George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian about one of the great mysteries in American policies — why we prefer stupidity, or at least the appearance of it, in the White House. (Another is why we think adultery disqualifies a man for public office — a bizarre notion that has cost the nation dearly.)

But enough of that. Here are some teasers from Monbiot’s essay:

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The US has the world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage…

On one level this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves around the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15 year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD…

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion — in particular fundamentalist religion — makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing…

A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state’s public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

Monbiot also has interesting things to say about how the revolting philosophy of Herbert Spencer managed to put religion on the side of reason in the latter decades of the 19th century. Too long to excerpt, though, so read the full piece.

Here’s a great rant from Alicia Morgan, whose enemy you would definitely not want to be.

…George W. Bush, in celebrating his own lack of intellect and curiosity, has made a virtue of ignorance, and by breaking the glass ceiling on stupidity, demonstrated to those who already think this way that there are no limits to where ignorance can take you. He has also demonstrated that governing by ignorance is not only possible, but easily done, and that ignorance can beat intelligence, given the right set of circumstances…

Case in point is the love child of George Bush and Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin. While George Bush is a relative latecomer to the fundamentalist fold, he insisted that “God told him to attack Iraq.” He relies on his ‘gut’ instead of brains, and considers that a completely acceptable, even preferable choice.

Sarah Palin takes those traits to a whole different level. No Johnny-come-lately she, Palin was steeped in fundamentalist principles from birth, and is both far more radically religious and far less educated than George W. Bush. Which, in the Bizarro-World of right-wing logic, makes her...even better! According to the Bush standard, all you need is a mule-stubborn refusal to yield to be a successful world leader, and intelligence just gets in the way of that. Sarah Palin describes it as “you can’t blink.” What she means is “you can’t think.”

This demonization of intelligence is getting worse, not better, as the ignorant and venal are rewarded ever more richly in our society. If the unthinkable come to pass, with a McCain presidency Sarah Palin — would-be book-banner, science-hater, reproductive-rights-destroyer, Rapture-ready end-timer — will be a fibrillation away from being the leader of the free world. One would not think it possible, but she makes George W. Bush look like Noam Chomsky.

Hell, yes, I’m an elitist. You should be, too.

…and so I won’t even try. These are excerpts from Women Against Sarah Palin, the wonderful website to which my sister Pat alerted me, and about which I blogged earlier this week.

Sarah Palin is the classic example of a woman being used by those in power to remove power from women.

I want to love a mother, governor and VP candidate, but Palin horrifies me, she seems to epitomize the American inability to be introspective, to polarize and see everything in terms of black and white, good or evil, right or wrong. This intolerance and inability to get out of a narrow perspective and see the divine spark in all is at the core of the danger America is creating for itself, and feeds the dissension in America. She has a sharp, but not a deep mind fast with the comebacks, but more interested in bullying an argument than in understanding the truth.

Even in this very red state of Alabama, we know the difference between a show horse, a hobby horse, and a work horse. You do not represent working class women, farm wives or single mothers — ALL of whom turned to Hillary Clinton with great hopes. You charged women for their own rape kits when you were mayor in Wasilla. You use housekeepers and nannies to care for your kids. You don’t want sex education in schools, but you let your daughter get pregnant! You do not now, nor will you ever speak for us!

I can hardly begin to express the depth of my anger at hearing Ms. Palin denigrate the many community organizers I worked with and proudly call my friends. Community Organizers make the world a better place, doing God’s work day in and day out, night after night. To hear that convention audience laugh in response to her snide remarks really pissed me off. I didn’t realize just how steamed I was until a dear friend (another longtime community activist) sent me an e-mail with this message: Jesus was a Community Organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

Sarah Palin represents the slap of the dinosaur’s tail — a deadly, horned swipe of a breed going extinct; quite likely, in her throes of excited thrashing, to kill off many individuals, many careers, many dearly held gains, won since 1963, for which many of us fought with our brains, our convictions, our blood, our time, our eloquence, and our money…

Are we ready to stand idly by while an old, ill man, watches Sarah’s shapely behind, while fingering his wedding ring? Are we ready to give up our time to choose, our right to decide and let this mockery of a modern woman, this poorly educated bigot tramples our civil rights? Are we ready to die if our life is endangered by an unhealthy pregnancy? Are we willing to let Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and the other megalomaniacs at the helm of the Republican party decide the course of our lives, our daughters’ and granddaughters’ lives?

Even the power she gained as the mayor of a town of a mere 5000, immediately corrupted her; her wide swipes through the administration she inherited were so disruptive to that small government entity that an immediate remedy was set in place — an administrator had to be hired to do the job of running the town while she was mayor. And still, the surplus she inherited turned into a deficit — IMAGINE the damage she could orchestrate on a national level.

