The New York Times Opinionator blog aggregator has detected a nascent revolt in the Democratic party.  The Times is only 18 months late.  The PUMAs were ahead of the curve the day the DNC RBC knifed its own voters and installed Barack Obama as the nominee over the objections of slightly more than half of the Democratic primary voters.  I’ll get back to why this moment was important.  The Opinionator follows up on this week’s off-off-year election results and reports that it appears that the Democrats are losing their far left flank.

(First, they came for the so-called “Reagan Democrats”, then they came for the women and the gays.)

Can I just say what a stupid narrative this is?  Sometimes, I read this crap in the paper and I think, do these reporters just take dictation from Rahm Emannuel or do they make this $^&* up to conform to their view of the world where things have to go into neat little boxes?

What the hell is the far-left anyway?  If you believe that equal treatment under the law should apply to all citizens regardless of gender, marital status, sexual orientation, age, race, creed or disability because they are all persons born with unalienable rights, that is hardly a “far left” position.  Isn’t that a uniquely American position?  Didn’t we all pledge allegiance to the flag that promised “liberty and justice for all”?  And if that is true, doesn’t that put us on the side of everything that is good about America and those that oppose those things horribly mislead?

My idea of “far-left” is based on my childhood impressions of news reports of the Weather Underground and defenders of Karl Marx.  Far lefties, to me, are people who are rigid ideologues who want to enforce some strange form of a socialist utopian nanny state on the rest of us. And I am referring to a REAL communist-socialist state, not some bizarre Republican  misinterpretation of one. Far lefties are militant pacifists.  They hang out in trees and feed their children macrobiotic organic fruititarian diets.  They are green Martha Stewart’s who think everyone has time to grow their own clothes and walk to work.   They’re people who can’t be reasoned with.  They’re oblivious to real life and are as fundamentalist in their world view as the religious right.

The closest I can find to a far-lefty these days is the Obot who still thinks that the main problem plaguing the country right now is the issue of race.  Where have these people been in the last year?  Did they miss that sincerely awe inspiring election of the first African-American for president?  Don’t they know what the unemployment rate is? Have they tried to find jobs lately?  Feed their kids?  Pay for a doctor?  Save for college?  They’re stuck with the mindset that we are not finished with their teachable moment on race as if all other oppressed demographic groups don’t have  grievances that need to be addressed.  If only we would let go of our prejudices, which for the most part do not exist on the center-left, President Obama could get on with his job and we’ll all be happier. Anyone who opposes Obama doesn’t have a legitimate reason for doing so.  They’re just racists or stupid old women.  That’s the far-left.  They are so stuck in the weeds of their own perfect world they are incapable of seeing the floor torn out from beneath their feet by the big business friends of Obama who installed him in office.

Let’s talk about those big business friends of Obama.  They were in control of the primary and general election season last year.  I think we can all see that in retrospect.  Raise your hand if that isn’t perfectly clear to you by now.  Their massive infusions of cash bought the Democratic National Committee, which unbeknownst to the average voter was up for sale.  The Democratic National Committee violated just about every principle it stood for in order to install Obama as the nominee including dumping millions of Hillary Clinton’s voters.  I’m going to keep harping on this until the Times boys get it.  The party dumped its base last year.   That is why there is trouble brewing in the party.  Some of us have left the party over what happened last year.  You just didn’t see it in the presidential election because the economy tanked.

Apparently, that “some of us” made the difference in NJ.  It isn’t that there were so many more voters voting Republican in NJ.  There weren’t.  It’s that Democrats just didn’t turn out or that the truly disgusted ones, such as myself, voted for a fiscally responsible, socially liberal Chris Daggett.  Now, some may argue that Corzine lost due to local issues.  And that is true.  But the reason he was such a failure at resolving local issues is because he is typical of the kind of Democratic politician we’ve become accustomed to voting for in the Democratic party.  He is beholden to the status quo and big money, a compromiser, an incrementalist, insufficiently bold, doesn’t look out for the middle class and all too willing to ignore the voters when their will is inconvenient to him.

Who does that sound like?

The party has lost its way and now that enough of its voters know that the party is no longer listening to them, there have been defections.  And let’s not mistake who the defectors are.  Most of us are FDR, Clinton style Democrats, moderate to  liberal but hardly “far-left”.  We’re in Paul Krugman’s camp.  Recently, some of the feminist Obama supporters have woken up and smelled the coffee.  We welcome them and only regret that they weren’t paying attention last year when references to abortion and reproductive rights were scrubbed from Democratic candidates web sites. (Read past the quote) They ridiculed the PUMAs last year.  They’re starting to sound just like them now.  Gay voters have been wary of Obama since he rolled out  Donny McClurkin but many fell prey to the “Obama is an historic candidate but Hillary Clinton is an old bitch” propaganda.  Do they now regret their over the top rants against her? Is it possible that she was just a legitimate candidate who stood for traditional core Democratic principles and was not sent by Satan to rain on Barack Obama’s glorious golden specialness?  Is it possible that her supporters deserved to be treated like persons and their votes respected?

The party’s civil war started the day the RBC tossed our votes out, May 31, 2008.  The day they made one candidate’s voters more equal than the others, the day they violated every principle they had over voting rights, the day they selectively broke and enforced their rules and decided to not listen to their voters, and got away with it, was the day the party started down the path to disunity.  It only took some time before the Obama cheerleaders realized that they had given the party permission to completely ignore them in the future.  And now the party should not be surprised that they have a civil war on their hands.

Bring. It. On.

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{The first essay in this series introduced a model I created to explain the cycle of corruption that plagues US politics. This essay looks into the roots of this corruption. It takes a long time to get to the payoff. Further, the conclusion is somewhat ex nihilo if you have not read the first essay. This said, for those who dare, I hope you find it worth the read.}

Polyphemos the cyclops would have eaten Odysseus, if his survival was dependent on the moral virtues of Silenus’s satyrs. Fortunately for Odysseus, and Silenus and his lot, Odysseus could depend on his fellow citizens. If Polyphemos had the majority of America’s elected representatives depending on him for their survival in his cave, the way that they are presently beholden to lobbyists’ money for their electoral survival, he could have had a ready supply of citizens for his daily meals.

Cyclopean virtues regularly triumph over the virtues of democratic citizenship in the political landscape of the United States. Given that the Declaration of Independence embodies the spirit and principles that ground the virtues of democratic citizenship, why is it that cyclopes, who eat humans, win the day in America? Answering this question requires that we journey back to Attic Greece and her proto-democratic foundations.

Euripides: “The Cyclops” and its Relation to Civic Virtue

The notion of cyclopean virtues comes to us through satyr plays, which are a type of comedic morality play, which were performed with the tragedies and comedies of the Greek dramatic festivals. The play that I shall draw upon is Euripides “Cyclops.” It is worth noting that it is the only surviving satyr play and much of what we know about them, we know from this play.

Satyr plays have three main types of characters, which are satyrs, the citizens of the polis, and monsters, such as cyclopes. Each of these groups personifies, by their acts and deeds, a different weighting of human virtues, which results in significantly different world views.

Satyrs

Satyrs, like Pan, are goat-man hybrids. They worship Dionysos and they love wine. They are social beings, but they are subject to the excesses of their instincts. As a consequence, they lack the self-control/moral foundation that is needed to make the self-sacrifices that are required to create and maintain more than rudimentary degrees of social cooperation. In some instances, they appear by their foibles to be no more than lovable scalliwags. This is somewhat misleading because their actions, besotted or not, often put others in serious jeopardy. Satyrs stand as metaphors for humans who have not yet fully escaped the bonds of nature.

Citizens of the Polis

The citizens of the polis represent civilized humanity: they prefer to live together despite its disadvantages. To be civilized, in this sense, means that citizens control their instincts through reason by adopting a code that more or less embodies The Golden Rule. Effectively, the citizens of the polis recognize that by sharing a system of responsibilities to each other, they gain the benefits of social specialization, which tend to be significant improvements in the quality and productivity of the society in its respective enterprises. For contrast sake, a society without a division of labor is a society of jacks of all trades who are particularly unskilled because there are no trades to be jacks of.

One outcome of being a citizen of the polis is the development of an appreciation for the polis because of the good it brings. Remembering that these ideas are the product of small city states should help to foster the idea that a feeling of shared kinship to one’s community is commonplace among almost all societies, regardless of size, even when the community does not appear to be deserving of that appreciation. It is also common for members of communities to be willing to sacrifice themselves for the community or its values, even when upholding the values mean sacrificing the community.

Cyclopes

The cyclopes are relatively lawless, violent, powerful, solitary giants, who tend to limit their mutual interaction to shared defense. They appear to acknowledge each others territorial boundaries. They readily seize what they want from all other creatures, be it their possessions, their freedom, or their lives. They worship riches and they sacrifice to their appetites.

Cyclops: To Odysseus
Ey, little man! Wise men believe in one god and one god only: Wealth! Everything else is just words; fat words, lovely words but that’s all. All these shrines and temples of my father, built on every shore in Greece mean nothing to me. What’s the point of telling me all about them?

As for Earth, whether she wants to or not, she’ll still bring up the grass which will feed all my animals which I, in turn, will feed to the most important divinity in the world, my own belly. No sacrifices, nothing for anyone else, just my own lovely guts! Yum, yum!

Living in a quasi-asocial state, their very loose knit community lacks the benefits of shared enterprises. It was not always this way. Their ancestors were legendary tradespeople. The cyclopes lost these skills as they devolved into an athemistic society.

The cyclopes stand for humans who see citizenship, social interrelations, and laws as impediments to their liberty by nature and where they do acquiesce to such impartments, they do with the idea that it is a necessary evil. Accordingly, their political focus is upon limiting the scope of citizenship, social interrelations, and laws, especially with respect to any of these that compromise their lust for riches. Cyclopes do not have a sense of working together for mutual advancement, beyond that of mutual protection. Those who exist outside their community are prey, such as Silenus and his satyrs and Odysseus and his compatriots.

