Republican family values

The next time some blowhard Republican tries to tell you that conservatives are all about moral values and that today's decadent teenagers are the product of liberalism, direct them to this story, out of Georgia:

Another attack on Hispanic reported

Seems a claque of well-to-do white kids from Cherokee County decided earlier this year to prey on Guatemalan immigrant laborers because they typically carried cash and were unlikely to report the robberies. They'd pick them up at the usual day-laborer hangouts, take them out to the sticks, beat the crap out of them and threaten them with death.

Five youths, all of whom attended Cherokee High School in Canton, were charged in the Feb. 2-3 attacks on two day laborers, in which they robbed the men of paltry sums. These kids weren't white trash who needed the money in any event.

No, as an earlier story makes clear, these kids were from well-known and well-off local families -- so much so that two judges and the local prosecutor had to recuse themselves in the case:

In 2003, Scott Cagle, an uncle of Ben Cagle's, made a $400 campaign contribution to Mills, according to campaign disclosure reports.

When District Attorney Garry Moss removed his office as prosecutor three weeks ago, he said it was because of his acquaintance with members of Ben Cagle's extended family. Ben Cagle's grandparents are founding members of Cherokee's Republican Party and remain active in civic and cultural affairs.

These kids did it not for money but seemingly for "kicks". In the South, though, such claims of mere frolicry have a history of covering for acts of racial terrorism -- otherwise known as hate crimes.

Indeed, that concern was raised locally:

Hispanic community advocates want prosecutors to add hate-crime charges because of the way the boys characterized their actions. A hate-crime conviction can add up to five years to any sentence. The next grand jury announcement of indictments will be in April.

Wheeler told police he and the other boys targeted the Guatemalans because they knew Hispanics usually carried cash, the chief of detectives testified.

"It was easy money," Trifilo said, summarizing Wheeling's explanation.

It's worth noting that there are real problems with the prosecutor's rationale in not pursuing such charges.

Blaming these attacks on an economic motive is not very credible, considering the tiny sums obtained (the entire spree netted about $570) as well as the economic backgrounds of the perpetrators. In fact, there is a distinct lack of a serious economic motive in this case -- which is, in fact, one of the earmarks of a bias-motivated crime.

Another indicator -- in some states, it constitutes the very definition of a bias crime -- is the intentional selection of the victims by their race. That this occurred was unquestionable, and in fact at one point the kids apparently bragged about "robbing Mexicans."

Moreover, an economic motive doesn't in itself rule out a bias motivation as well. The question is whether investigators knew what to look for and how to get it, or whether it even crossed their radar.

In an event, regardless of any hate-crime element, it's always nice to see good Republican moral values being instilled in today's youths.

[Thanks to Rick in my comments.]

Republican racial values

The next time some Republican blowhard wonders aloud why blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democratic, you can just point them to this story:

NAACP flap resurfaces with Yow T-shirt

To hear Commissioner Billy Yow tell it, it's just a shirt.

In fact, he said, it's a shirt he's been hawking quietly for eight months now that just happens to feature a character urinating on the letters "NAACP," a reference to the national civil rights group.

But the shirt has created a buzz, thanks largely to prominent mention in a new local weekly tabloid affiliated with another county commissioner, and it could resurrect old feuds involving race, politics and the county's elected governing board.

"If someone labels me a racist, that's just their narrow-mindedness," Yow, who is white, told a group of reporters gathered in front of his house Wednesday afternoon.

The shirt uses the stars-and-bars design of the Confederate battle emblem, which has been labeled by some, including chapters of the NAACP, as a racist emblem. It is touted by others as a symbol of Southern pride and heritage.

Yow called the design "a symbol of freedom."

The shirt, Yow said, was an exercise of free speech originally prompted by his 2003 battle with local NAACP chapters that led to calls for his removal.

"I'm still not over it," Yow said of the fight. "God forgives; Billy Yow don't."

And what was the dispute about? It was about Yow openly discriminating against any NAACP member in a hiring matter. "NAACP member" being a euphemism for ... well, you know.

The shirt's history is rooted in last year's search for a new county manager and Yow's assertion that Alston, who was then chairman of the board, wanted to find an NAACP member for the post. Yow was quoted in February 2003 as saying that he wouldn't vote to hire an NAACP member "unless he was very overly qualified."

That and other comments sparked protests from local chapters of the NAACP and a vote by the county commissioners that Yow interpreted as a censure. The board eventually rescinded that move after Yow filed a lawsuit.

Yow eventually dropped the suit, and the county hired Willie Best, who is black, as county manager.

Yow's racial bias couldn't be any clearer -- and his wink-and-nudge act isn't fooling anyone.

He is, of course, a GOP stalwart.

[ Thanks to a complete bunch of pants, via Frograbbitmonkey.]

Lucky us

I mentioned yesterday that there has been a recent uptick in right-wing domestic terrorism, ranging from the Texas cyanide bomb case to the Florida man who planned a bombing spree against abortion clinics and gay bars.

What's noteworthy is that, so far, we have been very fortunate in all these cases, which have been cracked by happenstance (especially in the Krar case) and watchful citizens -- not because of crack work by law enforcement, whose emphasis, as we have seen, has shifted away from domestic terrorism.

An older case of domestic terrorism -- dating from an incident and arrest that occurred in early 2002, but which went utterly unnoticed in the press -- is now coming to light, and the story underscores, again, just how lucky we've been.

According to this report in the Tennessean, a sharp-eyed citizen likely prevented a Buford Furrow wannabe from shooting up a Jewish children's school in Nashville back in January 2002:

On this leafy street in Nashville's Richland neighborhood, Smith could study the Jewish school while traffic was forced to squeeze past him awkwardly on the right. One of those passing motorists saw the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle on Smith's lap, the barrel pointed toward the school.

The motorist in a white car watched as Smith gestured to him. Smith drove forward, made a U-turn and eventually pulled onto West End Avenue. By then, the driver had noted the Contour's license plate and flagged down a Metro police officer.

By midafternoon, Michael Smith was in custody, starting a legal case that ended yesterday with his sentencing in federal court.

Immediately after his capture on Jan. 4, 2002, local police and federal agents started peeling away the layers of the former paramedic's life. They found live hand grenades, pipe bombs, boxes and boxes of ammunition, right-wing hate literature and military manuals detailing sniper techniques.

Ah well. Just another "isolated incident", right?

Meanwhile, in Boston, a neo-Nazi's threat against black bus drivers threw a scare into the transit system:

MBTA cops alerted area police last night to be on the lookout for a car carrying a white man who threatened to blow up every bus he saw with a black driver.

"This is a very serious incident to us, not only because of the threat to blow up a bus, but because of the racial overtone of the threat,'' MBTA police Lt. Robert Lenehan said.

... The man claimed to be a member of the Aryan Nation and used a racial slur as he threatened to blow up any bus with a black driver. Then he got back into the car, and it sped off.

Yeah, but, see, it can't be terrorism. These were Americans. Right?

"Who cares what you think?"

Self-admitted regular schmoo Bill Hangley finally comes forward to talk about his brief encounter with George W. Bush, which produced probably the Bushism to end all Bushisms:

A church picnic in Philadelphia, designed to help George W. Bush promote his faith-based policies. I was working at the time for a local nonprofit that had helped set it up, but I had some serious misgivings about the president's performance up to that point, and being a part of the whole operation had left me feeling a bit like a pseudo-person. So when I had the chance to shake Bush's hand, I said, "Mr. President, I'm very disappointed in your work so far. I hope you only serve four years."

His smiling response was swift: "Who cares what you think?"

I agree with Hangley that the quote ought to be appearing on T-shirts, preferably at Bush appearances. (Of course, anyone wearing one would be automatically sent to the "First Amendment zone.")

And now, as November approaches, I have to thank the president for pointing me toward exactly the right question. The voters won't go to the polls thinking only of war or taxes or moral clarity. They'll be asking themselves, "Does Bush care what I think?"

The only appropriate answer to which, of course, would be a smirk.

What I've been doing instead of blogging

I've been a bad boy, I know.

A note

By the way, has anyone else observed the profoundly anti-democratic sentiment that underpins the neoconservative spin about the outcome of the Spanish election?

At the base of the contention that the defeat of Aznar constituted "appeasement" is the belief that the voters didn't know what they were doing. That "democracy" (as these thugs define it) is too important to be left in the hands of voters.

That, of course, along with the intimations that the Spanish elections should have been postponed. (For what? A good dose of spin?) Somehow I wonder if we'll be hearing that rationale again.

