Um . . . dare I point out that I think Andrew's being a bit unfair to George Bush and Karl Rove in seeming to hold them responsible for these events? What happened is bad, but there are assholes all over the place and were even before the 2000 election.
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Independent Thinking!
17 May 2007 01:20 am
Comments (37)
We have to get these chrisianists nut jobs out of government.
Satan needs to call the Mullahs Robertson and Dobson home. ASAP. Falwell's probably lonely.
Good to know that denial has a strong place on your blog Matt.
This is just entirely coincidental that the commander in chief is pushing evangelical b.s. and it actually translates into actual policies.
Just like the whole torture thing. purely coincidental that the presidents policies get translated into tangible policies.
nothing to see here. move it along.
yeah I dunno Matt. Maybe "responisble" isn't the word, but when you look at the number of Liberty U grads throughout the administration, or the way we are approaching AIDs in Africa, I don't think its too far a leap to say that Rove's gameplan has made GWB's presidency, at the very least, amenable to Evangelism in all corners. I don't think its merely coincidence that Bible-Thumpers seem to be popping up everywhere you look.
Why do you read Andrew Sullivan?
Sounds like another result of excluding ROTC from elite Northeastern colleges -- a growing ideological monoculture in the officer corps. Now when the Islamists call our troops Crusaders there's almost an element of truth to it. If only we had more Ezra Kleins and Matt Yglesiases in the service.
Why do you read Andrew Sullivan?
he's gotta have something to talk about when they bump into eachother at the water-cooler.
If only we had more Ezra Kleins and Matt Yglesiases in the service.
worst. soldiers. ever.
Christians are merely Jews of the new testament.
Why do you read Andrew Sullivan?
I sometimes ask that of myself, about myself. I don't take Sullivan seriously, but there is something entertaining about his prose.
He does sometimes link to interesting stuff.
Fred has a minor tangental point. The government and its armed forces should be strictly non-denominational. If there are no officers pulled from the ranks of people who understand this however, it is quite easy for the evangelicals to get their way. If Ezra Klein was the commandant of the Air Force Academy, the would be no institutionally support religious coercion.
Matt if you join up, the Army will give you all the weapons and ammo you could ever want.
Matt, just look at the Jerry Boykin episode.
Complete out of control religious wing-nuttery, and the guy pays no penalties, whatsoever.
under any normal administration, he would have been eased out, or told to stfu long ago. under bush and rove, he's rewarded.
ditto with the episodes at the air force academy. The message has been clear: no one will pay penalties for turning the armed forces into christianists bastions.
leadership actually does matter, y'know. Sure, there are always assholes, but the degree to which they act out on it depends a lot on the messages from the top.
Sullivan is a good writer and I find his essays on the religious right insightful. Plus it's always entertaining to see his contortions on Iraq. You know deep down he really, really wants to fall in line behind Bush and McCain, but he's too honest to ignore the reality on the ground. And it's amusing to read his fantasies about what "real" conservatism should be like. Ron Paul the GOP candidate? Suuuure. Newsflash to Sullivan: Bush IS real conservativism.
Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy is the authentic conservative position. And only non-interventionism is consistent with classical republicanism and small-goverment conservatism.
But the greatest threat facing us today is the third-world invasion of the U.S.
As Jean Raspail says in Camp of the Saints, "the best conservative novel of all time," we can make a stand against the third-world hordes, or we can watch the West crumble.
Many support the invasion and thus are guilty of treason: McCain, Giuliani, Brownback, Huckabee, Thompson
The only candidates to be taken seriously are Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo or Duncan Hunter.
Look around you - America's becoming a third-world sewer.
Bush IS real conservativism.