It is likely, though I am unaware as to whether or not it has been hypothesized, that the Greeks knew full well that the loss, or coverage, of an eye causes one’s perspective to lack depth. In Greek, and kin societies, to be described as a cyclops was an insult of some force. Antigonus, one of the Macedonian Diadochi who succeeded Alexander, slew a man for calling him a cyclopes.

Other Monsters

How does one speak to a void, such as our lack of knowledge about the other types of monsters that inhabited satyr plays? I am too unversed in this area of study to hypothesize about which imbalances of character other creatures would likely represent.

Cyclops: The Tale

“Cyclops” itself involves Odysseus taking a small party ashore the Isle of the Cyclopes in an attempt to get some provisions. He encounters Silenus and his satyrs, who have been captured by Polyphemos, who has made them into his slaves. The satyrs are miserable and “dry,” because there is no wine on the island because wine is a fruit of a socially organized society.

Silenus is introduced to Odysseus’s “bottomless” wineskin, which is literally a godsend to a satyr. Silenus, emboldened and stupefied by his increasing drunkenness, offers Odysseus more and more some of Polyphemos’s goods, which brings them to his cave, and their subsequent capture by Polyphemos.

In the short time of capture, Silenus lies and betrays Odysseus to get out of trouble and Polyphemos eats 6 of Odysseus’s men. Odysseus hatches a plan. He uses the wineskin to get Polyphemos debilitatingly drunk, which is not difficult because he is not used to drink, which is a social product. Once he’s passed out, Odysseus and his soldiers use Polyphemos’ sharpened staff as a spear and blind him. Importantly, the satyrs do not involve themselves in this enterprise, even though their freedom is at stake, due to cowardice and a lack of the notion of shared sacrifice.

The moral of the story is that a group of people who work together and use their reason can overcome a malevolent, overpowering force. What does this moral, story, and its characters have to do with politics in the USA?

The Vision of the Declaration of Independence: Citizens of the Polis

Earlier, I noted that the Declaration of Independence embodies the spirit and principles that ground the virtues of democratic citizenship. It is a statement of a code of conduct to regulate exchanges in the moral marketplace of the state.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In, “The Dignity of No”, I demonstrated that the principle of Creator endowed, unalienable Rights is a statement of the duty that each citizen owes to each other to balance their claims of rights standing with how those claims impact the rights standing of others. In other words, the Declaration of Independence demands that YOU care as much for the rights of others as you do for your own.

Anthropophagy: The Love of Money is the Route of all Meals

Fundamentally, the cyclopean vision is founded on a will to power with an avaristic bent. Equal others are looked to for mutual security, so their property rights are recognized, but everyone else is a potential source of riches or food. Their interests are only relevant to the extent they enable the interests of the cyclopes.

John Adams was aware of the cyclopean vision in America, though he did not name it as such, and the potential problems it could cause the republic. He stated:

“Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Adams insisted, “There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.”

Adams worried that a businessman might have financial interests that conflicted with republican duty; indeed, he was especially suspicious of banks. He decided that history taught that “the Spirit of Commerce . . . is incompatible with that purity of Heart, and Greatness of soul which is necessary for a happy Republic.” But so much of that spirit of commerce had infected America. In New England, Adams noted, “even the Farmers and Tradesmen are addicted to Commerce.” As a result, there was “a great Danger that a Republican Government would be very factious and turbulent there.”

It is worth noting that Adams identifies the problem as an “addiction” to commerce. Much the same as the root of all evil is the love of money, not money itself, it is the addiction to commerce that is the problem, not commerce. When one is beholden of either of these, their duties to the others that make it possible for them to pursue their life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, disappear from the field of their vision.

The Rise of the Cyclopean Vision in the US

The institutions of the land were intended to be places where budding monarchs were nipped. Why is it that the institutions that were intended to practise republican banzai are engaged in greenhousing oligarchs, plutocrats, their minions, and their progeny? How did it come to happen that the citizens of the polis are being prepared as meals for the cyclopes by the satyrs?

Cyclopeans undermined the values of the Declaration of Independence by playing upon the ironies of liberty and regulatory malfeasence. The first play involved denuding Liberty of its societal context. The second play involved acting upon a justified fear that cyclopean interests could gain influence over the government and steal liberty.

The Irony of Liberty

The irony of liberty is that, in practical terms, one has to sacrifice liberty to gain liberty. The irony of liberty is not a contradiction, however. It merely is a statement about how within a limited marketplace of liberty exchange, cooperative action can create positive synergies wherein one gets more liberty back than one invests. One need only think about the liberty to pursue one’s happiness that is gained by accepting a set of laws that uphold personal and property rights as compared to the liberties one enjoys when no such laws whatsoever are not employed, as an example of the value of the liberty exchange.

Denuding liberty from its social context involved getting people to “forget” that the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness is something no individual can guarantee or is guaranteed by virtue of being an individual. It is something that can only be realized by the sacrifices of others (of their liberty) to make it so.

To undermine the social context of liberty, the cyclopeans had to undermine the system of government that was created to defend and develop the citizen’s independence from the cyclopean vision. Cyclopeans needed to get the citizens to distrust their means of guaranteeing their independence. To do this they played upon the Irony of Regulatory Malfeasance.

The Irony of Regulatory Malfeasance

The irony of regulatory malfeasance is that the very mechanism that is used to prevent malfeasance is prone to being manipulated to promote malfeasance. The irony of regulatory malfeasance is not a contradiction. The irony plays out when people mistake the cause of the malfeasance to be regulations themselves, and not the people who manipulate the system.

This is an easy mistake to make, both, because it contains a kernel of logic and because humans, as a practical matter, are prone to manipulation. The logic has a number of trails, some of which are follows:

Regulations are prone to manipulation.

The more regulations that exist, the greater the likelihood that regulations will be manipulated.

Economies of scale are emergent.

The more regulations that are manipulated, the greater the likelihood of synergies of manipulation.

If the regulations don’t exist, then they can’t be manipulated.

If one wants to avoid regulatory malfeasance, avoid regulating.

Cyclopeans have been very successful in cultivating a deep distrust in government and regulations. This is not difficult in a land where so many of the populace have migrated from countries where cyclopeans use government as a means of repression, rather than emancipation. It is fascinating to observe how people who espouse limited government have set themselves up as the default option, when the government makes mistakes, even if that mistake is a failure to regulate.

Those who share the cyclopean perspective on limited governance, which does not mean they ascribe to its’ other aspects nor its reasons, incorrectly identify problems caused by a lack of governance to be problems caused by too much governance.

The problem with this view of government, as noted above, is that regulations are at the heart of the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Regulations make rights happen. Accordingly, it is right to be concerned about the negative effects of too much governance, but one must also be aware that too little governance also undermines a society. Finding the right ratio between freedom and constraint is key to good regulation “Ratio” is the root of rationality, so the notion of finding the right ratio is a good place to conclude.

The cyclopean perspective lacks depth, which is why it lacks balance, which is why it was perceived by the Greeks to be less than fully rational. Those aspects of the current economic problems that are tied to the imbalance of influence between citizens, corporate interests, and elected representatives are the product of a well-entrenched cyclopean culture preying upon a reasonable apprehension citizens hold about government overreach. By not effectively regulating the relationship between corporate interests and elected representatives, corporate interests have overreached into the lives of the citizens. It is not rational to maintain this structure, if the aim of the society is to promote the values of the Declaration of Independence. This being so, citizens must end the practise where cyclopean corporate interests provide wineskins to the satyric elected representatives as trade bait to allow the cyclopeans to pillage the nation in the name of Polyphemos’ god, “Wealth”, and the filling of their bellies.

Gay-Lussac

The pressure of a fixed mass and fixed volume of a gas is directly proportional to the gas’s temperature.

This relationship is known as the Gay-Lussac’s Law and a pressure cooker is an example of the law in practice. Cooking under pressure creates the possibility of cooking with high temperature liquids because the boiling point of a liquid increases as its pressure increases. High pressure and high heat can result in delectable dishes.

Cooking under pressure can be also dangerous because as liquids change phase into gases their volume expands greatly. For example, at atmospheric pressure the volume of steam is about 1700 times greater than the volume of water. To prevent pressure cookers from becoming bombs, relief devices (pop safety valves) are employed that are capable of relieving all of the steam the vessel is capable of producing.

America the Beautiful Pressure Cooker

The political pressure cooker is beginning to heat up. The power brokers and institutions that drive the nation have arrived unannounced on the doorsteps of America like a gaggle of unwanted, high maintenance relatives that demand hospitality for an unforeseeable time and that won’t take no for answer. Furthermore, they’ve announced that more relatives are on the way. Whatever plans America’s householders had, they’ve just gone out the window, with their household budgie and the relatives’ cat in hot pursuit.

People are justifiably angry with this incursion. Their budgie might not have been much, but it was “their budgie”, nurtured from birth into what it had become. Justifiably angry householders are trying to work out why the relatives arrived on their doorsteps and why they brought their fucking cat.

Common Sense

Common sense, in everyday use, is thought of as something that everyone ought to know. Will Rogers notes the problem with this view.

I dont know why they call it common sense. If it was so common more people would have it. (h/t Tom in Paine)

Rogers knew, like most of us, that common sense notions have to be learned and, often, taught. For example, that most flames burn we can learn by experiencing being burnt. We learn morals by having our families and communities teach us, by calibration, how we ought to act.

Sometimes we encounter others that do not share our moral view. How ought we to treat those who do not share our common sense?