Getting Serious About Terror

One of the realities highlighted by last week's terrorism attacks in Spain -- and largely overlooked by the press -- is the fact that domestic terrorism is largely indistinguishable from international terrorism in terms of the damage that it can inflict -- and that focusing on one at the expense of the other leaves a nation truly vulnerable to lethal violence.

This was driven home by the way the Spanish government immediately tried to blame the attacks on the separatist ETA -- a domestic group -- instead of al Qaeda, who now appear to be the real culprits:

Beginning immediately after the blasts, Aznar and other officials telephoned journalists, stressing ETA's responsibility and dismissing speculation that Islamic extremists might be involved. Spanish diplomats pushed a hastily drafted resolution blaming ETA through the U.N. Security Council. At an afternoon news conference, when a reporter suggested the possibility of an al Qaeda connection, the interior minister, Angel Acebes, angrily denounced it as "a miserable attempt to disrupt information and confuse people."

"There is no doubt that ETA is responsible," Acebes said.

Within days, that assertion was in tatters, and with it the reputation and fortunes of the ruling party. Suspicion that the government manipulated information -- blaming ETA in order to divert any possible link between the bombings and Aznar's unpopular support for the war in Iraq -- helped fuel the upset victory of the Socialist Workers' Party in Sunday's elections. By then, Islamic extremists linked to al Qaeda had become the focus of the investigation.

With a seemingly bottomless capacity for callousness, right-wing pundits and warbloggers have been quick to blame the Spanish voters for supposedly capitulating to the terrorists by giving them their desired election result. The iterations of this noxious claim have been too numerous to list here, but are embodied by David Brooks' recent NYT column:

The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.

What is the Spanish word for appeasement?

As Retrogrouch points out, this kind of argument is not just outrageously thoughtless, it is simply wrong on the facts. The Times' own reportage gives a much clearer and more honest picture of what was on Spanish voters' minds:

At the bus and train terminal at Plaza de la Castilla in northern Madrid, Alberto Martín, a 31-year-old nuclear physicist who voted Socialist, said, "If the government had said, `We don't know who did it,' nothing would have happened and Zapatero would not be there. Aznar was making decisions without any consideration for people's concerns. Look at the war in Iraq. Aznar thought he was God! There was no dialogue."

The election, Mr. Martín added, "is a victory for the people, not for terrorism. You see, I'm now going to take the train."

Of course, the right-wing smear of Spanish voters serves precisely one purpose only: To set the stage in America for the Bush re-election campaign's talking points attacking John Kerry for his supposed weakness on national security. It's meant to work in tandem with the equally noxious "terrorists want to see Kerry win" meme.

And as it happens, their inability to understand -- or to honestly characterize -- the real reasons for the Spanish election outcome points precisely to Republicans' substantial vulnerability on exactly the issue of national security.

Because, just like the Spanish government, Bush and the GOP have sold the electorate a bill of goods on a "war on terror" that has come up substantially short in making the "homeland" more secure -- and has, in fact, more substantially increased the likelihood of being vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence.

This was, in essence, the rationale for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, certainly a military response is fully justified, since the state connection to terrorism is clear and unmistakable. In the case of Iraq, however, that connection remains far from clear; though at one time I thought evidence existed to suggest such a connection, it has become painfully clear since that any Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism, particularly al Qaeda, was thin at best.

More to the point, however, is the fact that by making the "War on Terror" primarily a military operation and only secondarily (at best) a matter for law enforcement and intelligence, the Bush administration is focusing on only a rather narrow part of the terrorism spectrum. (Even on those terms, as Matt Yglesias has ably demonstrated, Bush's execution of the "war on terror" has in fact largely consisted of smoke, mirrors, shock and awe.)

The reality: Terrorism is a global phenomenon. It takes the shape not of a singular or even related ideology, but the idiosyncratic form of whatever extremism gives it birth. It is amorphous, and highly corpuscular, sometimes effectively emanating from extremely small groups or even individuals. And it is every bit as alive and well in America as it is in the Middle East.

This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. As Robert Wright observes in Part 3 of his insightful series in Slate, "A Real War on Terrorism":

We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally a "meme" -- a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme, and the Bush administration has done some of that effectively. But some forms of killing and arresting -- especially the kinds that get us bad publicity -- do so much to spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss. ... The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

Rephrased in these terms, the point I've been trying to drive home is that, for technological reasons, memes are getting faster and slipperier. The information age is doing for these "viruses of the mind" what dense urban living and interurban transport did for biological pathogens during the late Middle Ages. (The result of humankind's failure to reckon with this was the Black Death.) And few things drive terrorism memes farther and faster over their new electronic conduits than doing an ill-thought-out job of neutralizing people already "infected."

Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.

This, as it happens, appears to be the smart approach to terrorism that is being advocated by none other than John Kerry, though of course it is being demagogued by the Bush campaign and its apologists as being solely about law enforcement.

Nearly all the smart folk on the left side of the blogosphere have been urging Kerry to take the debate on national security to Bush, to turn the assault on Kerry as weak on it head, and attack the administration for its very real miscalculations and missteps in this arena: Atrios, Josh Marshall, and Daily Kos are only among the foremost in the blogosphere making this point.

If Kerry is going to do this, one of the most effective ways he can make this point is to talk about domestic terrorism -- because the Bush administration's extraordinarily weak record on that front exposes in a concrete way that everyone can understand just how phony its "war on terror" (and accompanying rationale for the invasion of Iraq) really is.

It would not take much to drive this point home. The Kerry campaign could easily point to Bush's serious lapses in handling domestic terrorism as symptomatic of the real shortcomings of his approach to "homeland security":

-- The fall 2001 anthrax attacks, for which no one has yet been apprehended.

-- The Texas cyanide bomb case.

-- The ricin attack on the Senate.

-- Various cases of right-wing domestic terrorism since Sept. 11, ranging from plots to attack abortion clinics and gay bars to the bombing of local racial-relations offices.

As I've discussed previously, the Bush record is such that it is becoming clear that Americans are more vulnerable than ever to domestic terrorism, particularly since it is likewise evident the extremist right intends to "piggyback" off attacks committed by international terrorists -- and yet federal law enforcement's emphasis remains almost entirely on international terrorism. Even when a disturbingly dangerous case like the Texas cyanide bombers emerges, it is relegated to insignificance -- and so poorly handled that FBI investigators fail to even contact their own offices where leads might appear.

Even conservative news organizations like UPI have noticed. A recent op-ed piece on the wire service titled "Outside View: Who is William Krar?" points up many of the same problems observed here as well:

Even more astounding is the stony silence from the Ashcroft Justice Department, which found at least 2,295 occasions to toot its own horn that are apparently more newsworthy than the Krar arrest.

"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities," a Justice Department spokesman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Really? This is from a Justice Department that averages two news releases every day and has never been shy to march out every triumph over the arrest or conviction of anyone remotely connected to overseas terror.

No, this Justice Department is obsessed with thinking about how they announce their activities. And that is what is so intriguing about this arrest and the conspicuous lack of comment from Ashcroft.

It is, to quote another famous crime fighter, reminiscent of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," said Inspector Gregory. "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

What throws the Bush administration's miserable handling of domestic terrorism into stark relief is those few cases in which the government has tooted the "domestic terrorism" horn in making arrests -- all of which have involved so-called "eco-terrorists," such as the recent arrest of "Tre Arrow" up in Victoria. Especially noteworthy in that recent AP story was this point:

The FBI lists the ELF as its No. 1 domestic terrorism priority.

This is a crystalline example of the gross skewing of priorities for both law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with terrorism that has been a hallmark of the Bush regime.

While eco-terrorists are a serious problem, and deserve certainly serious prosecution under the law, the level of threat they represent is proportionally so much less than that from the far-right "Patriot" movement and white supremacists as to raise serious questions about the priorities of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly it is worth observing, as does It's a Crock, that "eco-terrorist" Jeff Luers -- who torched three SUVs and took care to do so when it was unlikely anyone would be harmed -- is serving a 22-year prison sentence, while William Krar -- who built a cyanide bomb designed to kill perhaps a hundred people or more -- is facing a mere 15 years. When left-wing terrorists begin actually killing and maiming people and blowing up federal buildings with day cares inside them, or even plotting to do so, perhaps then they will deserve the kind of focus being accorded them under the Bush and Ashcroft style of governance.

