Jeff Schweitzer's Blog, page 2

How the GOP Is Killing Us With Ignorance

In his State of the Union speech on January 12, 2016, President Obama said this about climate change:

Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it. You’ll be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.

Senator Bernie Sanders, reflecting the view held by the other Democratic presidential candidates, observed on the Bill Maher show that, “One of the embarrassments that goes on in this country today is that we have a major political party called the Republican Party that is rejecting what the overwhelming majority of scientists are saying.”

A New Disease Coming Your Way

Outside of the strange and insular world of extreme right-wing politics, most folks generally recognize the hazards of climate change: deadly heat waves, droughts, more frequent and more severe cyclones, floods, wildfires, catastrophic loss of marine life, and shifts in agricultural productivity. But because many of these impacts are not immediately evident in everyday life, those who wish to deny the obvious can continue to embrace the enticing comfort of ignorance.

Unfortunately, mosquitos are indifferent to the vagaries of American conservatism: with a warming planet they march north like an unstoppable Roman army. They are not alone, enjoying the companionship of a full menagerie of disease-vectoring insects never before seen in North America. Right-wing nutcases can deny that our climate is changing, but they will be unable to ignore that burning itch and spreading rash following the July 4 BBQ in a sweltering backyard. Bone-crushing joint pain, oppressive headaches, vomiting and blindness are hard to pawn off as a liberal conspiracy. I’m sure Obama is to blame, somehow.

Water-borne diseases will increase in frequency because warmer water expands the season and range of diseases like schistosomiasis and Cholera. Rodents also proliferate in the growing temperate regions with milder wet winters; they themselves are disease carriers, and also are reservoirs for disease-carrying ticks. Typhus and Hantavirus anyone?

Here are just a few of the ugly infections coming our way because of the changing climate that the GOP refuses to acknowledge:

• dengue fever

• malaria

• yellow fever

• hantavirus

• leptospirosis

• Japanese B Encephalitis

• elephantiasis

• Lyme’s disease

• West Nile

• leishmaniosis

• Chagas disease

• Zika

• chikungunya

• typhus

The arrival of these diseases is not theoretical, or a future development, but is happening right now here in the good old U.S. of A as we record higher and higher temperatures.

Severe drought in the southwest has reduced predator populations, leading to an explosion of white-footed mice. We cannot therefore be shocked to learn that in May 1993 the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States saw an outbreak of a deadly pulmonary disease caused by the mouse-borne hantavirus, virtually unknown in the States prior to this event. Subsequent outbreaks have been recorded in Yosemite National Park in 2012, and cases have now been reported in 34 states. In Austin, Texas, flea-borne Typhus was reported for the first time in 2008 and is now endemic to the Austin area. New Yorkers first suffered an outbreak of West Nile virus in 1999, a new scourge for the city, which is now an annual threat.

In 2014, for the first time in Central America, authorities reported the transmission of mosquito-borne chikungunya. Symptoms include dangerously high fever and such severe joint pain that patients become immobile; shaking hands is too painful. If that were not enough, Zika, another disease transmitted by mosquitos, has invaded our neighbors just to the south. U.S. officials warn us that this “once obscure virus” is spreading rapidly across Latin America and the Caribbean. So much so that the Center for Disease Control has issued a travel warning, urging pregnant women to avoid more than a dozen countries in which Zika can now be found. The disease has been linked to severe brain damage in newborns. There are currently no specific treatments against these diseases, nor any vaccines.

There is more bad news as the GOP plugs its collective ears saying “niener, niener, niener, I can’t hear you.” While conservatives rearrange deck chairs, and cling desperately to their stubborn ignorance, climate change is wreaking havoc with bird populations. The Audubon Society classifies 314 species, about half of all birds in North America, as severely threatened by climate change. Many of those birds were eating insects…

With fewer birds to eat the bugs, not only will the pests be moving into the United States, where they’ve never been before, but there will be more of them than ever before across the expanded range. In Sweden, we are already seeing disease-bearing ticks moving north as winters become warmer. Not a good sign for the U.S. and those who would rather not contract Lyme’s disease. We will also get new strains of old diseases. A new strain of West Nile first detected in 2002, is moving quickly. The virus infected about 175,000 people in 2007, killing 117, and has continued its deadly march ever since.

