Politics

From an article of the same title in The Week, September 15, 2006:

...let's not overreact to the threat, said James Fallows in The Atlantic Monthly. Despite ominous talk of mushroom clouds in U.S. cities, it's highly unlikely that terrorists could build or buy a nuke and smuggle it into the country. That leaves terrorists with one means of inflicting major damage on the superpower: Baiting us into foolishly damaging our own interests. The Bush administration has fallen into this trap, by invading Iraq, killing Muslim civilians, and playing into al Qaida's narrative. Portraying the war as an epic clash of civilizations only feeds the terrorists' false grandiosity - and drives Muslim moderates into the extremists' hands. Terrorists may yet again strike on U.S. soil, but the reality is that we've essentially won the war. The sooner we recognize this, the sooner our policies will be motivated by strategic self-interest, instead of by terror.

From a post of the same title by Bill Maher on The Huffington Post:

Afghanistan is a mess. The Taliban is back and has mounted serious offenses in recent weeks. NATO says they need more troops. And why is the Taliban back? Well, one of the reasons people are pointing to is our government's plan to eradicate opium. We've hired a corporation to go through the fields of the poorest farmers in Afghanistan and destroy their opium crop. And it's really worked too - opium production is at its highest levels ever. But the rural farmers who grow the opium have turned on the Americans and Brits for destroying their crop, and this is where the Taliban is re-gaining control. Coincidence? Who's to say? But I noticed in the recent drug survey - the same one that said baby boomers were getting high while their children say "no" - about 6 percent of people said they had used marijuana in the past month. About 4 percent of people surveyed said they had used methamphetamine. 2.6 percent said they had abused prescription drugs. Just about 1 percent said they had used cocaine. Heroin? Only 0.1 percent used heroin. So why worry so much about the opium crop in Afghanistan when Americans don't really have a heroin problem? We're sacrificing the war on terror in the vain hope of one day helping Courtney Love kick her smack habit?

From an article of the same title by Steven Waldman on beliefnet:

When U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris said separation of church and state is "a lie," many critics figured this was a characteristic Harris gaffe--another sign she was out of the mainstream. Actually, she was reflecting what has become a common view in religious conservative circles--that the idea of separation of church and state was concocted by 20th-century courts, not the Founding Fathers... Conservative activists point out that the words "separation of church and state" appear nowhere in the Constitution--and they're right about that. The phrase came from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to a group of Connecticut Baptists in which he praised the First Amendment's "wall between church and state." When the Supreme Court quoted that letter in a key church-state ruling in 1947, the "wall" became the dominant metaphor. While political activists have lately pushed the more combative rhetoric, serious conservative scholars have long argued that the Founders were mostly attempting to block the creation of official state religions when, in the First Amendment, they wrote that Congress could not make laws "respecting an establishment of religion." Therefore, wrote former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, "there is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the 'wall of separation.'" It's also true that when the First Amendment was approved, lawmakers assumed it would only apply to the federal government, allowing the states wide latitude in mixing church and state. (It was the 14th Amendment, passed after the civil war, that applied freedom of religion to the states)... But there's one important difference between mainstream conservative legal scholars and the Christian political activists. Most conservative scholars argue that the Constitution can accommodate a great deal of state support for religion, as long as the government avoids favoring one faith over another. Many modern Christian activists have argued that the U.S. is "a Christian nation" and that the Founders intended not only religion in general, but Christianity specifically... Christian activists usually make the argument by casting the Founders as orthodox Christians, except when it comes to Jefferson, who was downright hostile to organized Christianity.

In an interesting article of the same title on slate.com, Fred Kaplan examines

...the spectacle of our leaders wrapping themselves in [9/11's] legacy as if it were some tattered shroud that sanctifies their own catastrophic mistakes and demonizes all their critics.

Most interesting to me was Kaplan's response to Rumsfeld's fourth rhetorical question:

"And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America-not the enemy-is the real source of the world's trouble?" This is another red herring. Few Americans, and virtually no contenders in American politics, hold this view. However, a lot of people in other countries-including countries that are, or should be, our allies-do hold this view. Look at the Pew Research Center's most recent "global attitudes survey," released this past June. In only four of the 15 nations surveyed (Britain, India, Japan, and Nigeria) did a majority of citizens have a favorable view of the United States. In six countries (Spain, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Jordan), Iran had a higher rating than did the United States. (In one more, Russia, the two countries' ratings were tied.) Most remarkable, in all but one country (Germany), America's presence in Iraq was seen as a bigger danger to world peace than either Iran or North Korea. These views are widespread-and, by the way, they've grown steadily more prominent in the past few years-not because of "the media" or "blame-America-first" liberals, nor because Iran and North Korea have more skillful propagandists (or, if they do, it's time for Condoleezza Rice to hire a better public-diplomacy staff). No, a country's global image is usually formed not by what its leaders say but rather by what they do. If the war on terror is "a battle for the future of civilization," as Cheney claimed in his speech (or even if it's merely a serious struggle), and if the United States needs allies to wage it, the president and his team would better spend their time luring allies than beating up on journalists and Democrats. If Rumsfeld is serious, he should revisit the questions he asked back in October 2003. Those-not the cleverly phrased debaters' points he muttered this past Monday-really are some "central questions of our time."

Via Boing Boing, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann got all riled up about Rumsfeld's speech and gave a sharp rebuttal. Video and transcript/text here and here.

Via Andrew Sullivan's blog, from an op-ed piece of the same title (sub-titled "This Isn't the Way to Ban Same-Sex Marriage") by J. Harvie Wilkinson III in The Washington Post:

The chief casualty in the struggle over same-sex marriage has been the American constitutional tradition. Liberals and conservatives -- judges and legislators -- bear responsibility for this sad state of affairs. Twenty states have constitutional amendments banning gay marriages; many more are in the offing. On the ballot this fall in Virginia and five other states will be proposed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. Passage of the amendments is all but foreordained, but the first principles of American law will be further endangered... The Framers meant our Constitution to establish a structure of government and to provide individuals certain inalienable rights against the state. They certainly did not envision our Constitution as a place to restrict rights or enact public policies, as the Federal Marriage Amendment does. Ordinary legislation -- not constitutional amendments -- should express the community's view that marriage "shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." To use the Constitution for prescriptions of policy is to shackle future generations that should have the same right as ours to enact policies of their own. To use the Constitution as a forum for even our most favored views strikes a blow of uncommon harshness upon disfavored groups, in this case gay citizens who would never see this country's founding charter as their own... To constitutionalize matters of family law is to break with state traditions. The major changes in family law in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the recognition of married women's property rights and the liberalization of divorce, occurred in most states at the statutory level. Even the infamous bans on interracial marriage were adopted nonconstitutionally by 35 states, and by constitutional amendment in only six... Marriage between male and female is more than a matter of biological complementarity -- the union of the two has been thought through the ages to be more mystical and profound than the separate identities of each alone. Without strong family structures, there will be no stable and healthy social order, and alternative marriage structures might weaken the sanction of law and custom necessary for human families to flourish and children to grow. These are no small risks, and present trends are not often more sound than the cumulative wisdom of the centuries. Is it too much to ask that judges and legislatures acknowledge the difficulty of this debate by leaving it to normal democratic processes?