The Alaskan legislature took to wearing buttons that said, “Where’s Sarah?” because she spent so little time in Juneau. Once again, the GOP is deceiving the American people in a most callous and calculating way — just because they put a skirt on this time doesn’t change a damned thing!

Women in particular should project hope and love and caring for others, and Ms. Palin does none of this, choosing instead to be mean-spirited and accusatory in every single speech and action. I can only hope that with time, people will recognize this and realize that we need someone quite different from her to take us down the road to respect and REAL morality.

But she is not the problem — our problem is the white old men that insist on running this country with their need to control, their archaic laws and ideas. Their lives are based on fear and ridiculous needs to dominate our pocketbook, our bodies and to shoot before thinking and talking. They also have a great need to distort the truth — in other words LYING. This young woman from Alaska is being fooled with — she is their decoy — but she might be elected and then she could be a heartbeat away from being in charge of our lives.

The American people have become distracted. Palin, participating in this election as a trojan horse, has come with phrases that involve animals and lipsticks, bridges to nowhere, and eBay, leading americans in to an abyss of distractions pulling away from the very sobering facts that who she represents and the policies she supports are a complete replica of the current Bush administration, on paper, and without personality mud-slings, the Palin/MCCain ticket represent four more years of the same policies the world has come to hate.

Here we have the ideal ticket for anyone who supports women’s rights — Obama and Biden — versus two people who think women are brainless fools. The fact that Palin wears a skirt doesn’t mean she has respect for women. On the contrary. It just means that she uses her sex to stop any questions about her competence by accusing the questioner of sex-discrimination. Frankly, I didn’t buy that argument when Hillary made it and I’m certainly not buying it from Palin.

This classic bait and switch move has the electorate once again focusing on the culture wars instead of the real ones, on pseudo-feminism instead of tolerance and equality.

Her extreme beliefs regarding abstinence-only education did not work even for her own daughter! and yet she wants to force it on our daughters! We will not have it. We can do better, there are stronger, more thoughtful and fair minded women in this country who are fit to run it.

Is Ms.Palin really the best the Republican party has to offer in terms of a female? I guess there are slim pickings for a woman who will support an antiquated and sexist Republican agenda.

The cruel irony of Senator Clinton blooding herself on that glass ceiling only to have a puppet escorted through on the arm of a warrior…

These people are two loose cannons on a rolling deck and I genuinely fear for the future of our great country. If John McCain is unable to see his term through, Sarah Palin is next in line as leader of the Free World.

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.” Really? Because the parents of children with disabilities in Alaska don’t have much of a friend or advocate right now. Even in years of great surplus, she actually cut state funding for special education services and Medicaid — the program that children and adults with disabilities rely on for health care.

Ms. Palin is also well documented as a local bully who tries to fire anyone who disagrees with her. After eight years of an unqualified President who has done everything in his power to position America as a global bully, this characteristic is the last quality we need in the White House for four more years.

Sarah Palin sees the hand of God in a $30 billion Alaskan national gas pipeline. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she has stated.

Ms. Palin and I clearly worship very different gods. I see the hand of God not in the wallets of the oil companies, but in the pristine Alaska coastline, its majestic polar bears, whales, and glaciers — all of which Big Oil will despoil. Perhaps Ms. Palin has made the mistake that afflicts a frightening number of our citizens: confusing God with money.

Let’s see you argue with this, from Eye of the Storm:

i’m going to say this one time, and then i’m going to shut up. re: bristol palin. the american liberal is, — seriously, literally — pro-abortion and anti-choice, believes essentially in mandatory abortion. what does the average liberal mom do when her 16-year-old daughter shows up pregnant? drags her immediately to the abortion clinic, whatever the daughter’s (or the babydad’s, of course) misgivings.

the american left thinks that bristol palin having her baby is, actually, morally wrong. and more to the point, it shows something terrible about her mom, who had a moral obligation to make her daughter have an abortion. and one reason for this is that if you have a baby when you’re 16, you will likely slip out of our class. you’ll go live with joey, the kid who wants to be a mechanic. you’ll take classes at the community college instead of heading off to a decent school. you’ll end up in a housecoat with a houseful of wailing babies, listening to faith hill.

what haunts the imagination of the american liberal: my family, in the next generation, will be white trash. maybe it would be more interesting to look at these sorts of motivations than to try to figure out “when human life begins.”

Sarah Vowell, in today’s New York Times:

During a gubernatorial debate in 2006, Governor Palin claimed that if her daughter, then 16, were impregnated as the result of being raped, Ms. Palin would hope that the girl would “choose life,” which is a polite way of saying she would expect a tenth-grader to give birth to her rapist’s baby.