Moreover, lest anyone think that the American far right is incapable of serious damage and not really in al Qaeda's class, it's probably useful to recall that before Sept. 11, the most lethal terrorist attack on American soil was committed by American right-wing extremists, with a toll similar to Spain's recent losses.

And contrary to those who argue that an emphasis on law enforcement is inadequate, the reality is that a one-two punch of intelligence and law enforcement is extraordinarily effective in stopping terrorism, at least domestically. One of the points that emerged from my in-depth work for MSNBC on domestic terrorism was that of the 40-plus cases of serious domestic terrorism we identified as arising in the 1995-2000 period, the vast majority had in fact been nipped in the bud by law enforcement before the would-be terrorists could act, largely through effective intelligence-gathering and aggressive arrests and prosecution. There is no reason this same approach would not be effective on a global scale -- unless, of course, one was allergic to cooperating with the very concept of international law enforcement.

In many ways, the American situation is a kind of reverse mirror image of Spain's: Were domestic terrorists to actually strike on U.S. soil, the government would be eager to blame the attack on international terrorists -- as was, in fact, the case with the anthrax terrorist. Just as with Spain's Aznar, Bush's handling of terrorism has instead revolved around invading Iraq -- a diversion, by nearly any standard, from a serious and comprehensive assault on terrorism.

But unlike in Spain, hardly anyone has bothered to point out the flaws in that approach to the voters. John Kerry would be smart to do so.

Tamper, tamper

Down in my comments, Marty Heldt chimes in with a thoroughly detailed response on the question just raised: Have George W. Bush's military records been tampered with or altered?

Yes. I believe they have.

The recent White House dumping of several hundred pages of George W Bush's National Guard documents had the desired effect of both quieting and muddying the sea of questions surrounding his long ago service. Most journalists simply looked at the mess and they moved on.

But that puddle of papers also raised the eyebrows of those who have observed the periodic airing of Bush's files through an evolving series of releases. Among them was Mimi Swartz who, in a recent New York Times column [key extracts here] noted of this "disconcerting" progression, "that each election cycle comes with a new set of 'complete' documents."

Simply put, this shifting history has fueled widespread speculation that George W Bush somehow concealed, changed or altered his records.

Indeed, we have no need to speculate. There is clear evidence that George W Bush's records have seen changes.

In early 1999 the Bush campaign enlisted the services of an old friend, Albert Lloyd, to help sort through the gaps and holes in the candidate's records. But Lloyd's long years as top personnel officer of the Texas Air National Guard weren't enough fit all the pieces together. After his search was completed there were still uneasy gaps and discrepancies to account for.

But Lloyd did make a few discoveries in his search of Texas records. These were the three documents, one "torn" undated document and two general orders from April and May of 1973, first described by Walter Robinson in a May 2000 article for the Boston Globe. And now, thanks to James Moore's new book Bush's War For Re-election, we have a further confirmation from Albert Lloyd about his discovery of these documents in an old box at Camp Mabry near Austin Texas. "I found it in a general orders file. It wasn't a part of his personal file," Lloyd stated to Moore. Adding further emphasis to his discovery, Lloyd continued, "these were general Guard records, not Bush's records."

These "found" documents are important because they served as the Bush campaign's sole evidence of any Guard service performed by Bush between April 30th of 1972 and May 1st of 1973. The Bush campaign then shopped these documents around to several sources during the 2000 presidential campaign. Those who were given access included Jo Thomas, then with the New York Times, and Peter Keating, then with George magazine. Both writers used the documents found by Lloyd to establish some duty for Bush in this questioned period.

I obtained both the "torn" document and the May general orders document in the packet I received in August of 2000 as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request.

To ascertain that these documents had not been included in earlier FOIA releases I contacted a widely respected journalist who had obtained and examined many of Bush's documents. He confirmed that neither the May general order nor the "torn" document had been included in the pre-1999 document releases.

Furthermore, neither document had been referred to in print prior to Robinson's piece in May of 2000. Nor have the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times mentioned the documents in any articles on Bush's service. This is important since both of these papers received their documents prior to July 1999 stories on Bush's records printed by the respective papers.

At this time it is important to note that I am not questioning the authenticity of the documents found by Lloyd. Rather, my interest focuses on how the documents came to be included in the official record file of George W Bush.

At first look Lloyd seems an obvious suspect. His prior position as the chief personnel officer for the Texas Air National Guard meant Lloyd had a working knowledge of the record processes and connections to those in charge of their keeping. And Lloyd has had a personal involvement in Bush's records stretching back over a span of thirty years from when he first served as signator on several of Bush?s records till recently when the Bush campaign turned to him to help research the candidates service. Still, I want it understood that I believe Lloyd when he denies having inserted any documents into the official record. I consider it even more likely that someone with political motivations and connections caused the documents to be placed into Bush's official files.

Picking up the trail

From 1974-1999, a span of 25 years, there are no dated additions in the copies of Bush's file I received through the FOIA. Then, 17 pages from the Interceptor, a monthly newsletter-type magazine put out by Bush's former National Guard unit are marked "fax received" March 31, 1999. These include a quote which the Bush campaign manager must have found irresistible: "George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation who doesn't get his kicks from pot, hashish or speed. Oh he gets high, all right, but not from narcotics."

The spring of 1999 saw the Bush campaign cranking up to speed for the primary season. The Interceptor addition to the records at this time seems to be just a little harmless tweaking of the files for PR effect. And, in fact, the "gets his kicks" quote appeared in a July 4th article by the Los Angeles Times after they had received a packet of Bush's documents through a FOIA request.

The next fax date is a year later, July 6, 2000. This was five weeks after the Bush campaign had been rocked by Walter Robinson's story about Bush's records, and during a period when others were raising similar questions. This is a May 1973 general order, and it is one of the three documents I had mentioned above as being found during the Bush campaign search of Camp Mabry.

With these recent fax dates in mind I wrote the National Archives and Records Administration about the proper procedures for making changes to a serviceman's files.

I soon had an interview with Charles Pellegrini of the National Personnel Records Center in St Louis. From him I learned that changes to such old files are mostly limited to fixing mistakes. This position is confirmed by a search of the Air Force Board For Records Correction website where they note that the "purpose of a record correction is to restore the member to the position he would have held if the error or injustice had not occurred." I also learned from Mr. Pellegrini that records are kept of all changes to a veteran's files.

Seeking records of changes to the files was something that had not occurred to me before. I quickly filed a FOIA request seeking "access to and copies of records or logs of any changes or additions made to the military records file of George W Bush, AFSN FG324xxxx."

The response to my FOIA request again established that there "is a formal process to accomplish changes" and that "individual veterans, or their representatives, are required to use specific forms to request changes to their records." And a careful reading of their response does not rule out that these records were changed, only that the record center search "did not locate any requests for change" to these files.

Indeed, and despite the presence of the documents Lloyd discovered, the last recorded addition to these files is listed as "Mr. Bush's discharge from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974."

NARA's reply did not shed any light on who may have changed Bush's official records. But included at the end of their response was this caveat: "It should be noted that tampering with or changing Federal records is a criminal offense under Title 18, Chapter 101, Section 2071, and is punishable by fine and or imprisonment."

Undoubtedly, there will be more on this to come. When, though, is anybody's guess.

AWOL: Is HRP the key?

While the Washington press corps evidently has bought into the White House's "nothing to see here, move along" storyline regarding George W. Bush's spotty military record, there are, thank goodness, still a few working journalists out there who can see through the fog and spot the gaping holes in the story.

One of these, as it happens, is my good friend Bill Morlin, the veteran reporter at the Spokane Spokesman-Review whose work played such a big role for me in writing In God's Country (we covered a number of far-right events together, including the Freemen standoff in Montana; Bill has been covering Aryan Congresses since 1983). Bill teamed up with Karen Dorn Steele, another veteran investigative reporter, to examine Bush's military record thoroughly (Spokane is home to a large contingent of both Air Force and Air Guard forces).

The resulting report is an important advance in the AWOL story, since it not only brings into focus the possible reasons for Bush's previously unexplained (and frankly inexplicable) behavior regarding his missed flight physical, it also raises the key question that speaks to the story's immediate relevance: Have Bush's records been tampered with or altered?

Bush's partial history: Stringent military screening program may explain gaps on president's record

What Morlin and Steele appear to have ascertained is that Bush was subject to the Human Reliability Program, a set of stringent regulations designed to prevent nuclear weapons from being handled by people who were unreliable:

The White House documents do show that Bush's military job description, called an Air Force Specialty Code, or AFSC, was listed as "1125D, pilot, fighter interceptor."