No, no, no. Bush is a post-Gingrichian Rovite deviationist. Buckley warned in prescient terms against what would become the Rovite heresy at the Xth Party Congress in 1976. If the Stockmanite-Haigian faction had not been purged by the Schultz-Regan cabal in 1983-4, this splittist tendency might never have come to power. But it is absurd to project backwards the Bush-Rovite line, which might best be termed "CEO-individualist Communism", onto the thinking of the Founders. Rand and Goldwater would never have allowed things to come to this.
I'm from that neck of the woods. Iowa City is a very liberal town (they elected a card-carrying socialist to the city council) with a strong Jewish community. If things have gotten so bad in that environment, I shudder to thing what the situation must be like elsewhere.
It's 2007 and you're falling for the "bad apple" defense? Pathetic.
Your comment made it sound like Sullivan was wrong because the events cited were before the 2000 election. But they weren't.
The Sullivan argument, and this is one I agree with, is that Christianists have been systematically abusing power to try to establish a "Christian nation" running the country. Given all of the evidence that supports him on this issue, I don't think it's adequate to simply say "there are assholes all over the place".
Yeah... I'm sure
George Bush's constant refrains on religion had NOTHING to do with making this guy feel that this was an okay thing to do..
That's largerly Matt's problem. He needs absolute proof that someone is the sole cause of a difficulty before he'll point his finger at someone. That kind of bend-over-backwardsism is what put the Democratic party in this position in the first place.
And yes, Bush is a conservative. People saying otherwise are clueless. Conservatives are people who defend power, and believe that the great many should be ruled over by an elite few. That is the sole consistent ideological viewpoint of any conservative movement anywhere in the world. Any other definition is too subject to a specific time and place to be useful.
Mattsteinglass:
Do you realize how much you sound like a Trotskyite arguing that Stalin wasn't really a communist?
Unfortunately, "true conservatives" don't own the word "conservative" any more than Trotsky and Marx owned the word "communist". Bush ran as a conservative and was embraced by the community that described itself as conservative. I know a lot of ideological conservatives are displeased with Bush's direction as President. That raises the question whether Bush has governed differently than expected, and whether the ideological conservatives were naive. Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I've always seen "conservative" to mean "pro-wealthy people", and to that end Bush has been an ideal conservative. He's started a war to distract the masses, made massive tax cuts for the super-rich, put functionaries all over the government in positions where they will be hard to root out, and generally served the interests of "his base" admirably.
His "base" is less than 1% of the population, for sure, but he's managed to con at least 30% of the population to go along with that. The funny thing is that I don't think he realizes that he's just a place-holder for the plutocrats.
I agree with Matt's original post. Having grown up in Middle America, I can report that outside of the major cities, the US is *infested* with Christianists like those described in the link, and has been since well before 2000.
What's different now is that--thanks to the Internet--stories like the one in the link actually get some exposure. But cases like David Miller's are pervasive in America, and have been for a long time.
"Mattsteinglass:
Do you realize how much you sound like a Trotskyite arguing that Stalin wasn't really a communist?"
I'm pretty sure mattsteinglass's comment is a parody with specifically that intent--especially since he refers to the "Xth Party Congress."
Don't you dare claim that it's unfair to blame Bush and Rove for this. People who lie down with dogs should expect to get up with fleas. Bush and Rove have been in bed with the Christian reconstructionists from day one. They've placed themselves at the head of this movement--they're blamable for the wrongs committed by the members of the movement, particularly members of the movement who hold subordinate positions int he federal government.
Gee, Matt's comment seems unpopular with his usual commenters. That must mean he's up for an Yglesias award for this one...
"Gee, Matt's comment seems unpopular with his usual commenters. That must mean he's up for an Yglesias award for this one..."
But who gives out Yglesias awards? And who was Matt criticizing in this comment?
This has specifically been a problem in the armed forces for a long time, way before Bush. It's probably worse now, but so's everything else.
Gee, Matt's comment seems unpopular with his usual commenters.
What would be the fun of commenting here if we agreed with him all the time?
The only candidates to be taken seriously are Ron Paul...