The sensus communis

Acknowledging that there are different ways of seeing a thing, broadly conceived, is a first step in allowing that some of those other ways of seeing might have legitimacy. This acknowledgment is embodied in the Roman notion of the sensus communis (there is more than one notion). In the Roman notion, common sense is seen as the sense of the commons, which means that the sensus communis encorporates every view on every thing that each member of the community holds. It is like the opposite of how we use common sense because our use means there is only one right way to view a thing. Their view is like a warehouse or a purse, where everyview is stored because it might become useful some day.

This Roman notion is conservative in bold letters. It is practical because it recognizes that the vast majority of us can see something the same way and be wrong. If everyone held only one view, then what options would we have if we find we’ve got it wrong? (Nature abhors monocultures, for the most part.) By conserving alternate views we have a ready set of options to try, if our accepted wisdom turns out to be unwise.

The sensus communis and the pressure cooker

How does this relate to the pressure cooker? Somehow the power brokers and institutions that drive the nation, through their understanding and manipulation of the relatives/variables in the formulae by which they mathematically model the world, got some things wrong. They sent these relatives to the nation’s doorsteps. The relatives are eating the householders out of the hold they have on the house. The householders want the power brokers and institutions to do their jobs and send the relatives on their way.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done because it’s difficult to sort out all of the causes of the problems and the likely solutions. It’s made worse by those who are trying to cover the tracks of the relatives on their way to the households. It’s made even worse by those who are trying to say that it’s the neighbors who are the problem, not the relatives.

All in all, there is a nation full of justifiably angry householders using their received wisdom to make sense of the information they are given, contrary interpretations abound, and the temperature and pressure are building as the opposing views run into each other at ever increasing pace while the larders getting smaller, and so on. What can be done to turn down the heat before the pop safety valve is tested and/or fails?

Pop Safety Quiz

Ralph B might say something like we ought to be ready to do more listening and less talking at. He’s right. Myiq might say we ought not to suffer fools lightly. He’s right. SoD might say we ought to stop mooning idiots. She’s right. Dakinikat, in her role as the Cajun Quincy of finance, will do the economic forensic work and reveal the culprits, and then say we ought to challenge our assumptions about what’s right. She’s right. Riverdaughter might say it’s time to unwind and tend to soothing thyself for a while. She’s right.

I think we are all right. Booman’s right. Cannon’s right. Lambert’s right. Jeralyn’s right. kevin k is r.. r.. right. Murphy is right. Paul Lukasiak is right. Lawnguylander is wrong.

We are also wrong because our remedies are unlikely to be suitable for each and every situation. That’s not a matter of fault; it’s simply a matter of fact because none of us has a God’s eye view. In other words, our degree of rightness and wrongness depends on the fit of our imperfect knowledge to the situation at hand.

That we are fallible should make us act with more humility, however, in the real world humility tends to suffer under power. This is one of the reasons I like to humble power. It’s why I’m often humbled. This said, it’s easy to misidentify the problem or choose the wrong solution. It is the human condition.

What should we do if the heat is too high and we’re overcooking the dish?

What ought we to do to lower the pressure? If you think lowering the pressure is what we ought to do, and you are not sure of how to act, then I recommend searching the sensus communis for whatever answers you think best explain the situation, especially those that appear to offer effective prescriptions. This said, to make a tasty dish out of the “goods” we’ve been given is going to take some heat and some pressure. If we can get the temperature and pressure right, hopefully we can create a dish that is suited for most diets and palates.

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On Sunday Night during the VMAs, one of my favorite singers, Taylor Swift, a pop country singer just a few months older than me who writes and performs her own songs, was giving her acceptance speech after winning the Best Female Video of the Year Award, when Kanye West randomly appeared on the stage, took her award from her, and declared that she didn’t deserve it, explaining, “Beyonce had the best video of the year!” Taylor Swift went back stage and cried, and since then Kanye West has apologized to her, but not before his behavior became a subject of controversy.

Most people deduced reasonably that regardless of whether Kanye thought Taylor deserved the award (It’s called: “You Belong With Me” is the most adorable video ever and Taylor deserved the honor hands down, but whatever), it was not reason enough for him to leap on the stage and make a public idiot of himself. Most people came out in support of Taylor, acknowledging that what Kanye did was despicable and disrespectful.

This is a reasonable, mature conclusion.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much to change the atmosphere in this country. Because Jimmy Carter was right, we are a Racist Nation. But not for the reasons he thinks we are. You see, when Joe Wilson screamed “You Lie!” during the President’s speech on Sunday night, he was not being racist, he was simply being an imbecile. Any person not paying attention to the color of the President’s skin would have seen this. They would have heard representative Wilson’s outburst, logically concluded, “What a tool,” and Representative Wilson would have been ignored, as all blathering idiots should be ignored, thus Representative Wilson would not have gotten a week of free press coverage, thus reporters would have instead covered the president’s Health Care speech (which is kind of, oh… I don’t know… THEIR JOBS) and things would be slightly better with the world.

(In an even better world, cable news talking heads and the MSM would also realize that no one takes boobs like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Joe Wilson seriously and would therefore not pay attention to a word they say, thus taking the public debate away from Health Care Reform, Afghanistan, and the Economy, but you can’t have everything, and unfortunately this is not Walgreens.)

We are not a racist nation because people like Joe Wilson illicitly scream, “YOU LIE!” during presidential speeches. Calling someone a liar is not racist, it is calling someone a liar. I myself have called people of all races and ages liars. For example, when the white woman in the Pantene Pro V Shampoo Commercial says that she is a Professional Cosmo and she uses Pantene all of the time, I scream “YOU LIE!” at her. But I do not call her a liar because of the color of her skin, I call her a liar because most Cosmos are brainwashed in beauty school to believe that they can only use Salon Products to maximize profits for the Parlors that train them. Thus, a Hair Stylist would never tell people to use Pantene Pro V unless she was being paid large sums of money. Whether she is liar or not isn’t irrelevant to the color of her skin because when you are calling someone a liar, you are questioning their honesty and character, not implying that they are inferior because of their skin color. Simple Pimple.

I believe it was Martin Luther King Jr. who dreamed of a world where little white girls and little black girls could hold hands and play together without anyone thinking anything of it. I believe he told us to judge a person not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. Kanye West demonstrated poor character on Sunday Night. He is Black. George W. Bush demonstrated poor character for eight years. He is white. Margaret Cho IS a character. She is Asian. Taylor Swift Demonstrated Good Character all this week. She is white. Beyonce demonstrated good character on Sunday Night. She is Black. As you can see, these folks do not have good or bad character because of their race, they have good or bad character because they have good or bad character and should be judged as human beings, not members of race or ethnicity.

To be perfectly honest, I do not need to be lectured about race relations by rich white “liberals” *eye roll* descended from slave owners, who have never seen a black person in their lives. By screaming that I am “RACIST” every time I criticize the President on policy grounds, they are diffusing their argument and in fact proving themselves to be racist. If they were truly as blind to his race as they claim to be, they would see him as a human being with flaws, triumphs, failures, hopes, dreams. They would recognize that he is not “America’s First Black President” but a President who has many responsibilities to the American people, and therefore would hold him accountable to those responsibilities at all times.

America is indeed, a racist country, because we continue to have “a conversation on Race.” I don’t care what race a person is, and I do not want to have a conversation about it. I want to have a conversation about last night’s episode of True Blood or Kohl’s big blow out sale at the end of this month. If you see a person as your equal or your better, you talk to them as you would anyone else. Therefore you do not walk up to them and say, “Oh, hey! Let’s have a conversation about your race.” I wouldn’t even say something like that to my cat. That is just plain common sense.

America needs to move forward and leave the bloody stains of slavery and segregation behind us. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. If we can learn to look at each other as people instead of black people, Hispanic people, gay people, and Trannie people, that beautiful dream of his just might come true one of these days.

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Is it beyond our ken to maintain a noble purpose as we guide our battered ships of state through the dark shadows of this mild squall of an economic crisis? Whom of us will risk life and limb to keep the ships afloat? Who will cast away possessions for the same purpose? Who will act to subvert these sacrifices? How will the storm weather us, as we weather the storm?

I ask these question because these darkling foreshadows are pallid compared to those that will attend the forthcoming Category Six typhoon of environmental collapse. How will that storm weather us, if we weather the storm? Given the tendency of people to adopt default positions in crisis situations, how we perform now, should give us some indication of how we’ll perform in much more dire circumstances.

Curiously, given the introduction, the point of this post is not to delve into the ugliness which portends. The point of this post is to ask the question, “How should we behave when faced with the absurdity that the cultural virtues that we cherish undermine the existential preconditions of our culture?” In other words, what does a wine-inspired poet do, when he finds that greater amounts of drink are fueling his muse, but not curing his cirrhosis and, in fact, killing him?

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I’m liberal. I’m not ashamed to say it. In fact, I’m proud of it.

Wikipedia defines liberalism as:

Liberalism is a broad class of political philosophies that considers individual liberty and equality to be the most important political goals.^[1]

Liberalism emphasizes individual rights and equality of opportunity. Within liberalism, there are various streams of thought which compete over the use of the term “liberal” and may propose very different policies, but they are generally united by their support for political liberalism, which encompasses support for: freedom of thought and speech, limitations on the power of governments, the rule of law, an individual’s right to private property,^[2] and a transparent system of government.^[3][4][5] All liberals, as well as some adherents of other political ideologies, support some variant of the form of government known as liberal democracy, with open and fair elections, where all citizens have equal rights by law.^[6]

According to author and philosophy professor Peter Vallentyne, “Liberalism comes in two broad forms. Classical liberalism emphasizes the importance of individual liberty and contemporary (or welfare) liberalism tends to emphasize some kind of material equality.”^[7] In Europe, the term “liberalism” is closer to the economic outlook of American economic conservatives. According to Harry Girvetz and Minoque Kenneth “contemporary liberalism has come to represent different things to Americans and Europeans: In the United States it is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe liberals are more commonly conservative in their political and economic outlook”.^[8] In the United States, “liberalism” is most often used in the sense of social liberalism, which supports some regulation of business and other economic interventionism which they believe to be in the public interest. A philosophy holding a position in accordance with Scottish pioneer of political economy Adam Smith, that laissez-faire economics will bring about a spontaneous order or an invisible hand that benefits the society, is referred to as “classical liberalism.”^[9], of which US-style libertarianism may be considered an extreme example.