Bush's pilot code was among those covered by Air Force Regulation 35-99, a previously undisclosed document recently obtained by The Spokesman-Review. Regulation 35-99 contains an extensive explanation of the Human Reliability Program.

Human reliability regulations were used to screen military personnel for their mental, physical and emotional fitness before granting them access to nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Under the rules, pilots could be removed immediately from the cockpit for HRP issues, which happened in the 1974 Washington Air National Guard case. The two Washington airmen were suspended on suspicion of drug use, but eventually received honorable discharges.

A second previously unreleased document obtained by the newspaper, a declassified Air Force Inspector General's report on the Washington case, states that human reliability rules applied to all Air National Guard units in the 1970s. From 1968 to 1973, Bush was assigned to the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.

While Bush's defenders expend a great deal of energy downplaying the HRP rules and their role in the Air Guard, the reality is that they were in fact a point of emphasis during the time period in question:

Thousands of pilots and other military personnel have lost their job assignments under the human reliability regulations, which were established in the 1960s, according to academic researchers.

The regulations were made stricter in the 1970s when the military started screening for drug abuse, said Dr. Herbert Abrams in a 1991 research paper.
... "The military takes this very, very seriously," said Lloyd Dumas, professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Lethal Arrogance, a 1999 study of human foibles and dangerous technology.

"People of a lesser rank can even remove their superiors (under HRP). It's one of the few areas where rank doesn't matter," Dumas said.

Bush's suspension, his spotty final year of military service and his failure to take his flight physical are puzzling, Dumas said.

"If Bush was under the Human Reliability Program, there should be a paper trail. And if there's not, that's very, very unusual," the University of Texas professor said.

There already are indications -- just from the gaps in the record and what we know should be there -- that Bush's records have been manipulated (which is a federal offense). Recall, if you will, Walter Robinson's major piece on these gaps for the Boston Globe, in which he reported:

The order required Bush to acknowledge the suspension in writing and also said: "The local commander who has authority to convene a Flying Evaluation Board will direct an investigation as to why the individual failed to accomplish the medical examination." After that, the commander had two options -- to convene the Evaluation Board to review Bush's suspension or forward a detailed report on his case up the chain of command.

Either way, officials said yesterday, there should have been a record of the investigation.

As noted earlier, there were no such records in the supposedly "complete" release given by the White House.

So now the question is: Will anyone in the Washington press corps pick up on this development? Will any of them ask Scott McClellan or Dan Bartlett whether Bush in fact was under the HRP rules? And if so, where are the accompanying documents?

UPDATE: Eric Boehlert at Salon tosses in his two bits' worth, noting that the Morlin/Steele piece "goes a long way in explaining what's always been the biggest mystery surrounding Bush's questionable Guard service: Why did he stop flying?"

The trail grows cold

It's always tempting to bury our heads in the sand about domestic terrorism because it's such a potentially divisive and disruptive phenomenon.

International terrorism inspires our outrage, and has kind of a unifying effect upon a victim community; but domestic terrorism -- especially when committed by right-wing extremists seeking to spark a "race war" -- reveals our fault lines, particularly the racial ones. As with hate crimes, law enforcement has a decided incentive to play down the potential appearance of domestive terrorism within their communities, since such incidents often can give whole regions or even states, as well as cities and towns, a serious black eye (see, e.g., Idaho or Laramie, Wyoming).

The problem with being in denial about the motivations for such acts -- as the FBI discovered to its everlasting chagrin in dealing with the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing -- is that it usually means the perpetrators not only remain at large, but becomes emboldened to ratchet up the violence. Most of these terrorists see themselves as infinitely smarter than the "dumb cops," and infinitely capable of going uncaught. (Many believe that they are protected by God.) So when they do get away with it at the early stages, it's taken as a clear sign to rise to the next level.

This appears to be happening in the East Valley of the Phoenix area, where a mail bomber who tried to kill the head of Scottsdale's diversity office has so far eluded authorities. Investigators, it seems, are focusing on anyone who might have a personal or business-related grudge against Don Logan, the target of the attacks.

A recent Arizona Republic piece tried to tackle the question, Why was Logan a target? It noted the direction of the investigation so far, which is increasingly looking like yet another Richard Jewell-esque wild goose chase:

Investigators have not said whether they have a suspect in mind, but they are looking into Logan's personal and professional background for someone who might have a grudge. Logan handles training, community outreach, terminations and complaints from employees and citizens.

The possibility he was attacked because he represented a government office dedicated to racial equality -- and thereby a prime target for white supremacists -- seems not to loom very large on their radar. This despite the fact that the nearby town of Gilbert was recently plastered with National Alliance flyers.

Indeed, the fact that one of the people who commented in the Republic story -- Sandra Rembrandt of the non-profit organization Community Celebrating Diversity -- was subsequently the recipient of a phone threat does not seem to have registered with authorities as further indication of domestic terrorism.

Rembrandt evidently made the mistake of being quoted in the story saying what needed to be said: "Obviously someone is trying to make a point and is upset about something." The next day, she received a phone call indicating she might be next:

"A lot of people feel like (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy) McVeigh," a caller told Scottsdale resident Sandra Rembrandt. "You better be careful."

Rembrandt, who is African-American, Cherokee and Choctaw, runs a non-profit organization that promotes diversity.

"I just want to know what an anti-White (expletive) sounds like," the caller told Rembrandt shortly after noon.

It's clear that Scottsdale officials are not eager to address the implications of all this, adhering rigorously to the suggestion that this was the work of someone with a personal grudge. Just an "isolated incident."

Meanwhile, if a domestic terrorist in fact was at work here, then the perpetrator of the bombing becomes further emboldened to continue spiraling ever more violent because it's clear to him the cops are barking up the wrong tree. Which significantly increases the likelihood of his acting again, perhaps even more lethally.

And in the meantime, any minority communities, as well as civil-rights activists, in Scottsdale and the East Valley generally are likely to feel increasingly vulnerable, because it's clear their concerns that racism was at work in the bombing are being ignored -- and that they bomber is still free to strike again.

Not that this seems to be a major concern for Scottsdale police anyway. After all, they've been lately preoccupied with arresting black teenagers who wear their ballcaps sideways.

The Hatch act

If there were any doubt that Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch is one of the most duplicitous figures in American politics, it should have been erased with his most recent performance, blindsiding Democrats by kicking the push for an investigation into Republicans' theft of internal e-mails out of the Judiciary Committee.

Remember, it was only a few weeks ago that Hatch was playing the role of honest Republican, voicing his deep concern and regret over the thefts and promising to do what he could for an investigation. Indeed, his extremely pliant position had earned Hatch the wrath of fellow conservatives, who went so far as to call him a "traitor" for daring express a modicum of basic decency.

That was all just the setup for last `week's stunt -- which effectively killed any chance of the Senate supporting a Justice Department investigation into the matter. Democrats were gulled into believing Hatch was on their side, and then given the shaft when they weren't expecting it. Now any probe is left in the hands of the Republican sergeant-at-arms of the Senate.

Now Hatch can tell the people betrayed by him that he was pressured into killing the Judiciary vote -- and he gets to be a hero to those same conservatives who were willing to draw and quarter him a few weeks ago. Quite a slick routine, really.

Hatch's gentlemanly schtick has been used to good effect many times in the past, including effectively sidetracking a federal hate-crimes law by pretending to support it and then introducing various poison-pill amendments; and helping to insure the successful nomination of Ted Olson as Solicitor General by various backroom machinations.

In this case, the real agenda at work was readily discernible just within the response from defenders of the theft of the e-mails, as reported in the most recent story:

Lawyers representing one of the former aides who took the documents, Manuel Miranda, released two lengthy documents criticizing Pickle's report. They said Miranda was a whistle-blower, not a thief, taking advantage of a computer security glitch to fulfill his duty to further the president's agenda on the judiciary.

Of course, any Senate staffer's duty is not to the president but to the senators for whom he works. That Hatch's staffer saw his duty thus gives us a pretty clear idea just whose agenda Hatch is fronting for.

It's perhaps useful to recall that this is the same Orrin Hatch who, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, revealed to the public classified information about federal investigators' information about the terrorist attacks -- which then became one of the White House's excuses for refusing to share intelligence with Congress thereafter.

Rush Limbaugh is a Lying Liar

George W. Bush's campaign ads exploiting the victims of Sept. 11 demonstrated clearly that, when it comes to Bush's re-election, "nothing is out of bounds" for conservatives. This includes, of course, smearing not only his opponent, John Kerry, but anyone who dares speak up against Bush's appalling behavior. That in turn includes even the grieving families of the Sept. 11 dead.