Here’s a not-so-polite fact about the United States: According to Amnesty International, a woman is raped here every six minutes.…

This year, Senator McCain himself didn’t bother to stand up to the right wing of his party to insist that the rape and incest exception be written into the Republican Party platform.

Evidently somebody at the White House knows how to use the Google. From Froomkin:

“Another prosecutor was rejected for a job in part because she was thought to be a lesbian. And a Republican lawyer received high marks at his job interview because he was found to be sufficiently conservative on the core issues of ‘god, guns + gays.’”

The report “found that White House officials were actively involved in some hiring decisions.

“According to the report, officials at the White House first developed a method of searching the Internet to glean the political leanings of a candidate and introduced it at a White House seminar called The Thorough Process of Investigation. Justice Department officials then began using the technique to search for key phrases or words in an applicant’s background, like ‘abortion,’ ‘homosexual,’ ‘Florida recount,’ or ‘guns.…’

It may be that somewhere, sometime, a hate-crazed liberal once shot up a right-wing fundamentalist church, but no such occasion comes to mind.

And as for “acting alone,” where do you suppose the vicious simpleton below got the idea that things like desegregation, a living wage, women’s rights and gay rights were the cause of all his troubles?

Anything come to mind this time? Limbaugh? O’Reilly? Hagee? Falwell? Coulter? Parsley? Robertson? Savage? And on. And on. And on…

From the BBC:

A man accused of shooting dead two people in a Tennessee church was motivated by hatred of liberals and anger at being jobless, US police say…

“It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement,” Chief Owen said…

The Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church describes itself on its website as working for social change since the 1950s, including desegregation, racial harmony, fair wages, women’s rights and gay rights.

Police say it appears Mr. Adkisson was acting alone.

Inside the house, officers found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly…

On those rare occasions when Bush is moved to do the right thing, he gets knee-capped by his best friends. If it weren’t so horrible it would be amusing. Consider this unusually ripe specimen:

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s efforts to broaden a widely respected, bipartisan program to fight the spread of AIDS in Africa have faced roadblocks by seven Republican senators.

Bush had hoped that Congress would pass legislation to spend $50 billion to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis primarily in Africa in time for the Group of Eight summit in Japan next month. However, the seven socially conservative senators, led by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., refuse to support the legislation unless spending focuses more heavily on treatment than on prevention.

In a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the seven senators — Coburn, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Jim Bunning of Kentucky, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and David Vitter of Louisiana — criticized the bills’ increased spending over the next five years from $15 billion to $50 billion, the expansion of AIDS funding to countries such as China and India and the inclusion of funding for agricultural-assistance and poverty-alleviation programs.

“The bills’ support would allow morally questionable activities, including advocating with host governments to change gender norms and policies and promoting activities that could include needle distribution to drug users,” the senators wrote.

Vitter, Vitter. Haven’t I heard that name somewhere? Isn’t he some kind of an expert on morally questionable activities? Oh, yes, now it all comes back:

After Vitter’s telephone number was discovered this summer among the records of the so-called “D.C. Madam,” the rumors about his sexual proclivities really started flying. Wonkette and a variety of liberal blogs ran with rumors that he had a diaper fetish and liked to make in his nappy during sexual acts. No one seems to be sure where that rumor originated, so we did our best to get to the bottom of it.

Wendy Cortez (Ellis), a New Orleans-based reformed hooker, said during a press conference yesterday that Vitter stopped seeing her after he learned her real first name was the same as his wife’s. Cortez tells Radar that Vitter never wore any diapers during their sexual transgressions, which she says occurred two to three times a week over a four-month period in 1999.

“That story referred to another client of [mine] and was later misconstrued by reporters and bloggers,” Cortez explained. She also added that Vitter was always “very clean” during intercourse.

How disgusting. How sad. And how predictable. National Socialist, Moslem, or Orthodox Jew, a zealot is a zealot:

Messianic Jews in Israel say they want an inquiry into the burning of hundreds of copies of the New Testament by Orthodox Jews in Or Yehuda last week.

The books were given to the town’s Ethiopian Jews by the Messianic Jews, who believe in Jesus as a saviour.

Or Yehuda’s deputy mayor says he received complaints about the books, and arranged for them to be burnt…

Don Heiny sends this:

Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will — and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.

The speaker is the despicable Joe Lieberman, on ABC this morning. Here is some earlier moralizing from Holy Joe, Likud’s man in Connecticut and soon to be, if his wettest dreams come true, McCain’s man on the GOP ticket this fall:

WASHINGTON — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but believes the interrogation technique should be available only under the most extreme circumstances…

The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological," Lieberman said.

Connecticut resident Jerry Doolittle reluctantly acknowledges that he would rather have just about anybody as his senator but Torture Boy Lieberman. In fact I once put my vote where my mouth is.