Liberalism has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment and rejects many foundational assumptions that dominated most earlier theories of government, such as the Divine Right of Kings, hereditary status, established religion, and economic protectionism.^[10][11][12] Instead, it founds itself on the assumption of the equal dignity and worth of individuals.

By that standard, this is a liberal blog. I’d say we’re pretty obsessed with equality of opportunity and a transparent system of Government around here.

Wikipedia defines Progressivism as

Progressivism is a political and social term that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating changes or reform, usually in a statist or egalitarian direction for economic policies (government management) and liberal direction for social policies (personal choice). Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative ideologies.

In the United States, the term progressivism emerged in the late 19th century into the 20th century in reference to a more general response to the vast changes brought by industrialization: an alternative to both the traditional conservative response to social and economic issues and to the various more radical streams of socialism and anarchism which opposed them. Political parties, such as the Progressive Party, organized at the start of the 20th century, and progressivism made great strides under American presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.^[1]

Ideologically, that makes me and this blog a Progressive blog. And ideologically, therefore, I am a Classical Liberal Progressive (or a “Moderate Liberal”), if you want to get down to the nitty gritty technical term of liberalisticims.

But I am not, in fact, a Progressive by identity. I am a liberal. Because in today’s American Political Culture, being a “Progressive” makes you a Right Wing Fundie in liberal drag. Sad, but true.

Liberals have been demonized for quite a while in this country. I’d say it probably started with the Reagan Era, when Religious zealots and Conservative Southern Democrats took over the Republican Party. Around that time, a lot of wealthy and privileged former self described College “Liberals” moved to the Republican Party, declaring themselves “Conservatives.” Publicly, they took up the cause of Militarism and Religious Fundamentalism, but privately they were hypocrites, and their activities are well-documented in one of my favorite books, Blinded By the Right, by David Brock (I quote it often).

Hillary Clinton called their politics of personal destruction political activism “A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” She was mocked for it in the media, but she wasn’t wrong. Ever since Nixon’s Resignation, these kooks had been using corporate sugar daddies like Richard Mellon Scaife to fund their agenda in the media and in interest groups.

Old farts like Pat Robertson and James Dobson and Newt Gingrich come to mind, but they weren’t the only tools involved in the process. Jokers like Andrew Sullivan, Ariana Huffington, and Chris Matthews cheered for some of the worse disasters of my Generation: CDS and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the election of George W. Bush, and the War in Iraq. And they did it all under the guise of their Gung Ho “Conservatism.”

Then, around the time of the mid term elections in 2006, they had a Come-to-Jesus moment and left the Republican Party, hilariously declaring themselves icons of the “New Left,” and by extension liberalism itself. Most of them had gotten their starts by smearing the Clintons, whom they declared were Republicans in drag. Sadly, the irony was lost on them and their projection continued. And even worse, they gained an audience. They and their followers coined themselves “The Progressive Movement.”

It wasn’t long until “The Progressive Movement” began cheering for their new standard bearer, Barack Obama. Again, the irony was lost on their audience. These imbeciles had spent the past two decades decrying all things liberal and good, why would anyone vote for the candidate they were peddling on places like Politico, the Huffington Post, and Daily Kos?

Well, I’m not like a lot of people. I don’t actually think Americans are stupid. Hillary won the popular vote. But the damage is still done. We have Bush the Third as our POTUS.

Today, these “Progressives”- Right Wing Fundies in liberal drag- and their allies in the media do the same thing to Sarah Palin and her family that they did to Bill Clinton and his family. The tactics are exactly the same. They slander her, spread rumors about her, and attack her and her children in the most gratuitous and revolting ways imaginable. They accuse her and they accused Bill Clinton of doing and being exactly what they are- power hungry, morally depraved, and ruthless- capable of doing and saying anything to obtain their victories.

I don’t believe in coincidences, and neither should you. The media is neither “liberal” nor “conservative.” The media is corporate. Since the emergence of a twenty four hour news cycle, they’ve depended on their sponsors and their ratings for profit, and don’t you know? Follow the money! You just have to watch CNN for one day to understand. The graphics in Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room are eerily similar to the graphics from Obama’s campaign and the DNC and RNC. A panel of all-male, white reporters will solemnly declare that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are just whining- the Political coverage of them isn’t sexist and they are just trying to score political points with women. Then they go on a break and in the first commercial a woman is debating a Swiffer mop. A special about Al Gore’s Global Warming Documentary is solemnly discussed and Al Gore’s credibility is questioned with deep concern. Then they disappear and the screen explains, “This program has been sponsored by GM and Chrystler Motors.”

And again, the irony is lost on the audience.

Hillary’s famous “Right Wing Conspiracy” disguised as a Left Wing Conspiracy isn’t gone. It’s been with us this whole time, mouth breathing down our necks and leering at us like a bothersome lover.

And it’s rick rolled us once again.

Cross Posted at Age of Aquarius

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Don't let their Vaginas eat you!

Sarah Palin is not qualified to be the President of the United States. She is dreadfully inexperienced. She is a Fundie. That alone is normally a disqualify, but let’s continue. When it comes to women’s reproductive freedoms and choices, she disappoints. Her energy policies are mediocre at best, and her obsession with drilling in ANWR is at times annoying. She doesn’t get that there isn’t much oil there to begin with, and drilling there will degrade the natural habitat. She is not as supportive of LGBT rights as she should be, and she would probably sell out our Health Benefits to jackoffs in the Insurance Industry, given the opportunity. I could go on, but you get my point.

But she has also, correct me if I’m wrong, taken on her own party Establishment and been elected as the youngest and first lady Governor of the largest and most beautiful state in the union, raised taxes on oil companies and created a state budget surplus, which she gave back to Alaskans. Her first veto in office was a bill that would deny gay couples health benefits (and you know how those lesbians love Alaskan Cruises. Good call, Sarah!). She appointed a pro choice member of Planned Parenthood to the Alaskan Supreme Court in favor of a bible humping Fundie Blowhard, and she supports funding Head Start. She is, contrary to popular belief, pro-contraception, and has said so many times. She is a Feminist. Her husband is an Eskimo Union man who owns a commercial fisherman business. She is personally socially Conservative, but based on her performance as Governor, does not use her office to inflict those beliefs on her constituents. She has stated that she believes in Science and Evolution. In fact, her father was a Science Teacher and track coach, and her mother was a school librarian, so she likes books too.

Let’s face it: Bible Spice isn’t all that Conservative. Oh sure, she says she’s a Conservative, but in today’s political environment, that’s what you say if you’re a Republican. The word “liberal” has probably not been uttered by any politician for about 40 years. Not to say that Sarah is liberal, Goddess no. “Maverick” is code for “Moderate.” Like Riverdaughter always says, we have to pay attention to what politicians say. But honestly, it’s more important to pay attention to what they do. If Teleprompter Jesus taught us anything, he taught us that.

On the fourth of July, Violet Socks said it best when she marveled at the phenomenon that is Sarah Heath Palin.

The only thing Palin is commonly accused of that is actually true is her anti-abortion stance, though, as I’ve pointed out several times, her political position is that “the will of the people” should decide the law. She has also expressed sympathy for women choosing abortion and has said that she is totally opposed to any woman ever being criminalized for it. I’m not pretending she’s anything other than what she is (an adamant “pro-lifer”), but I am trying to be as clear and honest as I can be about her actual stance.

The fact is, that stance alone is not enough to explain the kind of frenzied hatred and feminist repudiation that Palin has attracted. Notice the example of Hugo Schwyzer, who, as I pointed out in my comment at IBTP, is allowed to call himself a feminist and even cross-post at RH Reality Check — while Sarah Palin is endlessly slandered and ridiculed for having the same beliefs. Notice, too, that the Republican Party (and even the Democratic Party) is full of other “pro-life” politicians, none of whom have ever been crucified and slandered Palin-style.

Speaking of slander, that brings me to my next big puzzlement: what is it with the feminists who just freely make shit up about Palin? The lies had to start somewhere, and they didn’t all hatch in the bowels of the Obama campaign (though a bunch of them did). Some of them were incubated by feminists, particularly the ones about Palin being an anti-sex “purity queen,” the kind of batshit Christian who believes in Purity Balls and abstinence pledges and is opposed to sex ed. None of that is true.

When I first started investigating Palin, I was very relieved to discover that she’s not nearly as nutty as she might be, given that she’s a Christian. I was pleased to learn that she’s not one of those fundies who thinks wives have to submit or that Adam and Eve rode on dinosaurs. She’s not into that whacked-out purity or abstinence-only stuff. That’s good. It’s good that she’s not a nutjob. So…why aren’t other feminists also happy that she’s not a nutjob? Why do they, in fact, spread lies to make her seem worse than she is?

Are people simply confused about the differences between Christians? Do they think all Christians are alike? I doubt it. I’m no godbag and I personally wish that Christianity would evaporate from the face of the earth, but I still recognize that not all Christians are alike. I think most other people do, too. I think most people in this country understand that Tennessee snake handlers don’t go to Catholic mass, and that the Quiverfull people are not the same as the Episcopalians. Being a Christian, even a conservative Christian, doesn’t automatically mean you’re a young earth creationist in a calico dress with a purity ring on your finger.