Leading the charge, unsurprisingly, is the movement's leading propagandist and smear artist, Rush Limbaugh.

On Monday's Limbaugh program, the Most Dangerous Man in America followed up on a Friday rant against the families who had complained about the Bush ads, claiming that their organization had been funded by Theresa Heinz Kerry's foundation:

Here, for those of you that weren't here on Friday, this is the montage. I'm just going to play it one more time. This is two different women, and they appeared on four networks: CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC, and they each have three phrases that they use verbatim. And these were prepared. These were prepared by Democratic campaign consultants. In fact, these women sound like campaign consultants, not grieving family members, and I was reluctant to make this charge; it's the first thing that crossed my mind. As I say, we've now learned all the organizational effort that's going on behind this and these people are indeed aligned with the Democratic Party, and it's just? I do not know this kind of hatred; I don't know this kind of venom; I don't harbor it; I never have; I don't know what it's like to be governed by this kind of rage, and I don't know what life must be like when it is. I cannot relate. I cannot relate to being obsessed with rage and hatred. I can relate to being obsessed with love and infatuation, but I cannot relate to being obsessed with all this hatred. I just don't get it. It is unspeakable to me. It is dirty. It is wounding. I think this stuff is absolutely poison, the depths -- and Ted Kennedy on Friday goes to the Council on Foreign Relations and -- I got the story coming up -- makes all these wild accusations. John Kerry himself is becoming, if you ask me, a walking caricature of himself already. I think these people have no clue.

Limbaugh is, if nothing else, living proof that projection isn't just for movie theaters anymore. But he is above all a purveyor of crudely false information. Otherwise known as lies.

As Allan P. Duncan explained in detail in an OpEdNews.com piece, Limbaugh's characterization of the situation was flatly wrong in several respects. First, and perhaps most notably, the women whose voices he played on the program did not belong to the organization he was claiming was tied to Heinz-Kerry:

The transcript for the show had a link, Listen to Rush, so I clicked it and listened to the part of his show that the transcript covered. I discovered that Voice I belonged to Kristen Breitweiser and that Voice II belonged to Monica Gabrielle.

Kristen Breitweiser and Monica Gabrielle are both members of the Family Steering Committee for the 9-11 Commission and are not members of the group Limbaugh claims received funding from Teresa Heinz Kerry. That group, according to news reports that began hitting the wires on March 6th was September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Moreover, it turned out that not even Peaceful Tomorrows was connected to Heinz-Kerry as Limbaugh had claimed. The organization issued a release flatly denying the accusation:

September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows has never received funding from the Howard Heinz Endowment, the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, Teresa Heinz Kerry or John Kerry.

Peaceful Tomorrows has no connection with the Heinz or Kerry families through Tides Foundation, the Tides Center or any other entity.

Maxwell King of the Heinz Endowments replied to the allegations in the New York Post, where Limbaugh's version of things appears to have originated:

Your allegation ["(Mrs.) Kerry's Cash Connection," Editorial, March 9] that an organization called Peaceful Tomorrows has received funding from foundations directed by Teresa Heinz Kerry is flat-out wrong.

The allegation rests on a false assumption -- that Heinz Endowments funding of the Tides Center for projects in western Pennsylvania is "fungible," as you state in your editorial, and so can be redirected to other causes.

In fact, by legally binding contract, every penny of our support to Tides has been explicitly directed to specific projects in our region. It cannot legally be redirected and is the exact opposite of "fungible."

It should also be noted that Limbaugh asserts, without any factual basis, that "Democratic consultants" prepped the Family Steering Committee members who appeared on TV. According to the committee's recent statement, that too is simply false:

We have been accused of being tutored by a particular political party to make statements against the current administration. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are Americans who care about the future of this country. Our nonpartisan mission has always been clear: to find out how 9/11 happened so that nothing like it will ever happen again.

I don't know about the rest of you, but:

I couldn't believe that the Republican Party would sink this low, to exploit and capitalize on the misery and loss of families. But they did it. They found a way. In fact, they found some radio talk-show hosts -- and I'm going to say this -- they found some talk-show hosts who seem to have more concern over who the president of this country is than over the sanctity of the loss of other people's own family members, and who are willing to go on the air and lie about these people and smear their motives. It is beyond the pale that this could happen. It is beyond the pale, yet people cooperate with it, and so much more has been learned about this since.

They have literally been poisoned by their hate. They have been poisoned by their rage. It is unbelievable, the depths to which they will sink.

He vants to rule the world

Look, we always knew Larry Klayman, the head of Judicial Watch and a leading figure in the impeachment drama, was a bit off the wall in his obsession about "getting" the Clintons. He represented in many ways the worst, most fanatical side of the GOP in that episode. (This was the guy who sued his own mother.)

Lately, David Corn has been reporting in The Nation about the likelihood that Klayman -- who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Florida -- is also crooked, rather nakedly violating campaign laws by soliciting a loan for a direct-mail house.

Corn also reveals that Klayman is not merely obsessive. He's genuinely nuts:

In an October 2 letter to Richard Scaife--written days after Klayman had lunch with him--Klayman referred to a loan idea. First he laid out his master plan. "As a senator," he wrote, "I will have considerable powers that I did not have at Judicial Watch, including the ability to investigate and prosecute in the Senate Hillary Clinton much like Richard Nixon did with the communist spy Alger Hiss.... if I am someday to run for president, I need the credentials to do so; being a senator will provide me with this. If not this year, Hillary Clinton obviously will run for the presidency in 2008. I plan to oppose her, God be willing." Then he made a pitch: "Dick, once again I need your help to achieve this goal. As explained, I left Judicial Watch without resources and must rely on direct mail to raise the monies to challenge my millionaire opponents. If you know of someone or some entity that can finance the direct mail firm, by providing a loan with an 18 percent return on investment, I would be most grateful." A Scaife spokesperson maintains that Scaife never received this letter. "He has not given one dime to Mr. Klayman's campaign," she adds, "and in fact he discouraged him from running."

That's it! By finally subduing the Evil Clinton invasion, Larry Klayman will become a national hero and a shoo-in for the presidency! What a brilliant strategy! Bwah hahahahahaha.

Sin and the law

One of the contentions we're hearing from the right these days against allowing gays to marry is that doing so forces Christians to accept homosexuality -- and thus it is gay-rights advocates, not proponents of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex unions, who are the aggressors in the "Culture War."

The other day in my comments, a fellow named Shawn McFarland offered an iteration of this argument:

For most Christians homosexuality is a sin that is tolerated, but to try to force Christains to accept that homosexual unions are somehow equivalent to marriage, is essentially forcing Christians to claim that homosexuality is not a sin.

The problem with the religious right's argument in this case is similar to its faulty logic in other areas as well, especially regarding abortion: It confuses what's sinful with what's illegal.

There is, of course, a real multitude sins elucidated in the Bible. Among them: Divorce. Usury. Breaking the Sabbath. Spiritual pride. Taking the Lord's name in vain.

Are any of these against the law? Not in America. The nation's economy wouldn't be able to function if usury -- the lending of money at an interest rate -- were outlawed.

It is one of the conceits of the religious right, of course, that American law is based on "Biblical law." (See the whole Roy Moore dustup.) But that's largely mythical. The body of American law is decidedly secular in nature, and is driven almost purely by logic and ethics, rather than religious morality.

This basic confusion on the part of fundamentalists leads them to believe that if the Bible forbids it, it oughta be against the law too.

Problem is, if that were to happen ... it wouldn't be America anymore. But then, they seem to know that.

It should be clear who's playing the aggressor here. Indeed, the whole "Culture War" -- just like "Class War" -- is largely an invention, and a strategy, of the right.

Divided Passions

It's becoming harder to pretend that it's "just a movie" anymore.

If forced to predict (something I'm not very keen on, to be honest) just what the real-world reaction to the radical Catholicism of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ would be, I'd have guessed that it wouldn't have resulted in anything concrete in the way of serious eruptions of anti-Semitism, not to mention hate crimes or other violence. As I said in my original review, the anti-Semitism in the film is not as overt or crude as what you might find in, say, Nazi propaganda. Its effect, I thought, would be more attitudinal -- as in cases like the one Atrios noted in the L.A. Times' letters. This effect was likely to contribute to a general atmosphere condoning violence, aimed more generally at liberals than at Jews specifically.