Ignorance Kills

The GOP has become the party that embraces ignorance, celebrates anti-intellectualism and dismisses scientific truths as mere inconveniences. The leading presidential candidates are climate change deniers. Ted Cruz says that “the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of flat-Earthers.” Donald Trump claims the issue is a hoax. One tweet reads: “This very expensive global warming bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.”

Watching candidates embarrassing themselves like this may have been amusing at one point, but the consequences are now deadly and no laughing matter. Ignorance kills; and here is a perfect story to tell that tale. During the height of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, eight health care workers combating the disease were killed by an angry mob who believed the doctors and nurses were infecting people with the virus. The population most in need of help murdered the only people who could provide assistance. In that tragedy, we can learn much about the mentality of the GOP, even if the problem initially seems distant and remote.

Sitting in the comfort of our homes we can easily see these horrible killings as ridiculous, obviously counterproductive to the killers, and dangerous to people globally with an increased risk of a broader epidemic. The terrible episode is based entirely in the transparently false idea that doctors were spreading the disease, a notion borne of ignorance of basic biology. While the killings in Africa are easy to condemn, and rightfully so, we actually witness the very equivalent embrace of deadly ignorance with every Republican utterance denying the reality of climate change. The GOP is guilty of a deep scientific illiteracy of a magnitude similar to what we see in Africa, with equally lethal results. Those who deny the obvious truth of climate change are no different from fearful African villagers who reach conclusions based on ignorance of established fact.

These people are running for the highest office of our country — and they have supporters among us. I can imagine few things more frightening. Republicans want to pull us back to the Dark Ages in a world increasingly dependent on the advances of science and technology. Get out the bug spray. The GOP is the wrong party at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons. We can only hope that sanity prevails in November.

Scalia’s Views on Religious Neutrality Reveal He Is Neutral on Sanity

Speaking at a Catholic high school in New Orleans recently, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said, “To tell you the truth there is no place for that in our constitutional tradition. Where did that come from To be sure, you can’t favor one denomination over another but can’t favor religion over non-religion?”

This question is astonishing on many levels, but mostly because it exposes a gross ignorance unbecoming a justice of the Supreme Court. The right not to believe is no less protected by our Constitution than the right to believe in any particular god. If the government cannot favor one religion over another, it cannot favor belief over rationalism. Doing so obviously is in direct violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What part of “establishment of religion” does Scalia not understand? The wording does not discuss the dominance of one religion over another, but the very establishment of any religion.

But Scalia was not done shredding our founding document. He also said in New Orleans that there is “nothing wrong” with the idea of presidents and others invoking God in speeches. “God has been good to America because Americans have honored him.” Really? He can interpret god’s motivations? He misses the obvious that Iranians believe that Allah has been good to Iran because Iranians have honored Allah. Hindus believe their many gods have blessed India because they have honored their many gods. How is their belief more or less valid than Scalia’s about who god favors and why? Is Scalia any different than a televangelist who says we have an earthquake or flood because god is unhappy with gay marriage or Roe v Wade?