It was in 2000, when a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.

The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.

Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is triggered more or less automatically when a new Waterbury mayor takes office.

During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.

And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.

The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.

Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.

If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.

And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.

Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”

It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.

But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.

Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.

What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)

Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”

She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.

Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?

Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.

Good stuff from Dennis Perrin on the MSM’s current fan-fluttering and attacks of the vapors over Obama’s pastor’s ventures into truth-telling.

In the real world, out where the flag-lapel crowd and the yellow ribbon boys never venture, 9/11 was indeed, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, the result of stupid and provocative actions taken by the United States in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel.

This is not to excuse the 9/11 attacks. They were evil, murderous and unforgivable. But so had been our own actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, over many years and many presidents. There are no good guys in this alley fight. This is essentially what Reverend Wright said, and he was right. Get over it, people.

And go read Perrin’s piece on the Reverend, from whence cometh this:

I've been pretty hard on the Obama campaign, and still am; but if anything would soften my view, it's this bullshit furor over Jeremiah Wright. If you are white and don't listen to black talk radio, now would be a good time to start.

Wright's opinions are not deemed crazy there, and you'll hear much stronger denunciations of imperialism and racism than you ever will on a white liberal's show. Sure, some dementia is present: this is America, after all.

But contrast the opinions exchanged between African-Americans to those expressed on the corporate kabuki programs, or worse, white reactionary broadcasts. Which do you think is closer to what's actually going on?

And speaking of white reactionary programs, here’s Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently back on his meds:

Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him “a race-baiter and a hatemonger.”

The most interesting thing among many interesting things in Iowa last night was Mike Huckabee’s speech. He hit all the right notes, and never a false one.

While none of the Republican candidates stands a chance of winning the White House in November, Huckabee showed himself to be the only one who wouldn’t lose in a landslide of Goldwater or Mondale proportions.

This is because Huckabee appealed to the growing number of voters who have become nostalgic for that outmoded New Testament crap. Big mistake, Mike. The cold-eyed moneylenders who own the Republican Party want somebody who can be counted on to understand that them with the gold, rule.

But Huckabee keeps showing signs of believing in that other Golden Rule, that whole Sermon on the Mount thing. As governor of Arkansas he even tried to follow it now and then, by raising taxes to improve schools and other such heresies. Consequently the party bosses are now set to strangle their strongest candidate in the crib.

They will attack Huckabee mercilessly for being soft on crime, for ignorance of foreign affairs, for preferring peace to war, for lying about his theological credentials, for raising taxes, for graft and corruption as governor. And that’s only the charges for which there is some basis, however slender, in fact.

As we know from the sliming of John McCain in the South Carolina primary eight years ago, however, no relation to truth at all is necessary when the GOP grownups get down to the short strokes.

Huckabee could find himself attacked as a queer, an equal opportunity employer, a pothead, a lush, an immigrant lover, a card-carrying member of the ACLU, a sodomizer of Eagle Scouts or Shetland ponies, an atheist. Or worst of all, a raghead, a haji:

“Would it change your opinion of Governor Huckabee to learn that he worships a Moslem prophet?” the anonymous telephone poller whispers to undecided voters just before the primary. (Hey, you can’t blame the RNC if folks don’t know that Moslems consider Jesus a prophet.)

Count on it. Whatever vile measures may be necessary to destroy a Baptist preacher with suspiciously New Testament tendencies and to throw the nomination to an spectacularly unelectable Mormon billionaire, those measures the GOP leadership is prepared to take.

Grunts in Vietnam had a name for this kind of thing. It was called stepping on your own dick.

H.L. Mencken in The American Mercury of October, 1925, on the occasion of William Jennings Bryan’s death:

Bryan came very near being elected President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee.

The President of the United States doesn't believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, from Smithsville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something — by a narrow margin, but still safely.

That is, so far. The Fundamentalists continue at the wake, and sense gets a sort of reprieve… But it is too early, it seems to me, to send the firemen home; the fire is still burning on many a far-flung hill, and it may begin to roar again at any moment…

Heave an egg out of a Pullman window and you will hit a Fundamentalist almost anywhere in the United States today. They swarm in the country towns, inflamed by their pastors, and with a saint, now, to venerate. They are thick in the mean streets behind the gasworks. They are everywhere that learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds, even the vague, pathetic learning on tap in little red schoolhouses.

They march with the Klan, with the Christian Endeavor Society, with the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, with the Epworth League, with all the rococo bands that poor and unhappy folk organize to bring some light of purpose into their lives. They have had a thrill, and they are ready for more.

Such is Bryan's legacy to his country. He couldn't be President, but he could at least help magnificently in the solemn business of shutting off the Presidency from every intelligent and self-respecting man.