That assessment, however, may have been wrong -- at least in terms of the timetable and the intensity of the attitudes. Hate crimes have already popped up their ugly visage, as well as various iterations of anti-Semitism in differing degrees.

Most of the activity of note so far has occurred in Denver. First there was the suburban pastor who, shortly after the film's opening, put up a letterboard sign outside his Lovingway United Pentecostal Church that read "Jews Killed The Lord Jesus." He said the sign was inspired by Gibson's film. After both Jews and Christians voiced their outrage, he put up a sign of apology.

But that was just the start. More recently, someone last Friday night vandalized a Denver synagogue by painting about 10 swastikas and other neo-Nazi symbols on it.

Ramon Saenz, a custodian for the synagogue, said he saw the Nazi symbols when he arrived at work about 8:30 a.m. Saturday.

Saenz said he checked the building for other damage but that everything seemed in order. Nothing was stolen, he said.

"There's a lot of crazy people in this world," he said. "I thought it might have something to do with the movie."

He referred to "The Passion of the Christ," released Feb. 25. Many Jewish and Christian religious leaders have expressed apprehension that anti-Semitism would result from the movie's portrayal of Jewish authorities and Jewish mobs involved in crucifying Jesus. The director, Mel Gibson, has denied being anti-Semitic.

Cohen also said the vandalism may have been sparked by the movie. "I do feel, after watching the film, that it sponsors the spirit of anti-Semitism," the rabbi said. "We need to be sensitive to images and stereotypes we portray."

On Sunday, about 300 people of various faiths showed up to assist in the cleanup effort. Some of the volunteers also pointed the finger of blame:

Elise Zakroff said she was sure the film inspired the graffiti.

"What Mel Gibson did is terrible," Zakroff said. "It is happening all over. We are tired of anti-Semitism. All we want is peace."

Nonetheless, the turnout was a good sign. A Jim Spencer column rather warmly describes the response as an effort to emphasize the "Not in Our Town" sentiments of the larger Denver community. It may seem to the undiscerning that such efforts are mostly "feelgood" measures to paper over the insidious nature of these acts, but this is in fact an important step for the community to take. Responding quietly or pretending it didn't happen -- which is often the response advocated by those who think such criminals feed on publicity, so why give them what they want? -- is always considered a signal of acquiescence and even tacit approval by the average bias criminal.

But it's apparent that, community-enhancement exercises notwithstanding, the situation is becoming volatile in Denver. Now someone else has vandalized the Lovingway Pentecostal church where the earlier controversy erupted by painting a pair of swastikas on a sign. Mind you, swastikas do not contain the same meaning for a fundamentalist Christian church as they do for a synagogue; nonetheless, it's hard clear that there was a retaliatory component to the vandalism. The threatening nature of both these attacks could signal that things are getting out of hand.

Is it fair to blame The Passion of the Christ for this? Perhaps not. There hasn't been enough of this kind of activity yet to certify a trend. But if it continues, and indeed manifests itself elsewhere, then it would be far more plausible to say the film has contributed concretely to the hardening of violent attitudes toward Jewish people.

A duet of essays by Mike Davis and Robert Jay Lifton at AlterNet tackle the two sides of why Gibson's film might inspire such changes. Davis' piece, "An Academy Award for Bigotry," details precisely the nasty nature of Gibson's stereotyping of the Jewish high priests and the rabble, which he believes may have been drawn visually from the notorious Nazi propaganada film Jud Suess:

To anyone who has ever seen Jud Suess (as I did in college), the most startling thing about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- even more than its relentless, shockingly eroticized cruelty -- is its fidelity to the anti-Semitic conventions of Hitlerian cinema.

Indeed, the high priest Caiaphas and his colleagues are such exact, blatant replicas of Suess that I suspect they must be direct borrowings. Moreover, Passion is one of the most manipulative films ever made and, after two hours watching mobs howling in delight at Christ's suffering, it is no wonder that many devout American viewers, like their German predecessors, have left theaters muttering, "I hate the Jews."

Davis' conclusions roughly parallel mine as well:

In short, Passion is the medieval vision of a pogromist, amplified by Hollywood special effects and the cachet of celebrity. It is protected by a formidable wall of enthusiastic endorsements from the American religious right as well as by the tolerance of ordinary Gibson fans who just can't believe that their goofy, handsome hero is really such a grotesque reactionary.

Even more incisive, however, is Lifton's analysis, "Violent Purification." (I happen to be an admirer of Lifton's work, especially his previous contributions on the totalist mindset, as well as his book Superpower Syndrome, which for my money is the best and most insightful of the post-Sept. 11 predicament yet published. I posted previously about his condensation of the book into an article in The Nation.)

Lifton puts the film in its appropriate context as an expression of apocalyptic belief:

At issue is the purification not just of Jesus or even of the sins he carries for others, but of the whole world. And that larger world can be purified, the film tells us, only by sustained cruelty and murderous violence. One must destroy the world, or in this case Christ, its divine representative, to save it. That kind of vision of all-encompassing violence as a means of spiritual renewal finds structured expression in the Old Testament in the Book of Daniel and in the New Testament in the Book of Revelation.

Only in the twentieth century, however, could the apocalyptic mindset take on a more activist form as human beings acquired the actual means of purifying the world by destroying it and so could attempt just that, always claiming to be doing so in God's name. This was the mindset I encountered in the small but ambitious Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which in 1995 produced and released chemical and biological weapons (having unsuccessfully attempted to acquire nuclear warheads) meant -- at least in the fevered fantasies of its guru Shoko Asahara -- to initiate World War III and thereby bring about a biblical Armageddon. For his sarin-gassing of the Tokyo subways, only last week he was sentenced to death by a Japanese court.

Lifton too identifies the problem as the extreme dualism that the film is really about:

The problem of The Passion of the Christ goes far beyond the individual psyche of Mel Gibson, or even questions of biblical interpretation. The crucifixion here becomes a vehicle for a contemporary mentality that is absolute and polarizing in its starkly violent vision of world purification -- a vision that fits well with an apocalyptic, all or nothing "war on terrorism." While many will be moved by this vision, there may also be a backlash of revulsion and a reasoned rejection of the zealotry and love of violence the film promotes.

My friend Jean Rosenfeld, the religious-studies researcher at UCLA with whom I correspond, described her viewing of the film recently in an e-mail:

A Jewish friend and I went to see the Gibson film together for mutual support. We both felt we had to see it in order to speak authentically if asked. A few notes on it that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere:

The scene between Claudia and Pilate re his "catch-22" about rebellion by Caiphas against him or rebellion by the Jesus movement against him -- and Rome's warning that his head is in the noose if there is a rebellion -- is all Gibson and no scripture or tradition that I am aware of. It amplifies the anti-Semitism, which I could easily draw a red line around in the film and identify as a theology expressly rejected at Vatican II.

The scourging of Jesus in the film is a tactic by Pilate to convince the Jews that he has been punished enough and to avoid sentencing him to crucifixion. Thus, it is carried out *before* Pilate confronts Caiphas and the crowd. In the gospels, the judgment of crucifixion is rendered *first* and the scourging takes place afterward. This out-of-sequence presentation of events serves only the purpose of amplifying the perfidy of the crowd and the priests.

The anti-Semitism in the film is not all "in the Gospels" and it is not incidental.

If one is Catholic, all the iconography, symbolism and midrash is perfectly clear. Gibson makes powerful films and there is a great deal about this film that is artistic. It could have been a great film, but it completely missed the point of Christianity, and it resurrected the perverse blood libel tradition of European Christianity that James Carroll has so expertly exposed.

Gibson leaned heavily on the Gospel According to John, which is a highly symbolic text. Reading this Gospel literally leads to anti-Semitic excesses. It is also the most mystical and pious of the gospels, presenting Jesus as a "theos aner" or "divine man," a recognized archetype in the Greco-Roman empire of the first-century. I once wrote an article on "the Jews" in the John's Gospel. The key is that one cannot take this account literally, which is exactly what retrograde Catholics like the Gibsons do. They are Catholic fundamentalists, which explains the appeal of the film to Protestant fundamentalists.

The key dialogue in the film is between Pilate and Jesus about truth/veritas. To the mainstream Catholic, truth is the message of love and forgiveness that Gibson has Jesus speak. But the message of the film cinematically is that certain agents cannot be forgiven, because they are "of Satan." Among these are the priests, the crowd, Judas and the bad thief. They remain unredeemed and consigned to Satan's realm. (BTW that is the point of the raven pecking out the eye of the bad thief; it is symbolic, not gratuitous violence, as the raven is a satanic icon and the thief was blind to the truth.)