But to get back to the original point, Sarah Palin is not qualified to be President of the United States. And I think most everyone here, including me, would probably not vote for her, depending on the alternative. She is qualified to be VICE President of the United States, as is our current Disappointment in Chief. When we all thought the Democratic Nomination wasn’t going to be jacked from Hillary in a rigged nominating process, many of us here thought he would make a good VPOTUS. He could run around on Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, making fun of the Special Olympics and talking about who would win in a fight (Ninjas or Pirates?!) while Hillary busied herself with ramming Single Payer Healthcare through Congress and down all of our collective grateful throats. So vital were his potential talents for distraction.

To reiterate, Sarah Palin is, in fact, no more qualified to be President of the United States than Barack Obama is. As David Harsanyi says

Can you believe the gall of these Sarah Palin cultists? Presidential aspirations? This is a woman who named one of her kids “Track,” for God’s sake. (Well, if it really is her kid.)

William Buckley once wrote that he rather would “entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

But running government is no longer a suitable vocation for the bumbling proletariat. It’s for folks with schoolin’ and such. It’s a job for herculean thinkers with degrees from Ivy League schools. In other words, no one from Alaska need apply.

Former sports reporters certainly won’t do. We need former constitutional scholars. Who else, after all, has a better understanding of how to undermine the document?

He’s right of course. Our last “Herculean Thinker” President from an Ivy League School was Dubya. And he was the greatest a great President. So the fact that Governor Palin doesn’t have a pretty Harvard degree is just a point against her, as far as America is concerned. In fact

If Palin were president, chances are we’d have a gaffe-generating motormouth for a vice president. That’s the kind of decision-making one expects from Miss Congeniality.

The job of building generational debt is not for the unsophisticated. Enriching political donors with taxpayer dollars takes intellectual prowess, not the skills of a moose-hunting point guard.

The talent to print money we don’t have to pay for programs we can’t afford is the work of a finely tuned imagination, soaring gravitas and endless policy know-how.

Palin is so clueless she probably would have rushed through some colossal stimulus plan that ended up stimulating nothing.

If Palin were president, no one doubts this nation would have continued the Bush-era policy of indefinite detention of enemy combatants and the CIA’s program of transferring prisoners to other countries without legal rights. Be thankful you have a president who makes you think this nation doesn’t.

If Palin were commander in chief — and, again, can anyone imagine anything so preposterous? — the United States still would be fighting endless and expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s true that Palin’s first veto as Alaska governor was of a bill that would have blocked state employee benefits and health insurance for same-sex couples, but does anyone doubt her true intentions?

If she were president, brave American soldiers still would be living under the dark specter of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Palin even might have instructed her Justice Department to file a brief in defense of the Defense of Marriage Act. Such is the depth of her depravity.

Does anyone believe that Palin possesses the competence to nationalize entire industries without the consent of the people? A housewife from Wasilla isn’t equipped with political brawn to shake down banks and bondholders.

Palin never would be able to convince Americans that a trillion-dollar government-run health care plan would save taxpayers money or have the rhetorical ability to convince even a single person that a European-style cap-and-trade scheme has any benefit at all.

Palin is such a goofball that she probably believes oil will continue to be a vital American energy source.

And how is anyone as simplistic as Palin going to help change the habits of all these fatsos in America? We need a mommy … but, you know, not a real mommy.

It’s fairly obvious to everyone with a shred of certifiable sanity that Obots are one fry short of a Happy Meal. Projection is a common psychological phenomenon, and Obots seem to use it often. They have called Sarah Palin silly, narcissistic, bumbling, rambling, and an intellectual lightweight who cannot utter three consecutive sentences without the aid of a teleprompter. Gee. I think one could make a lot of money in this recession by declaring themselves kool aid prevention counselors.

Ever since Sarah Palin resigned (and again since she gave her farewell speech) an enormous, slightly pointless debate has erupted on the PUMAsphere about Sarah Palin. It is very easy to say, “I do not support Sarah Palin politically, even though I like her and will defend her against personal, misogynistic, and unfair attacks.” Bam. Done. Simple Pimple. In fact, I have yet to meet anyone on this blog who has not stated that as their official Palinpalooza position.

The fact is, Sarah Palin, like Hillary Clinton, is provocative. I don’t mean their personalities are provocative. They both seem to be pretty normal, straightforward women. Hillary taught Sunday School at her Church in Little Rock, and she grew up in 1950’s Suburbia, playing softball, wearing poodle skirts and trying to convince her dad to let her go on dates. She goes shopping with Chelsea and watches Hospital Dramas with Bill on weekends.

Sarah Palin was a point guard basketball champ. She won the “Miss Congeniality” Award in the Alaska Beauty Pageant, which helped her pay for college. She eloped with her childhood friend because she was in a family way, and it would have embarrassed her dad. She goes to a normal Fundie Church, emails her mom on her blackberry and listens to Gretchen Meyer on her morning jogs.

But like Violet Socks says

it is striking to me how much of the political discourse in 2008 revolved around people who don’t exist. The main players last year, if you recall, were Obama, the genius messiah whose perfection and purity would save the planet; Hillary, the evil racist lesbian who killed Vince Foster with her bare hands before plotting the Iraqi invasion and then attempting to have Obama assassinated; and Sarah Palin, a crazed dominionist who hates polar bears and personally arranges for Christian girls to be raped by their fathers just so she can charge them for their rape kits.

Think back to the reactions to Sarah Palin’s speech at the convention. Remember the gal at Jezebel whose head throbbed with hate blood as she listened to Palin speak? The one who said she wanted to “murk that cunt”? What the hell is that? I cannot figure it out. I look and look, and it’s like trying to see someone else’s hallucination. No matter how hard I squint, I can’t see whatever it is they’re looking at. What is so horrifying?

Violet couldn’t wrap her head around it, and neither could her commenters. What is it about Sarah Palin (and even Hillary Clinton) that drives people into such frenzies of lunacy? So many took a crack at it. It’s Sarah’s working class background. It’s her hot husband. They’re upset because she chose to have her child.

The truth is, it’s not any of those things. Hillary and Sarah are two very different people who evoke the same violent, misogynistic reactions from people. I call bull shit on people who claim Sarah has it worse than Hillary did. Bull. Shit. Not that it matters, since misogyny is something that has to be called out no matter how varying the degrees.

Remember the Nineties? Remember Rush Limbaugh holding up a picture of Chelsea and saying she was the White House Dog? Remember all those reporters sniffing through Arkansas (the same way they would later sniff through Alaska) looking for dirt and a list of Hillary’s lesbian lovers? Remember John McCain calling Hillary and Chelsea ugly pigs? Remember the Internet graphics showing Hillary being raped by a donkey and flying on a broom? Remember Newt Gingrich’s mother calling her a bitch? Remember Hickman Ewing, one of Ken Starr’s goons, saying she was “a little woman,” and claiming the whole Whitewater “scandal” was just a cover up for her love affair with Vince Foster, who she later murdered? Late night comedians have and still do make countless nasty, unfunny jokes about her. I could go on and on, but that’s only the Nineties. 2008 was worse, as we all know.

And it will never end. Sarah Palin suffers the same fate as her. I could list the offenses against her too, but it was exhausting enough listing the ones against Hillary, and I don’t want to be in a bad mood. The point is that it is a fate Sarah Palin will continue to suffer, for as long as her political career lasts. But why?

Never fear, I have the answer for you, but I’m not telling yet. You’ll have to wait for Part 2.

To Be Continued….

Cross posted at Age of Aquarius

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Recent events in the United States and Canada, in which fathers and families treat their daughters in an inexcusable manner, compel me to release this draft of an incompletely distilled paper. I apologize for its length, but the topic is not amenable to a series of posts, and it may offer some understanding as to why these practise exist and what might be done to change them.

Aqsa Parvez was strangled to death in her Mississauga home, Peel police said today.
An autopsy revealed the cause of death as “neck compression.” The 16-year-old was taken to hospital Monday morning after a man called police and said he killed his daughter. She died later that night. Friends told reporters that Aqsa fought with her Muslim family over whether or not to wear the hijab. She often stayed overnight with friends, afraid to go home, they said. Her father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, appeared in court today and will face either a first- or second-degree murder charge. He was denied bail and remanded into custody until a hearing via video link on Jan. 29.

Why did Aqsa Parvez’s father strangle her to death? Why is the honour killing of women, over perceived or actual improprietous conduct, a feature of practice among some Muslim communities? Why do these communities enforce such rigourous and strict regulation of women’s conduct? Given that many of these killings violate both the word and the spirit of the Koran and the prophet, why does the practice persist? In this brief essay, I sketch the physical and social conditions that lead to the emergence of the structures that control women’s conduct within the Muslim communities that practice honour killing. I show that the more stringent control structures are artifacts from pre-Islamic Bedouin communities. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the gender-based honour killings that are features of these structures violate Islamic principles and law. In fact, much of the structure of social control goes against the principle that the practice of Islam is a matter of internal conviction.

Consequently, I argue that neither the principles of Islam nor their Bedouin counterparts fully circumscribed or colonized the other. The distinctions marked by their urban and rural divide resulted in a fusion, which manifests its contradictions when the relatively extreme aspects of each, confront the other. I also argue that the practice of gender-based honour killing has lost its moral legitimacy institutional justification [changed due to reasoned interpretive concerns] because the physical conditions that were used to legitmated the practice are no longer features of the lives of the vast majority of Muslims that kill their female family members and wards.

In terms of this essay’s organization, I begin with a short analysis and definition of honour killing. Next I describe how various hadith inform honour killing. I then hypothesize about the roots of honour killing within the Arab communities in which Islam was born. In this regard, I use the work of Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth century Islamic scholar and author of The Muqaddimah (1967), which some scholars argue is the first work on the sociology of history. Through Ibn Khaldun and contemporary research on Bedouin praxis, I outline the principles and conduct that drove both pre-Islamic and post-Islamic Bedouin culture. The results of this discussion bolster Ibn Khaldun’s claim that the praiseworthy character and mores of Bedouin tribes that are well-suited to their environmental circumstance make them unsuited for other locales and styles of life (Ibn Khaldun, 1967). Hypothesizing that honour killing, mutatis mutandis can fail in the same way, I will use principles from religious economy and ecology to point to a potential strategy for ending the acceptance of its’ practice by using the cultural capital within the Koran to overcome the hadith that have been colonized by Bedouin praxis.

