday and warned of serious repercussions if Congress labels the killing of Armenians by Turks a century ago as genocide.

 

Ordered after a House committee endorsed the genocide measure, the summons of the ambassador for consultations was a further sign of the deteriorating relations between two longtime allies and the potential for new turmoil in an already troubled region.

 

And from the AP, this detail –

  

“We called back our ambassador to Washington for consultations. It should not be understood that we have pulled him back permanently,” a senior Turkish diplomat told Reuters.

 

In Washington, a State Department official said it was not unusual for an ambassador to be called home for consultations. The official, who spoke on condition he was not named due to the sensitivity of the issue, called it “a fairly limited response.”

 

Maybe we won’t be in a shooting war with Turkey, defending the Kurds?  This blow-up with Turkey also falls under the same heading - what couldn’t be so, but was so, at a particular point in time.

 

What else?

 

That’s enough.