Gibson's presentation of the Jews skirts the theology of Christian Identity a little too closely for my comfort. The only good Jews are those that become Christians. As for the Romans, well, I suspect that Gibson was told by biblical scholars he consulted that Pilate was a brutal ruler who executed Jesus for sedition (a Roman, not a Jewish, crime), but I also suspect that he deliberately did not listen to them.

... My friend and I were grateful for all the discussion about the film beforehand, because it prepared us for the excessive violence. A sign at the box office warned against taking children to see it.

The film's divisiveness, at least, is spreading to some perhaps unexpected quarters as well, as Jim Lobe reports:

'The Passion' Incites New Divisions Among Neo-Cons

'The Passion', which could become the biggest grossing movie of 2004 and the surely the biggest ever with subtitles -- the actors speak in Aramaic and Latin -- appears to have pushed some very influential neo-conservatives over the edge.

Thus, 'Washington Post' columnist Charles Krauthammer this weekend denounced the movie as a ''blood libel'' against the Jews that challenges the Catholic Church's official doctrine that the Jews should not be held responsible for the crucifixion and constitutes a ''singular act of interreligious aggression''.

... While many neo-conservatives probably would have ignored 'The Passion' had it been directed exclusively to the small, traditionalist, pre-Vatican II Catholic constituency of the kind that Gibson and his far more outspoken father hail from, the fact that he marketed it aggressively to Christian fundamentalists through their churches and Christian Right leaders like Robertson -- with whom the neo-cons have aligned themselves -- threatens to raise new questions about their political judgment, particularly among U.S. Jews, most of whom have remained liberal.

The distinctly negative turn that neo-conservative reviews of 'The Passion' have taken since its release suggest that a process of rethinking may already be underway within its ranks.

Sounds like the legend of the snake devouring its own tale.

[Thanks to Warbaby in comments for the AlterNet link.]

Prioritizing our 'problems'

When David Brooks writes the following:

The flap over Gibson's movie reminds us that religion can be a dangerous thing. It can be coarsened into gore and bloodshed and used to foment hatred. But we're not living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Our general problem is not that we're too dogmatic. Our more common problems come from the other end of the continuum. Americans in the 21st century are more likely to be divorced from any sense of a creedal order, ignorant of the moral traditions that have come down to us through the ages and detached from the sense that we all owe obligations to a higher authority.

You have to wonder what world Brooks lives in.

Of course, Brooks need look only a short distance from the New York Times Building -- to the rubble of Ground Zero -- for evidence that dogmatic religious zealotry is more than just dangerous, it constitutes a major problem for modern American society.

Of course, you could also find that same kind of zealotry in play back in April 1995 in Oklahoma City. Eric Rudolph's rampage was only one of many such acts of domestic terrorism inspired by dogmatic religiosity.

Now, granted, these are not what one would call "common" problems. But given the toll in bloodshed, lives, and torn social fabric, one certainly could conclude they constitute a far more "pressing" problem.

There's a certain validity to Brooks' point: There's nothing really admirable about mushy-mindedness in any aspect of our collective thinking, and Gibran-esque religiosity certainly fits that description.

However, I have yet to have observed anyone committing acts of violence or other forms of criminality after becoming a devotee of Deepak Chopra. No one has blown up any government offices after reading Mitch Albom. There haven't been any attacks on Jewish day-centers from readers of Scott Peck.

The same cannot be said of dogmatic, right-wing Christians who have been told that killing abortion doctors is morally justified by any number of fundamentalist "thinkers," or that putting abortion clinics to the torch is God's work.

The difference between most mushy pseudo-religionists like Albom and religious dogmatists like Mel Gibson is fairly simple: the former blur lines and make leaps of logic that inspire a lazy and thoughtless "spirituality," while the latter insist on a Manichean dualism that inspires a judgemental and divisive religiosity.

And that extreme dualism lies at the root of such "common" problems as racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracism, and especially terrorism, both domestic and international. It is also, ultimately, the driving force that gives rise to totalitarianism.

By comparison, mushy-headed Mitch Albomists look positively appealing.

Seen and heard

Busy day today, but here's some good reading:

Allen Brill has an op-ed in today's Charlotte Observer that he reproduced at The Right Christians that everyone should read:

Sexual Mores and the Bible

The conservative proponents of biblical sexual standards better hope that no one examines the texts they rely upon too closely for many of the Bible's ideas about sexual morality are quite alien to our own. Biblical sexual mores were centered around two concerns: preserving the property rights and honor of men with respect to the women in the household; and avoiding tebel, the improper mixing, that could threaten the order that God had imposed upon chaos.

The status of women and children in biblical times throughout the Ancient Near East was little above that of chattel. In Judges 19, the old Ephraimite man could offer his virgin daughter to satisfy gang rapists without even asking for her consent. Sexual behavior was prohibited only when it interfered with another male's property rights or honor. "Adultery" was defined as sleeping with another's wife. Sexual relations with prostitutes was not prohibited. Sleeping with a step-mother, mother-in-law or daughter-in-law was punishable by death. On the other hand, there was no explicit prohibition against a father having sex with his daughter. "Rape" was sleeping with a unmarried woman without her father's permission. If she was betrothed to another man, the victim died along with the rapist unless she "cried out" in protest. If she was not betrothed, her father received a bride-price for her from the rapist and she had to marry the man.

The laws against homosexuality and bestiality that are found in chapters 18 and 20 of Leviticus derive from the taboo against tebel rather than a concern for male property rights. Sexual acts between males--there is no biblical prohibition against lesbian sex--or sexual interaction between humans and animals constituted an "improper mixing" could lead to cosmic collapse just as mixing two kinds of crops in a field or two kinds of material in clothing.

What is missing in the biblical regulation of sexuality that we now consider of utmost importance? Consent, particularly consent on the part of women and children.

Also, welcome to the blogosphere another Table Talk alum, Julius Civitatus, who is already off to a roaring start with his JuliusBlog. Be sure to check out his excellent review of The Passion of the Christ.

Meanwhile, on the lighter side of the same topic, there's this:

The Passion of the Christ: Blooper Reel

Paul Ford is a very funny guy.

And Keith Berry points out that, when it was a Democrat making use of images of victims in the "war on terror" -- namely, Dennis Kucinich's shots of body bags coming home from Iraq -- the right could barely contain itself.

Just wondering

I see that Republicans are rushing to defend the Bush campaign's use of footage from Sept. 11 in television ads by arguing that it's only natural to display dead bodies from a national tragedy in a campaign ad. The latest is Rudy Giuliani, who seems to have gotten this week's talking points down pat:

I think if you asked a question, "Is September 11, 2001, a legitimate area for the president to point out?" He was facing challenges. You got to go back to the ad. The ad is challenges facing George W. Bush. Well, if you left out September 11, 2001, I think people would be asking, "Why is he leaving it out?" That was probably the biggest challenge that he's faced. Those of us who support him think he did a terrific job in getting the country through it. You know, other people on the other side have taken shots at him for not doing as good a job. So it's kind of unrealistic to think you're not going to have that as part of the political debate.

Of course, no one is exactly suggesting that Sept. 11 be off the table in terms of the national debate. The question in this case is why Mr. Bush is so crassly manipulating a national tragedy in the service of partisan politics. It's not whether he refers to 9/11; it's how he refers to it.

But Giuliani's point raises the question of what might have happened had a Democrat run such an ad in the wake of a similar "challenge."

Does anyone, for instance, remember all those Clinton campaign ads with footage from Oklahoma City?

[Eric Muller at Is That Legal? weighs in with a similar point, delivered graphically. And while we're at it, gotta wonder how many FDR '44 campaign posters featured Pearl Harbor.]

Just remember what we observed last Sept. 11: "Nothing is out of bounds for them."

Comments deluxe

I finally upgraded my comments feature so that folks don't have to file so many short posts. The new limit is 3,000 characters (much longer than the old 1,000-character limit). Hope you enjoy.

Drive responsibly, of course. I also have increased new powers.

The press: Still missing on AWOL

It seems apparent that, to the press corps at least, the questions about George W. Bush's military record have been at least mollified if not answered. Problem is, nothing has been answered.

Prototypical for the sudden disappearance of the AWOL story from the radar screen was Tim Russert's handling of it on Meet the Press the other week, when he said:

The president has now released all his military records. General [sic] Calhoun, who was in Alabama, said he observed him coming to duty on weekends in Alabama. Should the Democrats withdraw the charge of AWOL towards George W. Bush?