Honour killing is a social act. Its motive force is the recovery of perceived loss of face (Welchman and Hossain, 2005). The intent of this act is to rectify a condition of lost honour or status to the actor or actors and a community by punishing those that have dishonoured them (Welchman and Hossain). “Honour,” in this sense, plays many roles: it refers to honouring the community and oneself by dispatching dishonouring parties, to fulfilling one’s promise to the community, and to adhering to the community’s codes (Welchman and Hossain). To the extent that performing the act necessarily harms the actor, it refers to deferring to the community’s codes.

Honour killing, per se, is the act of slaying an individual or group that has potentially, or actually, violated the code of acceptable practice within or towards a community (Welchman and Hossain). Slaying the offending individual or group is a means of restoring or repairing the honour of both the community and any members of the community that are more directly dishonoured (Welchman and Hossain). In this sense, Hamlet and Julius Caesar are as much stories about honour killing as are Othello and Romeo and Juliet. In all these cases family or community honour and individual honour are at stake and in play. Hamlet slew his uncle to honour and avenge his father. The Senators slew Caesar to restore the honour of the Republic, the Senate, and themselves. They were slain to avenge and honour Caesar. Othello slew Desdemona to restore his honour, due to false perception that she had been unfaithful. The diversity of these settings points to the fact that honour killing is a transcultural practice (Welchman and Hossain).

In this paper, I consider the subset of honour killing that lead Othello to slay Desdemona, namely perceived or actual sexual infidelity. More broadly conceived, this notion applies to perceived or actual sexual indiscretions. The essence of this type of honour killing, according to feminist scholars, is the notion that a man’s honour is embedded in the sexual fidelity of the woman or women under his purview, be they coital partners, blood family, or wards (Welchman and Hossain). As aforementioned, I extend this notion to also include the honour of the community. Typically, the family is the immediate locus of a man’s purview, which is determined by closeness of kinship and relation (Welchman and Hossain).

Feminist scholars correctly note that the plume of honour’s essence can soak through to every aspect of a woman’s conduct (Welchman and Hossain). In other words, because it is possible for some men to infer sexual coding in every act a woman makes, these men perceive the need to monitor and control all of a woman’s acts and all of her social locations. Within the context of the zone of control, conceived liberally or radically, any female resistance to male control of this zone is viewed as an assault on the honour of the community and its agent or agents (Young and Anderson). For example, within more all encompassing zone of control notions, acts by, or situations imposed upon, females that violate family and community honour include “sexual immodesty”, refusal to accept arranged (sometimes forced) marriage, flirting, being a victim of rape, and refusing to adhere to hijab dress code” are viewed violate family and community honour (Welchman and Hossain). In some cases, “staying out late” and “smoking” constitute serious violations (Welchman and Hossain). A father in Jordan killed his daughter because she tended to go for walks by herself, even though he commanded her not to (Welchman and Hossain). Interestingly, as in many cases of honour killing where an autopsy is performed, the girl was a virgin (Welchman and Hossain).

Young and Anderson note another Koranic justification for men to claim absolute control over women’s day-to-day movements. The Koran allows men “unlimited” and “unfettered” access to enjoy their wives bodies (Young and Anderson, 206). Some hadith have interpreted this right to imply that their access is limited and fettered, if their women are allowed to move about without their direct or indirect supervision (Young and Anderson).

Why do communities feel the need to strictly regulate the sociosexual conduct of women? To step back in order to move forward, the justification for honour killing is predicated upon the justification for slaying a spouse who has committed adultery. The acceptance of honour killing as a defence for slaying an adulterous spouse is somewhat cross-cultural. According to the UN Commission of Human Rights, the legal codes of Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Peru, Syria, Venezuela and the Palestinian National Authority permit the honour killing of adulterers (2002, 83). Haiti, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Brazil, and Columbia also allow the defence should one catch the adulterous spouse “in flagrante delicto (2002, 83).” Most nations categorize such non-premeditated killings as manslaughter.

How does Islam inform on the question of honour killing? The Koran does not sanction the killing of either fornicators or adulterers: it does, however, provide a sanction. In Sura 24, verse 2 and 3, it is written that:

The woman of the man guilty of fornication- flog each of them with a hundred stripes (1992, 865);

Let no man guilty of adultery or fornication marry any but a woman similarly guilty, or an unbeliever; nor let any but such a man or an unbeliever marry such a woman (1992, 865-6);

Given that honour killing for fornication or adultery is not sanctioned in the Koran, why does honour killing occur in Islam? The sanction is based on a sunnah that is contained in some hadith. “Sunnah, meaning ‘accepted custom’ refers to the pattern of life of Muhammad and the early community; emulation of this pattern is for believers a religious ideal as well as one of the sources of the Law (Anderson and Young, 2004, 189).” In the sunnah in question the prophet was asked by the Jewish community to rule on what should be done with two convicted Jewish adulterers (Anderson and Young). He ruled that they should be punished according to Jewish law (Anderson and Young). Stoning was the penalty for adultery under Jewish law (Anderson and Young). Arguably, however, this punishment should not apply to the community of believers because the Koran clearly states what their punishments should be. In fact, Anderson and Young argue that the explicit penalties that the Koran outlines for fornication and adultery are an attempt to block honour killing (Anderson and Young).

Notwithstanding Anderson and Young’s interpretation, some hadith sanction honour killing, if the burden of proof is met. The standard of evidence is high. To convict requires the testimony of four people who actually saw the act take place, which is twice the number typically required (1992, 866). Furthermore, the Koran dictates hard punishments for accusations lacking evidence. In Sura 24: 4 it states:

And those who launch a charge against chaste women, and produce not four witnesses (To support their allegations) – flog them with eighty stripes; and reject their evidence ever after: for such men are wicked transgressors (1992, 866) -

Furthermore, the Koran requires that the community does not let suspicion taint a woman’s reputation and that it act against those that accuse without evidence:

Those who slander chaste women, indiscreet but believing, are cursed in this life and in the hereafter: For them is a grievous penalty (1992, 871) –

Even if the burden of proof is met on charges of adultery and fornication, more liberal forms of hadith can allow for the restitution of honour through penalties other than death (1992). Beyond this, it is a serious offence for a Muslim to kill another Muslim because all Muslims are directed to respect the sanctity of human life (1992, 71-2).

Given the burden of proof and the sanctions against rumours and false witness, honour killing within Islam should be a rather rare event. Why, then, do we continue to hear and see the murder of young Muslim women over acts that, when juxtaposed with adultery, are comparatively trivial, especially when Allah dictates that one should side with the indiscreet but chaste believer? Also, why is it that some Islamic jurisdictions accept the defence of honour killing for comparatively trivial acts?

Honour killing is a holdover from the pre-Islamic customs and cultural roots of the Bedouin communities that founded Islam (Young and Anderson, 2004). In this sense, honour killing is bidah, which means that it is an Islamic practice that is not sanctioned by the Koran, nor is it found to be sanctioned by his words or deeds or those of his immediate followers or the twelve Imans (Young and Anderson). As bidah, honour killing is an example of a pre-Islamic practice that has colonized Islam. In other words, early Islamic practice did not fully subsume pre-Islamic practice. In fact, early Islamic practice was modified to meet Bedouin standards (Anderson and Young). This being so, it is worthwhile to examine these communities and the role they have played in Islam because of the insights this yields on the raison d’etre of honour killing.

The Bedouin in Mohammed’s time were pastoralists. The camel pastoralists are the group that epitomizes the harshest of the pastoralist extremes environmentally and socially. Camels are well-adapted to the desert environment (Bates and Rassam, 1983). The foods most suited for camels are found in the desert (Ibn Khaldun). In the hot summer the Bedouin clans camp together around the water sources where their camels can get the water they need to survive the hot weather (Bates and Rassam). In the cooler seasons, the Bedouins disperse in smaller units into the arid to seek forage for their camels (Bates and Rassam). The harsh life of the desert, and the need to function in small units in the winter season, make it imperative that Bedouin family units be committed to each other (Bates and Rassam). Their division of labour requires that the men go off into the deep desert while the women and children remain in the encampment (Bates and Rassam). The men are often gone for long stretches of time (Bates and Rassam). The interdependence structure involves the women and children depending on the men to maintain and sustain their economic capital (the camels), while the men depend on the women to maintain and sustain their families (the children and themselves). Both groups functioning as such maintain and sustain the community. Islam also promotes well-integrated family units because “Family law is regarded as the heart of God’s plan for society (Young and Anderson, 2004, 205).

Furthermore, the need to protect themselves from outside interests, made it imperative that Bedouin clans could function as larger units, particularly in combat Bates and Rassam). Here, shared values stood upon family values. In fact, the success of their combat model, which is based upon the superior military advantages of camel warfare, enhanced Bedouin survivability through raiding, extortion, and conquest (Lendering, 2006).

Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth century Islamic scholar, and author of The Muqaddimah (1967), the first work on the sociology of history, offers insightful guidance upon the ecological factors that shape the characters and mores of the peoples of the world. He highly praises the character and the mores evolved by and through the Bedouin tribes while still allowing for qualifications about how these qualities make them unsuited for certain locales and styles of life (Ibn Khaldun). In fact, he interestingly hypothesizes that pastoralists must have preceded city dwellers, not only because many of the city dwellers traced their roots to the Bedouins, but because pastoralists live with the bare necessities and the luxury and plenty of the city can only come about after the bare necessities have been met and surpassed (Ibn Khaldun). In a sense, this comment is about how surplus value leads to the development of urban centers.

