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The Danes should have the right to publish their cartoons and Moslems should have the right to get mad about them. The rest is just testosterone poisoning.
Posted at February 10, 2006 5:56 PM in response to Hirsi Ali and the right to disobey someone else's religion
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As long as he said/she said journalism is the paradigm, lying will continue to carry no penalties and convey real advantage. The meme "Terrorist plot foiled" is the message and it gets out, perhaps not to all but to many. That's the point. Sure, it's from 3 years ago and it's unclear how imminent or even likely the threat was, and yes, there is no connection to the current NSA scandal. That's not the point. That is all after the fact analysis and debunking. It is not the lede. It is buried somewhere in the inside pages or consigned to the left side of the blogosphere. Yet it is precisely in the original reporting that critical thought is most important. Think how comments by the President made in the last few days could have been reported. "The President declared progress in the war on terrorism but could only cite a 3 year old example to illustrate his claim" or "The President said that al Qaeda was fractured and weakened but could still launch terrorist attacks. While citing progress, the President did not, in fact, say that the underlying threat had changed." If the media passed this Administration's pronouncements through a critical, not partisan, not political, filter. There would be a cost to nonsensical arguments and the repetition of lies and perhaps, just perhaps, this Administration would be a little less cavalier in their use.
Posted at February 9, 2006 7:40 PM in response to More Horse Hockey from President Bush
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At what point do Senators feel it is no longer incumbent upon them to represent the views of their core constituents on a matter of paramount importance to these constituents? How unprepared, unfocused, and inept do they have to be before we can say that they failed us not because they fought the good fight and lost but because they did not fight at all?
Blogs are useful but they are still in their infancy. They can discuss, suggest, explain but they can not pose questions directly to a judicial nominee. Even the mass media can not convey a message albeit with all their attendant bias and spin if their is no message.
Why is it considered unremarkable that Senators many of whom are lawyers and deal on a daily basis with the law and the crafting of law are incapable of asking a clear question on a matter of law? Alito had practice sessions in how to answer and not answer questions. What prevented Democratic Senators to practice asking questions and dealing with nonanswers before a few former prosecutors and Constitutional lawyers? Surely after the Roberts hearings the weakness of their previous approach had to be obvious even to them.
As for the importance of the Alito nomination, I can fault the media but did I hear a single Democratic Senator say that this decision was perhaps the most important and fraught with long term consequences of any that he/she would make in their career? If Senators think that the Alito nomination is important but not that important, what are the rest of us to think? When Roe v. Wade was mentioned, it could have and should have been followed immediately by some statement that affirmed its meaning: A woman's right to control her own body is one of the most fundamental rights I know and I will accept no compromise on it. Similarly, with Presidential powers and judicial access: I stand for the rights of individual Americans and I will stand against the powers of a dictatorial President and an exclusionary judiciary. I heard none of this and it should have been emphasized and repeated at every opportunity.
The fault in the Alito hearings lay with the Senators and it was not in the stars but in themselves. We may elect them but they do not serve us. It raises the question if they do not stand for us here, where will they stand for us?
Posted at January 16, 2006 12:38 PM in response to Supine politics and the Supreme Court
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It is curious that you think intelligent design is somehow foreign to the Enlightment since this is precisely where it came from. I suppose you could trace its roots further back if you wanted to to Aristotle's unmoved mover and then through Aquinas to the Enlightment but it is really with Moliere's Grand Horlogier (Great Clockmaker) that the idea gains currency in something like the form it has today.
At the time it was a rationalist reaction to what Moliere and other Lumieres saw as the "superstition" of traditional Christian religion. Here superstition is to be taken in its more etymological sense of "beyond being", i.e. supernaturalism. Writers like Molier rebelled against the irrational interventions of an Old Testament God bent on punishment and performing miracles. They saw the universe as a great mechanism or clock that was rational, regular, and comprehensible. This is the deist God of Jefferson and Washington. For these, God created a clocklike universe, set it motion, and then left it to run according to rational laws, no miracles, no shaking the earth. In the Eighteenth Century, intelligent design was the progressive anti-Establishment point of view. It has always seemed strange to me that it has been taken up by religious conservatives and fundamentalists when in its origins it was used as a critique of the wrathful deity with which these groups are most comfortable.Posted at December 20, 2005 1:14 PM in response to Before We Get Too Excited