Our friend Neddie over at BNJ put up another fine post last week, “An Atheist at Christmas”. Acknowledging and bewailing the manifold sins and wickednesses of the mass emailing lists of friends, he finds particular excess in a recent one.

In sum, the item forwarded to me was simple intellectual pollution, more goddamned dumbness that cloaks itself as folksy wisdom and makes its forwarder feel virtuous for having passed it on.

Besides the slanders and the untruths, and the profoundly irritating conflation of the concepts of "secular" and "atheist," what was most off-putting about the thing was its general aggrieved tone, as though its author were part of some put-upon minority, an underclass of the righteous who loathe the idea that many people don’t take their religion quite as seriously as the righteous think they ought.

If you’ve been reading John Dean recently, you might have encountered the work of Bob Altemeyer, a research psychologist at the University of Manitoba who studies authoritarian personality types. He’s got decades’ worth of survey information and results; other researchers have both added data and extended the ideas.

Authoritarians include followers as well as the power-hungry. Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as the covariation of three attitudes: conventionality, authoritarian submission, and authoritarian aggression. Conventionality involves conforming to social conventions and believing that others ought to do the same. Authoritarian submission means believing in leaders and authority as the best means of keeping society prosperous. Authoritarian aggression indicates the subset of aggressive tendencies that is disinhibited when it’s perceived to be sanctioned by authority, or would help authority maintain its position.

Altemeyer’s Enemies of Freedom is not as famous as it should be. Admittedly it includes a lot of statistical detail, but the detail builds an argument that covers a lot of ground, makes a lot of sense, and seems to provide useful frameworks for understanding some behavior patterns that often occur among fundamentalists and social conservatives in particular.

Dean’s recent Conservatives Without Conscience brought new attention to Altemeyer’s work, and several surprising facts emerge. He’s managed to get this research done without grants, by using his own money and getting a lot of data from his own students, their parents, and their friends. He has a writing style that has you laughing in the preface, and throughout, despite the density of the numbers. Plus, you quickly begin to trust him, because he tells you so much about his thinking and experimentation: what he surveyed for, how he munged the data, how he interprets the results, where ambiguities continue to exist, and on to the next step.

Thus it’s perhaps not surprising that Enemies of Freedom isn’t so easy to find. In fact there were none at Powell’s or eBay, and I was forced to resort to Amazon. Where I discovered two used copies, one $138, the other $154.

Fortunately, as Professor Altemeyer kindly pointed out in an email, he has an updated version of the content, minus the vast majority of the statistical detail, and thus both shorter and easier to read. I’m half-way through it and I highly recommend it. Oh, and The Authoritarians is free.

Among the most interesting issues Altemeyer examines is the question of why people remain in the relatively closed world that authoritarians must inhabit if they wish to maintain their viewpoint. Many, perhaps most, tend to modify at least some of their views and behavior when they encounter new information. But they generally grow up in a heavily circumscribed world that keeps them safe and gives their lives shape and structure, so they have no reason to leave it, or to disbelieve its tenets.

Of course many people grow up in such situations and rebel, or suffer inner dichotomies, or simply lose the ability to reconcile everything and give up. Those whom Altemeyer’s scale labels High Right-Wing Authoritarians, however, feel comfortable there. (By the way, there could also be left-wing authoritarians, who instead of submitting to established authority would submit to revolutionary authority. But there aren’t nearly as many of them as there are RWAs, nor does Altemeyer’s scale directly look for them.)

After looking at several possible explanations, Altemeyer’s data led him to conclude that two factors dominate in the backgrounds of authoritarians. First, they see the world as a very dangerous place, with possibilities for disaster looming around every corner. Second, they see themselves as upholding the Good and the Right as opposed to all those folks who don’t hue to the same high standards they perceive themselves to follow.

Thus they have reason to be frightened, plus aggressive impulses against those who appear to deserve censure, which are inhibited by their strong need to conform to social convention. They need reinforcement to tell them that they’re still in the group; they get a thrill from thumbing their noses at those they figure will in some sense get Left Behind; and they’re often insufferably hypocritical.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing Altemeyer discovered, though, was how frequently such people modified their views with experience, which turned out to be the strongest factor in determining attitudes, stronger than parents and upbringing or religion. For instance, many students entering college are emerging from their parents’ world for the first time, and bring with them the attitudes that worked in that world, and predicted what would happen. They may have been taught that sex is bad, or that homosexual folks are scuzzy and evil; then they have sex, or they meet someone who’s homosexual, and discover that what they’ve been taught isn’t true.

People do change. As Bishop Tutu says, every situation is capable of transfiguration.

It only recently occurred to me that the golden arches on McDonald’s were actually the letter M. So no doubt I am the last person in America who failed to decode the title of Bush’s attempt to destroy public education.