The son of Khaldun also suggests, anticipating Rousseau by 400 years, that the Bedouins are closer to a natural state and, therefore, “closer to being good than sedentary people (Ibn Khaldun, 253).” Generally speaking, he views the luxury and sedentariness of city life to be a corrupting influence (Ibn Khaldun). Living on the bare necessities outside of the protective walls of the cities is said to give the Bedouins fortitude, they become self-reliant and self-restrained, they are ready for conflict because the wilds of the desert demand preparedness (which is tied to his notion that savage nations are better able to achieve superiority than others and to his assertion that the Bedouins are the most savage people on Earth), and mutual respect of this fact makes them less likely to talk loosely (Ibn Khaldun). In the desert, they are not broken by a leader’s force nor made pacifistic by study and living under governmental law (Ibn Khaldun). The religious laws of Islam learned by the Bedouin, on the other hand, because they develop discipline, are said to leave fortitude intact (Ibn Khaldun).

Bedouin clannishness furthers this fact. Familial affection provides the group feeling that leads to loyalty and courage in combat (Ibn Khaldun).

Contemporary Bedouin codes of proper conduct or codes of honour arose out of the aforementioned conditions. Sharaf is the code for men (2007). Ird is the code for women (2007). The status of a man’s honour is dependent upon his ability to protect the honour of the women of his family, protect property, and protect the honour of his clan (2007). A man is expected to be brave and courageous. Protecting the honour of the clan is more than a matter of fighting because Bedouins are expected to be hospitable to guests and even to offer sanctuary to their enemies, if their enemies submit (2007). To do less, would be to dishonour the tribe and oneself (2007).

The Koran dictates that men are socially situated above women, though it also positions women as persons in their own right with their own standing before the law (Young and Anderson, 205).” In 4:34 the Koran states:

Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more strength than the other, and because they support them from their means. Therefore righteous women are devotedly obedient, and guard in absence what Allah would have them guard (1992, 195).

Ird is the code for women. Once lost, ird, a form of honour, can not be regained (2007). Ird is consonant with chastity (2007). It is said to be an emotional and conceptual attribute (2007). Because it is consonant with notions of propriety, even unsolicited, mildly flirtatious attentions can be seen to lessen a woman’s ird (2007). The Koran, as above, also promotes chastity.

For men and women who guard their chastity…For them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward (1992, 1067).

In Islam, sexual morality “is believed to be the bedrock of (social) order (Young and Anderson, 209).” As aforenoted, it is the duty of the men to protect the ird of the women of their family and their clan. A man’s honour is said to be almost solely based upon his protection of the ird of his family members (2007).

Arab poetic culture is said to be partly to blame for the apparent obsessive compulsion to monitor female behaviour among the Bedouins (Young and Anderson). The Thousand Nights and One Nights dramatically makes this point, which is why it is an argument in favor of developing women’s character through learning as a means of developing chaste behaviour through internally-driven moral discipline (Mathers, 1996).

Lacking the cultural resources of the scholarly and cultured merchant classes, the Bedouin vision of this education reduces women to their assigned role within the social unit (Young and Anderson). Women unschooled in Islam are portrayed as easily aroused to passion and men are portrayed as readily willing to arouse those passions (Young and Anderson). In Islam, in general:

Women’s ritual is also hobbled by the long-standing traditional view, seen in the classical literature and even the hadith (though certainly not the Quran), that unsupervised activity entails certain hazards arising from the female psyche (young and Anderson, 204).

Perhaps more germane to the lives of Bedouins, adultery is a capital offense (Welchman and Hossain). Sex out of wedlock can lead to a young woman being turned out of the tribe (Welchman and Hossain). Pregnancy out of wedlock can lead to stoning or, more mercifully, strangulation by one’s father (Welchman and Hossain). Given these consequences, one can almost see why families would think it merciful to give their daughters clitoridectomies or infibulations, if they thought such operations would decrease chances of unchaste behaviour. Why are the Bedouin so sensitive about chastity?

It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer more than weak generalizations about why any community is particularly sensitive about chastity. Hopefully weak generalizations can suffice. Ibn Khaldun argues that blood relations found the familial affections that found the loyalty and courage that make it possible for the community to survive and thrive in its harsh environment (Ibn Khaldun). He also argues that affections decline as kinship dilutes(Ibn Khaldun).

Both chastity and paternity matter to the Bedouin. They matter in many cultures. History is littered with attempts to legislate chastity. The Koran stands as one of these attempts. Camel pastoralism magnifies the issues of chastity and paternity because it occurs in a harsh environment wherein the day-to-day sacrifices one makes are done within the context of a necessitated interdependence. Given the honour system that derived out of the trust arrangements that were required to make pastoralism work, when one’s mate violates chastity it is not only a loss of face, but it demonstrates a lack of appreciation for one’s sacrifices. Violations of chastity undermine the reasons for making the sacrifices and, thereby, undermine familial affection. If a question of chastity also creates questions about paternity, then one further loses the benefits of familial affection. Decreased familial affection undermines loyalty and courage. According to Young and Anderson,

Light punishment for honour killing rests on the belief that cherished social values depend ultimately upon good behaviour and therefore (external) discipline of women (209).

Interestingly, I found no examples of communities of sexually, liberal camel pastoralists. This does not mean they did, or do, not exist. Perhaps, with this form of pastoralism, ferocity has an associative causal relation to obsessive concern with sexual honour.

In judging the Bedouin’s conduct, we do well to step back from the horn of plenty through which we view their acts, which is not to say that we should not judge, only that we should try to understand their perspective.   The Bedouin were well aware that social cohesion is directly proportional to survivability in the harsh conditions in which they live their lives (Ibn Khaldun). In this respect, maintaining honour is somewhat equivalent to maintaining social cohesion (Ibn Khaldun). Their strict codes have been a successful adaptation to the desert situation. 

Outside of the desert context, however, and particularly within the context of modern urban environments, strict adherence to such practices is dysfunctional. Ibn Khaldun recognizes this in noticing that the fierceness, independence, tribal social organization, and practical skill set of the Bedouin make them ill-suited both city-rule and city life (Ibn Khaldun). In other words, city life requires that people accept and adhere to a looser set of rules of social order that can accommodate the eccentricities of the various groups of people that are required to make a city function (Ibn Khaldun). For example, cities draw wealth and wealth draws desires for luxuries that require artisans, merchants, and scholars, to name a few specialized occupations that have little truck with Bedouin needs (Ibn Khaldun).

Honour killing loses its environmental justification in urban centers. It remains in the cities because it is ensconced in the hadith that were adapted to meet the perspectives of the camel pastoralists that comprised a significant number of early Islam’s converts and vanguard. It also remains in the cities because the social virtues associated with close families and chastity run throughout both groups. This connection also holds for perspectives on female character and men’s responsibilities and duties towards women and their virtue. For honour killing to be abandoned as a socially sanctioned practice requires that it lose its association with maintaining and sustaining close families. Accordingly, the interpretations of the virtues, duties, and perceptions that are connected to family well-being must also transform. If this can be done, then the justification for honour killing can be dismissed as bidah. Can this be done?

Given that honour killing has inertia within Islamic society; it is likely that any meaningful tack must be based on the cultural capital of Muslims (Stark, 2004), unless the approach of Pol Pot is deemed acceptable. Given that Pol Pot’s approach is unpalatable, then Stark’s model points to the need to use the cultural resources within Islam as a means to excise the Bedouin’s anti-Koranic influences.

There are efforts to undermine the Islamic foundations of honour killing within Islam. Islamic feminists are arguing that they seek the justice of attaining the rights that the Koran provides (Young and Anderson). Islamic women’s organizations are developing infrastructures to protect and support potential victims of honour killing (Young and Anderson). The Royal Family of Jordan, through the acts of Queen Nur, has attempted change from the top, which, up to now, has been thwarted by their parliament (Welchman and Hossain). Saudi Arabia has been purging their laity of the more traditionalist clerics. From the outside, the United Nations and individual foreign governments are pressuring Islamic nations where honour killing receives some degree of social sanction to act against the practice.

Notwithstanding, success is unlikely to occur quickly, if at all, because the resilience of honour killing within Islam is connected to a millennium of supportive practices and jurisprudence. Furthermore, traditionalists situate women’s attempts to acquire the rights they are granted in the Koran to be western-inspired assaults on the sanctity of the Islamic family and social order (Young and Anderson). Also, women’s rights within these traditional hadith restrict their abilities to be agents for change (Anderson and Young). Deteriorating environmental and economic conditions also work against creating change because they impact men’s abilities to economically provide for their families, which can direct men to focus on being more protective in other arenas.

Muhammad Parvez strangled his daughter because she symbolized his inability to protect his family and his community from the threats to the social order implicit in her indiscreet conduct. His perception of his duty to kill his daughter as the means to restore community, familial, and personal honour is an artifact of pre-Islamic culture. Honour killing as an artifact has had the inertia and resilience to not only resist the dictates of the Koran, but to lead its supporters to organize Islamic principles to defend its existence. Honour killing no longer bears the environmental circumstance that could be said to proffer legitimacy. Its systemic justifications are part of a network of perceptions about the well-being of Muslim society that are also suspect. Accordingly, a strategy of using the cultural capital within the Koran to uproot the bidah of honour killing appears to be an optimal strategy that is currently practiced, to some extent. Notwithstanding, because the practice has the inertia of respected hadith, and women’s rights are restricted with these hadith, the task of uprooting honour killing shall be difficult.

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Bibliography

Ali, A.Y. (ed.) (1992) The Meaning of the Holy Koran, Brentwood, Md: Amana Corporation.

Anderson, L. and Young D. (2004). Women and Religious Traditions, New York: Oxford University Press.

Bates, D. and Rassam, A. (1983). People and Cultures of the Middle East. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.