With these utterances Scalia is continuing his history of religious extremism. His radicalism seeps out in strange ways. In one case decided in 2010 (Salazar v. Buono) Scalia said he was simply baffled that a Christian cross could be construed to represent Christianity. The case in question is a bit convoluted, but the details are important. A seven-foot cross was erected on Sunrise Rock in 1934 on government-owned land in the Mojave Desert to honor fallen veterans. The metal display has been repaired and replaced many times since, with the latest renovation completed in 1998. A former National Park Service employee, Frank Buono, sued to have the cross removed as an offensive symbol to all non-Christian soldiers and their surviving families. In response to this challenge, Congress offered yet another violation of the Establishment Clause by using sleazy slight-of-hand to circumvent the Constitution. Congress sold a little plot of land on which the cross rests to a veterans group, thereby claiming that the cross no longer stood on federal property. But the transparent ploy of gutting the Constitution by creating an island of private property surrounding by a National Park did not fool the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled the cross had to come down. Our largely Catholic Supreme Court then decided to hear the case.

Justice Scalia explained that he agreed to put this case on the court docket because he was simply baffled that a Christian cross could be construed to represent Christianity. He was puzzled that a cross was not broadly representative of Islam, Judaism or no religion at all. Take a moment and ponder that. His assertion that the cross represents everybody is extraordinarily bizarre, defying even the most basic elements of decency. How horribly offensive to every non-Christian to be told that the cross is a universal symbol representative of all religions. Our Founding Fathers are spinning furiously in their graves right now.

Scalia’s views are precisely what our forefathers feared so terribly and worked so diligently to avoid. In addition to ignoring our Bill of Rights, Scalia has abandoned any pretense of logic to support his faith. To demonstrate how terribly sick Scalia’s thoughts are, he asked the ridiculous question, “What would you have them erect? Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?” Notice that Scalia did not offer the obvious and imminently more reasonable alternative of erecting the Crescent of Islam in place of the cross. He only suggested the absurd notion of a chimera. He is so utterly blinded by his faith that he could not imagine that anything other than a cross could serve to honor our soldiers. Would Scalia himself allow a Star of David on his grave? If a Christian would not select a Star of David then why on earth would a Jew choose a cross? Yet that is exactly what Scalia proposes. The notion that the cross represents everybody is extraordinarily bizarre, defying even the most basic elements of decency. The idea that the Constitution favors religion or non-religion is downright terrifying.

Scalia sometimes describes himself as a “textualist” interpreter of the Constitution, meaning he divines the meaning of the words in the Constitution as the framers did in writing them. He channels into the minds of Jefferson and Adams; really how else would he have any greater insight into the meaning of those words than any other legal scholar? Actually he is a “spiritualist” interpreter of our founding document, the Carnac of the Supreme Court. Only Scalia knows what the founders really meant; only he can interpret the words accurately, even though he apparently has trouble interpreting his own. In any case, he said that as a textualist his job was easy. “The death penalty? Give me a break. It’s easy. Abortion? Absolutely easy. Nobody ever thought the Constitution prevented restrictions on abortion. Homosexual sodomy? Come on. For 200 years, it was criminal in every state.” (In what was to become a pattern, he skipped the issue of heterosexual sodomy, which is also illegal in many of those same states). For a brilliant scholar it is impressive to cram into one sentence so much inanity. Notice that he dismisses any discussion in repealing the death sentence by stating that nothing in the Constitution prevents it. By that logic anything not specifically prohibited is allowed. Well that is exactly true of sodomy as well — nowhere in the Constitution is sodomy prohibited. By his own logic, just provided to justify his position on the death penalty, requires that he must too support sodomy. But instead of being consistent, he shifts his argument to the states, citing precedent. And that is rich, because no other Justice in modern history has had such disdain for “stare decisis.” Scalia cites precedent when it suits his purpose, and rudely dismissed previous rulings when they become inconvenient. Even richer is his appeal to states’ rights (implied in his argument) given his willingness to trample over Florida’s rights in anointing Bush to the presidency.

For someone supposedly with a keen intellect, Scalia’s mind has become a nightmarish olio of jumbled principles packaged with arrogant certainty, which is an extraordinarily dangerous combination. No Justice has been more inconsistent in legal outlook. He is an activist judge who decries judicial activism. He is a strict constructionist who willingly flaunts the will and intent of our founders. He is, in the end, an embarrassment to the history of the Supreme Court. His judicial record is a train wreck, derailing logic and decency. With apologies to Churchill, never has one man done so much to harm so many. In a TV interview, Scalia described his job thusly: “I’m in charge of making the Constitution come out right all the time.” By his own criterion, he is a complete, utter failure. He is the epitome of everything that a Justice on the Supreme Court should not be; he is an abomination.