My Duh! moment came a few minutes ago when I read this article on a Christo-porno-violence video game in which our little tykes can roam the virtual streets of New York, killing “Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state — especially moderate, mainstream Christians.”

The game is called Left Behind: Eternal Forces, and it is based on the Christo-porno-violence best-sellers in the Left Behind series — 14 novels written in Christ’s name by two gentle souls named Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye.

For details on these vicious, bloodsoaked novels of the Apocalypse, visit Slacktivist, a blog on which one-time Baptist seminarian Fred Clark undertakes an exegesis of the series. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

The basic plot line is that good guys like Huckabee and Falwell are zipped up from this earth on a Heavenly Express, leaving behind bad guys like you and me to be forever consumed by flames.

Just as the good child is home- or church-schooled and the bad child is left behind to rot in underfunded, decertified public schools.

Here we learn that crickets in Utah are already living the Republican dream:

But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.

Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.

“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”

Mike Huckabee, previously thought to be the closest thing to a humanoid among the GOP hopefuls, has stepped back into line with this:

”Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

Or it might be that trillions of potential lettuce pickers and hotel maids have been washed out of the sheets of American teenage boys by their mothers before the little pre-born tykes could be implanted in high school girls.

Then again, it might be that more than a million additional proles would have been in our minimum-wage workforce if not for the holocaust of True Love Waits. My goodness, Pastor Huckabee’s Southern Baptist Convention alone has extracted virginity pledges from more than 2,500,000 hot-blooded teens.

Unless you subscribe to the Atlantic, you may not know the details of former White House speechwriter Matthew Scully’s hissy fit over former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson hogging the credit for Bush’s silver tongue.

But all you need to know about this inconsequential matter can be found in Sidney Blumenthal’s posting today on The Smirking Chimp. Actually all you need to know can be found in hundreds of restrooms all over America, where poetry lovers have indited these words:

A man’s ambition

Must be small

To write his name

On a shithouse wall.

Or, as Blumenthal puts it less succinctly:

Scully’s memoir is unusual in the annals of Washington tell-alls. Typically, the disillusioned narrator wishes to distance himself from failure, assign blame to others or expiate his guilt. Scully, however, desperately wants to claim his proper share of credit for the Bush catastrophe.

While he accuses the devout Gerson of bad faith, he never quite recognises why Gerson’s credit-hogging has seemed so plausible. Whether or not Gerson wrote what he claimed to have written, the orotund, purple prose that is his style is completely consistent with Bush’s high-flown rhetoric.

Phrases like “axis of evil” mark Bush’s language as a torrent of incoherence, arrogance and fanaticism. But the stupidity of the ideas is no hindrance to the fight over pride of authorship …

The conflict between Matthew Scully and Michael Gerson (below) is a clash between two cardinal sins: the bearer of envy meets the bearer of false witness. Scully is transparently envious of the rewards bestowed on Gerson by the Washington Post Corp — both Post and Newsweek columns — suggesting a payoff to a source, an unreliable one at that.

Gary Wills has written an interesting article in the New York Review of Books entitled “A Country Ruled by Faith”. Two paragraphs in particular struck a chord.

Charles Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote: “We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible… God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers.” Jerry Falwell put it succinctly in 2004: “God is pro-war.” For some evangelicals, this was a war against the enemies of Israel, who are by definition anti-God. The evangelical writer Tim LaHaye called it, therefore, “a focal point of end-time events.” For others, it was a chance to spread Christianity to the infidels. An article syndicated on the Southern Baptist Convention’s wire service said that “American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the inventor of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” agreed.

This has so many problems it’s hard to know what to ridicule first.

It certainly appears that this is the God of the Old Testament, since it’s difficult to imagine the New Testament God battling with people who oppose him. Earlier, Wills talked at length about General Boykin, famous for his confidence that the US will win the war against Islam because “I knew my God was bigger than his” (which doesn’t explain his failures in the “Black Hawk Down” clash and the 1980 attempted rescue of Iranian-held American hostages — or perhaps God battles Democratic Presidents as well). Boykin has also said that Bush is President despite having lost the vote because God put him in office.

But if Boykin’s God is so big, why does he have to battle human beings? And how stupid do you have to be to believe that bombing people opens their hearts to your Gospel? Stupid enough to support Bush, I suppose.

In any case, I was reminded of Gibbon’s description, in his inimitable quietly sarcastic tone, of holy wars.

So familiar, and as it were so natural, to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility. But the name and nature of an holy war demands a more rigorous scrutiny; nor can we hastily believe that the servants of the Prince of Peace would unsheath the sword of destruction, unless the motives were pure, the quarrel legitimate, and the necessity inevitable. The policy of an action may be determined from the tardy lessons of experience; but before we act, our conscience should be satisfied of the justice and propriety of our enterprise.