Bedouin Sociopolitical Organization downloaded from http://www.everyculture.com/Africa-Middle-East/Bedouin-Sociopolitical-Organization.html on March 10, 2008

Ibn Khaldun (1967). The Muqaddimah., New York: Bollingen Corporation.

Lendering, Jona. Camels and Dromedaries downloaded from http://www.livius.org/caa-can/camel/camel.html on March 10, 2008

Mathers, P. (1996). The Thousand Nights and One Night. New York: Routledge.

Miller, G. (1985). Living in the Environment. Belmont, Ca: Wadsworth Publishing Co.

Stark, R. (2003). ‘Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail’ in L. Dawson (ed.), Cults and New Religious Movements, Malden, Ma: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Welshman, L. and Hossain, S. (2005). Honour: crimes, paradigms, and violence against women., New York: Zed Books.

(2002). Draft Report of the Commission: Commission on Human Rights, 58th Session. downloaded from http//:documents.un.org/mother.asp on March 10, 2008.

(2007). downloaded from http://www.thestar.com/News/article/284823 on March 10, 2008

There is a right to Privacy. There is no right to  Hypocrisy.

-Congressman Barney Frank

Everyone has a right to their own privacy. Nobody deserves to have their personal lives, personality, character, and morals judged and analyzed by people who either don’t know them, have never met them, or hardly know them.

Politicians are people. As people, they also deserve that basic right. When choosing to vote for them, most Americans have never met them, and the journalists  who cover their campaigns, policies, and careers have also either never met them or hardly know them.

A majority of Americans do want their leaders to be decent people. An American voter votes for a candidate on faith, because they believe that candidate will do everything within their power to make their lives better. American voters, for the most part, want their leaders to be in Politics as Public Servants who believe in service and social advocacy as a way to help others. It is, in fact, about “Putting People First.”   The same can perhaps be said of police officers, surgeons, and others whose professions affect people’s lives. A surgeon saves lives, and a police officer protects lives. A politician can affect lives in many different ways, depending on what policies they implement, bills they sign into law, legislation they write, or what message they send to the world.

Politicians are supposed to be Public Servants. And a person who serves people helps people. By extension, a person who helps others is generally considered to be a good person.

That being said, people, and most especially good people, can be complicated people with successes and failures. It is unfair to judge them solely on their failures and foolish to judge them only on their successes.  And sometimes, good people can make mistakes and have problems in their personal lives. In case you haven’t noticed, shit happens.

That is why a politician’s personal life should never be aired in public. That is why there should be a basic right to privacy and that right should not be violated.

The examination of Politician’s personal lives started in the late eighties, with the emergence of reactionary right wing “values voters” that picked and chose Bible Verses to advance bigotry against women, gays, racial minorities, joy, laughter, and other blasphemous ungodly characters. They found a home with Movement  Conservatives in the early 1990’s. And, as David Brock writes in his memoir, Blinded By the Right, their morally superior panty drawer snooping consisted of, “…making accusations with no proof, and of using ill-defined issues of ‘judgment’ and ‘character’ to discredit opponents based solely on alleged personal behavior. Sexual McCarthyism had been introduced into modern right-wing politics.”

These “Family Values” nutjobs and their allies in the media have an interesting way of judging elected officials personal lives. As John at LR states:

The bible literalists who spend many a happy hour bashing gays because of a few bible verses are mighty forgiving of Conservative adulterers as Joe Conason points out here. The biblical punishment for adultery is death by stoning. I have yet to see a right winger pitch at stone at Newt, Sanford, Vitter, or Ensign. But lordy, lordy, say “Lewinsky” to one of them and watch them froth. I guess I don’t have the translation of the bible that includes the phrase “Forgive the Republicans but keep on trashing the Democrats with all the invective at your command.”

And maybe I am just being immature and completely juvenile about this (okay, I am) but the Big Dawg just got a couple of bl*wj*bs (granted, the Big Dawg’s sex scandal was a lot more fun, because there were characters like Linda Tripp and Lucciane Goldberg and Kenn Starr and other weirdos involved. Like a soap opera!). Sanford has recently been caught in a five-year affair with a chick from Argentina, and after lying about it to his wife, she caught him, and he actually asked her permission to go see his mistress. Newt Gingrich, the coolest Conservative evah who will totally run for President and beat Palin in the Primaries! gave his wife divorce papers while she was on her death bed, then cheated on his second wife while he was calling Liberals “decadent” and “sick” and routinely sniffing through the Clintons’ private lives. Vitter, another Clinton Condemner, was caught with prostitutes. Larry Craig voted for the Federal Marriage Amendment, and he tried to boink a guy in a bathroom stall. The list goes on. In fact, I have a list!

Since 1998 there has been an average of two sex scandals a year. There are twenty four in my list. Fourteen involve Republicans and ten involve Democrats. And, as Joe Conason says

Even after confessing to the most flagrant and colorful fornication, the worst that a conservative must anticipate is a stern scolding, followed by warm assurances of God’s forgiveness and a swift return to business as usual.

The hilarious thing is that Right Wingers don’t even notice the double standard or the blatant hypocrisy. Just spend a few minutes reading the comments at Hillbuzz, which has pretty much been taken over by Reactionary Republicans, and you would come away believing that all Democrats are the most lewd, immoral, promiscuous cretins in the Universe. But mention Vitter, Sanford, or Ewing and you will get nothing but crickets.

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man,

in whom there is no help” – Psalm 146:3

Two pieces of news this week – Bill Clinton meets with some bloggers and tells them to apply pressure to Congress and the Obama administration from the left and the Washington Post fires liberal columnist Dan Froomkin who was pressuring Congress and the Obama administration from the left.

Last week the LGBT community got a lump of coal in their stocking and this week it was healthcare reform advocates’ turn in the barrel.  Since he became the “presumptive nominee” Obama has broken so many promises that Arthur Silber advises:

Don’t try to keep a list of all of Obama’s broken “promises.” Instead, keep a list of the promises you think he made that he’s kept. In this manner, your work will be brief and undemanding.

So what are the nutroots focused on?  Getting religion.

From PZ Meyers:

Netroots Nation, the big lefty political/blogging meeting, is organizing sessions for their conference in August. Unfortunately, they seem have given up on the idea of a secular nation, because this one session on A New Progressive Vision for Church and State has a bizarre description.

The old liberal vision of a total separation of religion from politics has been discredited. Despite growing secularization, a secular progressive majority is still impossible, and a new two-part approach is needed–one that first admits that there is no political wall of separation. Voters must be allowed, without criticism, to propose policies based on religious belief. (emphasis added)

I wonder if Carrie Prejean will be on the panel for that discussion.

Times are tough in the Kool-aid Kingdom.  It’s like the epitaph on the hypochondriac’s tombstone says:

“I expected this, but not so soon.“

What I didn’t expect was that we would be left behind in Left Blogistan.  Richard Nixon described the secret to getting elected President as a Republican as “run to the right as far and as quickly as possible in the primaries, then run back to the center as quickly as possible in the general election.”

Obama’s theory appears to be “run to the left in the primaries and then run to the center in the general election and keep on heading right after you’re elected.“  Obama hasn’t just broken campaign promises, he has betrayed some of his earliest and most loyal supporters.  Well, maybe not his earliest supporters and certainly not his biggest donors.  His moneybags backers should be really happy since they got exactly what they paid for – a conservative wolf in a liberal sheep’s clothing empty suit.

Despite the fact that Obama quickly morphed into Bush III, the Republicans kept calling him a socialist and threatened to obstruct pretty much everything he proposed.  This caused the sippy-kup kidz to rush to Obama’s defense, heedless of the fact that they crossed the border separating moonbat from wingnut, dragging the Overton window with them.

Those of us that never jumped on the Obama bandwagon Kool-aid kart are sitting here all alone in Liberal territory watching “progressive Democrats” defend the same policies for which they wanted to impeach Bush II, such as torture, indefinite detention and domestic spying.

Now, five months into Obama’s administration (and over a year since we warned them) some progressives are starting to wake up and smell the arugula.  But are they apologetic and contrite, humbly admitting that we were right all along?  Hell no!  They have nothing but contempt for our “paranoid band of shrieking holdouts” and act shocked and surprised as they wail that “nobody could have foreseen” what is happening.  They still think we are traitors for not supporting the man who betrayed them.  Go figure.

For years I used to get so frustrated by the way Democrats capitulated to the GOP when it really counted.  It was after the 2006 electoral tsunami that the truth begin to penetrate my think skull.  Even though they had just finished kicking ass and taking names in November, the first thing Nancy Botoxi did in January 2007 was take impeachment “off the table.”

The 2006 exit polling showed that the voters wanted to end the war in Iraq.  So what did the Democrats do?  They voted to fund it with nary a whimper.  All the GOP had to do in the Senate was threaten to filibuster and Dirty Harry Reid would fold like a cheap suit.  “We need bigger majorities and the White House too!” was their excuse.  Then Harry and Nancy (and Barack) led the stampede to pass the FISA revision with retroactive immunity in it.

Finally I realized the truth.  With the Democratic Party, failure is a feature not a bug.  They don’t want to win.  That’s why they hate Bill Clinton so much – he screwed up and won.  Twice. The Democratic victories in 2006 had more to do with the failure of the Republicans and the efforts of non-Villagers than it had to do with the DLC or DNC.

Now the Democrats have huge majorities in Congress and the White House but we’re still supposed to take an old cold tater and wait.  Meanwhile they want mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

The lesson here is : You can’t trust any politician.

Not any of them, not even Hillary or the Big Dawg.  Put your trust in principles and ideology and advocate for the policies that reflect them.  Support only those candidates that will commit to what you believe in.  Demand promises from them before giving them your vote and then accept no excuses once they are in office.

Never cut politicians or political parties any slack.  Keep up the pressure – even if they did good in the past, keep asking them “What have you done for me lately?”

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