Ah yes, Ron Paul:
"If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."
"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action,"Paul wrote.
"We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such."
"Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal,"
please GOP, please nominate Ron Paul!
What's the deal, Matt, does your contract with the Atlantic require some quota of mindless contrarianism? It is surely true that there were assholes before 2000, indeed, they have always been around. (Adam, for example, was an asshole for trying to blame Eve for the whole Applegate scandal. And don't get me started on Cain.) But you really think that there's no connection between Bush policies and behavior like this?
On another point, the VA spokesperson in that story says, "it is standard practice within hospitals nationwide to conduct a spiritual assessment of each patient upon admission." Huh? Is that really true? Thank God I haven't been hospitalized in a long time, then.
Re Soulite's comment "That kind of bend-over-backwardsism is what put the Democratic party in this position in the first place."
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er.. could we use a different metaphor when discussing an Andrew Sullivan article?
er.. could we use a different metaphor when discussing an Andrew Sullivan article?
Oh, a HA HA HA! I Get It! Sullivan is gay, you see, so naturally he's all about buttfucking! Practically defines him, doncha know.
Don, you sure you're not Don Imus? Or maybe Tommy Thompson?
Hey, looks like Matt and Andrew are on a first-name basis now. Cheers.
Andrew Sullivan is not just gay, Glenn. He's a gay Republican who beat the drums for the war in Iraq -- a war in which he was immune from service -- and who now argues that war was a mistake.
Homesexuality is not perversion. Andrew Sullivan's politics are.
I don't care what Andrew does in his bedroom -- I care about the 10,000+ crippled soldiers and the 3000+ dead ones that he's sodomized.
could we use a different metaphor when discussing an Andrew Sullivan article?
Sometimes it seems like I have to spend far too much time explaining the mechanics of gay sex to the ignorant. Suffice it to say, we don't do it by bending over backwards.
Hmm... Would Yglesias getting an Yglesias award from Sullivan for criticizing Sullivan be an example of irony? Or is that only when put to music?
Re rea's comment "we don't do it by bending over 'backwards' "
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1) You may not -- you should not assume the same of "flexible Andrew".
After all, compare his above tears about a military veteran suffering religious harassment in a VA center with his 2001 posts pushing for an unnecessary war in Iraq that would fill those VA centers.
See, for example, http://time-blog.com/daily_dish/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2001_10_01_dish_archive.html
2) A short excerpt from Andrew Sullivan's post on Oct 16 2001 at 4:48 pm re the anthrax mailed to
Tom Daschle
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"At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat.
We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable.
We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn't dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat. "
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NUKES? With NO evidence that Iraq was the source?
"it is standard practice within hospitals nationwide to conduct a spiritual assessment of each patient upon admission."
And has been for quite some time. Many years ago, I was on the critical list for several days and the hospital asked my wife what kind of minister they should send for. (Nobody let me know, btw.) A fairly bitter priest appeared shortly afterwards to ask me about the state of my soul and if I wanted the sacraments. After he realized that I was just nodding my head due to the morphine, he spent the next 20 minutes complaining about being passed over repeatedly when it came time to hand out parishes.
Spiritual assessment: FUBAR.
When no one in your family, none of your friends, co-workers, fellow alumni, etc., has ever served in the military, you shouldn't expect the folks in the military to be like people you know. Institutions are shaped by those who are interested in participating in them; since evangelicals are more interested in serving in the military than secular progressives, Jews, Hindus, Unitarians, atheists, etc., it shouldn't be a surprise that the military now has a touch of the 700 Club about it.
This state of affairs didn't start with G.W. Bush and won't end with him; it will only change when the percentage of evangelicals drops in the military. For that to happen, there have to be more non-evangelicals interested in serving.
Comments closed May 31, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I think he's saying the Bush administration has emboldened and legitimised this kind of culture and behaviour.
Posted by benny | May 17, 2007 2:37 AM