Apparently the right-wing so-called Christians have consciences that are easily satisfied, as long as Halliburton and Bechtel are making enormous war profits.

Still, one problem remains.

There is a particular danger with a war that God commands. What if God should lose? That is unthinkable to the evangelicals. They cannot accept the idea of second-guessing God, and he was the one who led them into war. Thus, in 2006, when two thirds of the American people told pollsters that the war in Iraq was a mistake, the third of those still standing behind it were mainly evangelicals (who make up about one third of the population). It was a faith-based certitude.

Those Mississippians who are not actually proud of their state’s legendary backwardness are apt to say, when the subject comes up, “Thank God for Alabama.” In the same spirit, all Americans will be proud to learn that the Turks, it appears, are even dumber than us.

What I think is that we should leave them behind.

I’ve come to realize that my attitude toward the dispensationalists and the reconstructionists is pretty much the same as their attitude toward me: I’m happy to leave them to what they want, while I move on to reality.

They are looking forward to the moment in which their deluded fantasies of hate are actualized by a loving God, so they can laugh as the people who made fun of their stupidity are cast into a lake of fire. This is what their intelligence has distilled from the doctrine of loving your enemy.

In other words, they hate me and want to hurt me, but they have neither the brains nor the balls to do it themselves, so they pray to God to do it for them. (Somehow, I don’t find that particularly threatening.)

Still, amazingly enough, I can’t find it in my heart to want to hurt them. All I want is for them to suffer the consequences of their beliefs.

I don’t want them to starve, or die of preventable diseases. But I wouldn’t give them food, or medicine, or medical care, or even hospice care. Let them grow their own food, if they can figure out how. Let them evolve — oops, I mean intelligently design — their own medical procedures. Let them live the life they imagine, while we construct a just society.

What humanity cannot afford is to have these so-called Christians influencing public policy. Since I’m against capital punishment, I can’t really advocate machine-gunning them, although from the practical point of view that’s the most logical.

But I can feel perfectly comfortable with leaving them behind. If they choose to accept reality — like calculus and evolution and the inherent superiority of intelligence — then they’re acceptable in my world. Otherwise, not.

File this one under “it’s about time”. I really hope this guy wins his lawsuit because Fred Phelps and his flock of homophobes have been behaving disgracefully.

On Friday, July 7, Army 1st Lieutenant Forrest P. Ewens was buried at a respectful ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, which many consider to be the most hallowed ground in the United States.

But the peace was disrupted by protests from members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. In a cordoned-off area by the entrance to the cemetery, they carried signs with anti-gay and anti-American slogans and proclaimed that Ewens’ death in Afghanistan on June 16 was another sign of God’s impeding doom on the nation.

Westboro has taken what it calls “love crusades” to military funerals across the country. The church was not protesting at the funeral because Ewens was gay, but because he died, in their view, serving a country that has incurred the wrath of God by accepting and tolerating homosexuality.

Now the father of a slain serviceman whose funeral was disrupted is suing the church in an attempt to fight back against what he views as the abuse of military families with a message of hate.

Via Capitol Hill Blue.

There are signs out there many Christians aren’t behind the neocon agenda and they’re speaking out. I’ve never doubted the fundies were a small minority of Christians, but now the majority seem to be gaining their voice.

Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

(read more)

Take a look at this turd that Bush slipped into America’s punchbowl while we weren’t paying enough attention:

James Leon Holmes, nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas, says it straight out in an article: “It is not coincidental that the feminist movement brought with it artificial contraception … To the extent we adopt the feminist principle that the distinction between the sexes is of no consequence and should be disregarded in the organization of society and the Church, we are contributing to the culture of death.” His stated solution is that “ … the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband.”

Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent letter to George W. Bush is an interesting document, very similar in tone to one that Jimmy Carter sent to the Ayatollah Khomeini during the hostage crisis. In both cases, the recipient of the letter is held to be confused about the tenets of his own religion, and so the sender kindly offers to correct him.

This time it is the Iranian who is the passive-aggressive one, speaking more in sorrow than in anger. Ahmadinejad wants Bush to understand that they are both on the same team — intolerant theocrats at heart after all — so why can’t we just hang out together and be pals?

I found myself agreeing with the overwhelming majority of Ahmadinejad’s arguments, and I don’t doubt that most of you will, too. The two presidents are interchangeable control freaks, their religious beliefs an accident of geography. The best that can be wished for each of them is speedy removal from office followed by a long retirement spent in neglect and disgrace.

We’ve finally managed to get hold of a photograph showing George W. Bush, the prominent Methodist, in the actual act of receiving divine guidance. God is shown at upper left.

New poll of college students:

In a finding that surprised the institute, 50 percent said the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina raised questions of morality.

