Links With Your Coffee - Monday
- The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us - New York Times
I think it safe to say that 90% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats are 'good Germans'. What do you think?By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page. - Looking Up From the Gutter: Philosophy and Popular Culture - Chronicle.com
- Shown the Door at the White HouseSome like free speech only if it's polite and serves their agenda, ah, but then it's not really free, is it?
- The Rockies Pitch Religion
Then there are the fans. I spoke with journalist Tom Krattenmaker, who has studied the connection between religion and sports. Krattenmaker said, "I have concerns about what this Christianization of the Rockies means for the community that supports the team in and around Denver--a community in which evangelical Christians are probably a minority, albeit a large and influential one. Taxpayers and ticket-buyers in a religiously diverse community have a right not to see their team--a quasi-public resource--used for the purpose of advancing a specific form of religion. Have the Colorado Rockies become a faith-based organization? This can be particularly problematic when the religion in question is one that makes exclusive claims and sometimes denigrates the validity of other belief systems."
- Pharyngula: I may have to get this
Comments
My favorite Part of the "Good Germans" article
And the 90% repub/70% demo number sounds fairly reasonable. I was going to say that the democrat support started at 70% and then has dropped since the start of the war, but I'm not sure if that's entirely true of the national population of democrats. Watching online blogs and discussions, I think the small demographic has become more frustrated for more reasons, but I'm not sure the number of people have really changed their stance on what to do about "bad guys". Perhaps 5% of democrats have changed from supporters to vocal critics on the "war on terra".
This doesn't mean the war in Iraq mind you, which polls say support went from somewhere from 90% to now below 50%. I think that a majority of the population still sees torture and suspension of habeus corpus as necessary to stop "terra".
I'm assuming you mean Congress, Norm. In that case, yes, 90/70 is about right. Among the people, however, I really think there is far more wisdom: I'd say it's more like 50/35 among the electorate.
If, among the "Good Germans" one counts the more-or-less disinterested members of the public, I'd put the numbers at about 80/55. This means that Daily Rev is right, but he's only right about people who bother to keep track of what is going on at all concerning the issues discussed in Frank Rich's column. Almost half the electorate doesn't much care what the Bush administration is doing about torture, rendition, or Blackwater, etc. With many people (maybe most people), the war in Iraq is unpopular only because they finally figured out that it was never going as well as the Bush administration kept saying it was. The specifics of torture, killing by mercenaries, the trashing of habeas corpus - they wouldn't much care if they still believed "mission accomplished". During a visit last January, my sister-in-law asked me when these subjects came up, "How can you be so angry?", to which I replied, "How can you NOT be angry?"
If you haven't seen it yet, you should look up the documentary "Taxi to the Darkside". There is a clip here.
http://www.whydemocracy.net/home?PHPSESSID=0a7c1aaef36c604a1514f3f355e334fc
It shows how the torture is not an aberration or just a few black sheep, but is the Bush regime's policy, especially prized by Rumsfeld and Cheney.
@Tim:
Yeah, you said what I was trying to say, only better, which isn't hard sometimes
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