This was, of course, a fairly typical softballs-for-Republicans performance from Russert. As the folks at Spinsanity remarked on this obfuscation of the matter shortly afterward:

... [A]s Russert should know, the evidence shows that Calhoun's claims appear to contradict those of the White House. As the Houston Chronicle pointed out, Calhoun claimed to have seen Bush a number of times in summer and fall 1972, but records released by the White House do not credit Bush for service until late October.

What very few people in the press have remarked on so far is the fact that the White House's release of Bush's "complete" records in reality has some substantial gaps in it that do not answer any of the serious questions raised so far. This is especially the case regarding Bush's failure to take a flight physical in 1972, which has never been adequately explained.

As fascinating as the questions about Bush's records might be -- even as it becomes increasingly clear that Bush has been grossly misleading the voters about those records -- the most disturbing aspect of all this has been the behavior of the press in its handling of the story.

This has, in fact, been true from the get-go. Reporters dropped or ignored the story in 1994 and again, especially, in 2000, and for no apparent reason other than that the story didn't fit the scripts that dominated the storylines at the time. The script in 2000, you may recall, was that Bush was a "straight shooter" while Gore "made stuff up."

The press simply has failed to delve past the Bush team's consistent obfuscation of the records issue. That has resulted in the story's persistent half-life, floating around the periphery of news coverage, staying alive almost purely because of its steady circulation on the Internet -- and then erupting, almost bizarrely, for about a week's worth of feeding frenzy after Democrats finally decided to put the card on the table. And then, just as suddenly, the story drops off the screen -- even though the White House's response has been just as devoid of any kind of serious explanation of the questions raised as before.

This up-and-down kind of coverage clearly reveals a dysfunction in the nation's press, as Mimi Swartz recently outlined in the New York Times:

In Search of the President's Missing Years

Over the past few weeks, President Bush has responded to recurring questions about his National Guard service by saying that the subject is old and tiresome. According to Mr. Bush, reporters conducted a thorough investigation of his time in the Texas National Guard when he ran against Ann Richards for governor in 1994, and again when he ran against Al Gore in 2000. The complete Guard records, the president told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press," were "scoured."

This came as news to me, as I lived in and reported from Texas during those times and feel that questions about the story -- Mr. Bush's life story -- linger 10 years after his first political victory. Why they linger is a more complicated question, one that has as much to do with the press as it does with the president.

What the AWOL case demonstrates is the extent to which the nation's press has developed a real vulnerability to manipulation by propaganda -- one that has always existed, but which has come to dominate media behavior under the weight of simultaneous changes in the industry and the ideological playing field.

On the one hand, media conglomeration has rendered the bulk of the nation's news organizations essentially bottom line-oriented organizations with only a passing glance at their role in protecting the public interest. Investigative and consumer-oriented journalism, both of which are expensive, time-consuming and not always rewarding -- and both of which have the decided disadvantage of frequently embarrassing the business friends and associates of ownership, as well as potential or even current advertisers -- have always been the first to go in cutbacks, and such work is now a rarity in most newsrooms. Meanwhile, political reporters are increasingly forced to rely on press releases and canned statements, and many simply lack either the time or ambition to pursue stories that aren't handed to them. Real ombudsmen, at the same time, have become rarities as well.

At the same time that the nation's newsrooms have been gutted, they have fallen under attacks from the "Mighty Wurlitzer" -- the right-wing media attack machine that on the one hand attacks mainstream news organizations for "liberal bias" merely for publishing non-conservative viewpoints, while themselves engaging in the crassest kind of bias and spin that distorts reality and fabricates false "facts."

The culture in most newsrooms now has created a de facto conservative bias, simply because no one wants to counter the popular memes emanating from the Wurlitzer, since to do so runs the risk of being suspected of "liberal bias."

So when Team Bush decides to stonewall on their candidate's military records, no one has much incentive to push harder. Only a few reporters challenge the Team's fairly obvious fabrications: Do you recall, for instance, anyone asking Ari Fleischer or Dan Bartlett about the brazenly false first explanation for the missed flight physical (which was that Bush's personal physician wasn't available -- even though all such physicals must, in fact, be administered by an Air Force flight surgeon)?

Then, when the Democrats finally decide to raise it as an issue, the press erupts in a mass feeding frenzy as they realize that the gaps in Bush's records really haven't been adequately explained. But the frenzy, like most such phenomena, is all fizz and little substance; most reporters, with only a shallow understanding of the facts of the case, miss the key element (the physical) and focus on red herrings (whether Bush actually served in Alabama). When two Guard vets suddenly pop up with stories corroborating Bush's presence in Alabama -- even though their dates don't match up with those supplied by the White House, and in fact assert he was present in Alabama when the record is quite clear he wasn't -- the pack suddenly decides that the questions have been answered, even though in reality nothing has been answered definitively at all. And the story goes away.

This is simply an abysmal job on the part of the press, and suggests the way that the right-wing Wurlitzer functions to suppress serious investigative work about the Bush administration, mainly by intimidating reporters inclined to do such work. On one hand, it endlessly intimates that such questions are part of an enduring "liberal bias," while at the same time endlessly repeating the White House's dodges.

It doesn't take much imagination to know how the Wurliter -- and the press -- would have reacted had these kinds of questions been raised about, say, Al Gore or John Kerry, both of whom served honorably in Vietnam. It would have been a nonstop circus of conjecture (it would have been "irresponsible" not to speculate, of course) and accusation, all with the purpose of impugning the Democrat's character. House and Senate investigations would have been called.

And the press would have gladly played along, almost eagerly manipulated. Makes for good cable ratings, dontcha know.

What the case demonstrates most clearly, though, is that when journalists fall down on the job now, regular citizens -- empowered by this new medium of mass information dissemination -- are more than capable of doing their work for them.

Think about the way the AWOL story stayed alive: By the work of a handful of regular citizens, non-journalists, who doggedly kept filing FOIA requests and publishing their results on the Web. Chief among these is Marty Heldt, the Iowa farmer whose Web site remains one of the significant repositories for Bush's records. The Iowa press, of course, has steadfastly ignored his contributions, even though he has been interviewed by everyone from CBS to CNN. However, the paper in Davenport finally decided to profile him recently:

Area man key source on Bush's Guard record

Think about how Marty describes the way he got involved:

Heldt does not seem to mind his anonymity. What he says he did mind was the little attention the issue got four years ago when Bush was running for president. "This was an amazing story. I thought, 'Why isn?t anybody talking about it?' " Heldt said in a recent interview.

Mimi Swartz, at least, holds out some hope that, now that the story is in play, it will not fade entirely from view (and indeed, there is some likelihood that James Moore's book, due out this summer, will contain some fresh revelations):

In some ways, then, the president is right: questions about his military service have been raised every time he's run for office. But it's also true that the story still seems woefully incomplete and that there have been clear inconsistencies in the answers Mr. Bush and his associates have given about his time in the Guard. (Mr. Bush's associates said that he didn't take his 1972 military physical because his doctor in Houston was unavailable and that he lost his flight status because the plane he was training on was phased out -- statements that have been shown to be debatable at best.) It's also disconcerting that each election cycle comes with a new set of "complete" documents.

Perhaps 2004 will be the year that details of George W. Bush's time in the National Guard -- indeed, his life in the early 1970's -- finally get filled in. This time around, there are certain factors that might put added pressure on reporters, editors and news organizations to complete the story. After all, the questions about Mr. Bush's service are being raised while we are at war and while the president is facing a genuine war hero as a potential opponent. Maybe this year, 10 years after Mr. Bush's first political victory, the lingering questions will finally disappear.

The story might finally be resolved, but the issue of the way the press has been manipulated throughout this episode will not. As long as journalists are willing to let themselves be propaganda conduits, putty in the hands of Machiavellian conservatives, instead of acting as independent reporters of fact, it will remain.

There is simply no counterpart for the Mighty Wurlitzer on the left, though there has been talk about creating a left-wing counterpart to the right-wing talk radio and television presence. I remain skeptical that simply imitating the tactics will be adequate -- and believe that alternative strategies, such as building an entirely different communications infrastructure based on the Internet, hold much greater promise in terms of countering the right.

But the people opposed to the conservative movement's agenda and its ruthlessness in enacting it have at least one thing going for them. They have, for the most part, the facts on their side. That in itself won't ensure victory, but it is a good place to start.

As for the press ... well, it's nearly impossible to even know where to start.