Now I’m really looking forward to reading Kevin Phillips’s new book, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, a title that veritably rolls off the tongue.

Phillips, you’ll recall, has some credibility with the right due to his past contributions to Republicanism. His 1967 book The Emerging Republican Majority was a must read for early movement conservatives. In recent years he’s become a strong critic of the direction that movement has taken.

In his Washington Post article, “How the GOP Became God’s Own Party”, Phillips displays a bit of the zeal of a convert, but he makes some solid points.

The United States has organized much of its military posture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks around the protection of oil fields, pipelines and sea lanes. But U.S. preoccupation with the Middle East has another dimension. In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits — oil and biblical expectations — require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary — fascinating but appalling — is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.

President Bush has promoted these alignments, interest groups and their underpinning values. His family, over multiple generations, has been linked to a politics that conjoined finance, national security and oil. In recent decades, the Bushes have added close ties to evangelical and fundamentalist power brokers of many persuasions.

You gotta admit, he calls ’em as he sees ’em.

The American heartland, from Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to Ohio and the Appalachian coal states, has become (along with the onetime Confederacy) an electoral hydrocarbon coalition. It cherishes sport-utility vehicles and easy carbon dioxide emissions policy, and applauds preemptive U.S. airstrikes on uncooperative, terrorist-coddling Persian Gulf countries fortuitously blessed with huge reserves of oil.

Of the 99 requests at the SF library for a copy of his book, I’m number 58. The web site says they have seven copies, with two more on the way. So it will probably take two to four months for the book to reach me, at which point it won’t be the hot topic any more. I expect to blog about it anyway; for one thing, I’ll already know what lots of other people said, so maybe some new synthesis will present itself.

Anyone else interested in reading the book? If so, we could synchronize our reading of chapters and post a running conversation here at BA.

What a dissertation, by a self-described Messianic Jew at Pat Robertson’s Regent University, looks like. It aims to prove that throughout the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, justices have ruled according to their official religious labels. From the book review:

Sekulow’s reliance on Waite’s faith to prove that Waite was influenced by religion here comes uncomfortably close to the old saw about the rabbi who proposes to prove from a biblical source that Abraham wore a yarmulke: “The Torah tells us that ’Abraham set forth.’ And would our forefather Abraham have set forth without a yarmulke?”

Preposting update: I’m not sure whether Sekulow’s or Mojecki’s individual creepiness is worse, but I sure hope that’s not the denomination Mrs. Batard is dragging Buck to this weekend! (Yes, they want a year of birth and zip code.)

Down in Decatur, Alabama, an editor is incensed:

The headline on a news article in Wednesday’s newspaper said, “Alabama House GOP blocks vote on Bible class bill.”

The headline is correct because Republican House members Tuesday prevented a Democratic bill from coming up for debate that would name “The Bible as Literature” as an acceptable text for an elective course in public high schools.

The bill and vote caught Republicans between the rock and a hard place they are so adept at placing Democrats.

Knowing their usual opposition to issues that mix religion and government, it's difficult to imagine Democrats being serious about the bill.

But Republicans knew that if they joined in supporting it, they would hand Democrats one of their bedrock issues, which they figured is the motive behind the bill.

Thus, Republicans voted to stop it from consideration, which also gives Democrats an issue Republicans laid claim to long ago.

“They are going to take this vote and mail it out and say we were against the Bible,” GOP House member Micky Hammon of Decatur lamented.

Meanwhile, in England, the Guardian muses seriously:

People’s cherished religious values are best not subjected to public scrutiny in the same way that the foibles of public officials and politicians are. This is imprudent for a newspaper known for its undaunted commitment to coverage of grassroots issues affecting minorities and the majority of people in the country.

Fifteen years ago someone wrote seriously:

Schizophrenic individuals who claim to have had a mystical experience are similar to other schizophrenic individuals in that they:

1. do not feel any greater control over their experiences than other schizophrenics;
2. do not experience a greater since of coping ability than other schizophrenics;
3. do not experience any more improvement in their relationships than other schizophrenics;
4. experience terror, fear, depression, and a sense of insecurity.

Schizophrenic individuals who claim to have had a mystical experience differ from other schizophrenic individuals in that they:

1. are more likely to have experienced a sense of unity, oneness, or connectedness in the world;
2. report more of a range of affective experiences, and are more likely to have experienced joyful, peaceful states of consciousness;
3. are more likely to report time-space distortions;
4. experience more of a sense of sacredness or holiness;
5. are more likely to see their experiences as valid and meaningful than other schizophrenics”.

Meanwhile, in America, if a modern day Hitler is ever to rise up, he might just come flying in on Jesus’ donkey rather than his elephant.

Yes indeed. Pigs and Elephants can fly. Maybe Donkeys can too.