Death of an Orca: What It Means for the GOP

Donald Trump may be to the Republican Party what Blackfish was to SeaWorld.

The documentary Blackfish on the mistreatment of Orcas had a disastrous effect on the marine amusement park, revealing a long-standing and widely-accepted SeaWorld lie that the whales were being treated well. Following the release of Blackfish, attendance at the park fell by about 50%, with bleeding losses of revenue and about a 60% decline in stock value. Blackfish was like a light suddenly flipped on in the kitchen, revealing the roaches everybody knew were there but chose to ignore until the obvious was simply too overwhelming.

With Donald Trump’s campaign we can no longer ignore the intolerance and hate that has so thoroughly infected the Republican Party pantry. With Trump front and center in the Republican primary season, the spotlight is now shining brightly on the ugly truth that was, pre-Trump, so conveniently swept under the counter. Trump’s brazen and popular foray into the realm of vile rhetoric has revealed a long-standing but well-hidden truth about the GOP and conservativism in the United States: right-wing thought has devolved into a disease of ignorance and hate.

A New Low

While Republican presidential hopefuls descend down to historic and frightening lows of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, the rest of us must pause to take stock of why we have reached this horrible nadir in public discourse.

We have all heard the sentiment that, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” Mahatma Gandhi is often and widely cited as the author of this phrase, but he apparently never uttered the words. Nevertheless, no matter who first noted this truth, the idea is sound and a viable guide to our humanness. Others have gone further, again with hazy attribution to Gandhi, with the notion that, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way in which its animals are treated. I hold that the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.”

Many of us would agree with these aphorisms. But the Republican field is hastily veering ever far away from this ideal, taking the opposite position that attacking those most in need is a moral imperative. This inversion of reason can be seen with the extraordinary extremism espoused by those representing the GOP. Trump is a deep well of such ugly sentiment, which has disturbingly resonated with a large swath of our population. His popularity is what is most frightening of all. That a demagogue will come along is no surprise, but that his despicable views will find resonance with so many of our voters is as shocking as it is disappointing. Trump is the lump in our collective breast, an ominous warning of a more virulent disease about to attack our body politic. Trumps ascendancy proves we are sick, that the cancer on our society is metastasizing.

Mainstream Extremism

Trump is no outlier or anomaly, but instead broadly representative of the growing radicalization of conservative thought – one reason other candidates vying for the Oval Office have not dared to criticize Trump. There is much to choose from, but let’s look at just a few of the more drastic notions that have become mainstream, ideas that would have resulted in instant political death just a decade ago.

Trump proposes that the U.S. Government should shut down mosques, you know, like Nazi Germany closed synagogues. Should we have our own version of Kristallnacht now? Worse, if there can be a worse, pining for the good old days of internment camps for the Japanese during World War II, Trump suggests that the government create a database to track Muslims -like the Nazis tracked Jews. Perhaps we should require that all Muslims wear yellow crescent moons to make them easier to identify. If it was good enough for the Nazis, it is good enough for us, no?

Trump describes immigrants as rapists and criminals. “But you have people coming in and I’m not just saying Mexicans, I’m talking about people that are from all over that are killers and rapists and they’re coming into this country.” Never mind the pesky fact that there is no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than people born in the country. Here is the conclusion from a Congressional Research Service report from 2012: “The overall proportion of noncitizens in federal and state prisons and local jails corresponds closely to the proportion of noncitizens in the total U.S. population.”

With this dark but factually incorrect perspective on the influx of criminals, Trump not surprisingly has a solution when he says all undocumented workers “have to go.” This means that a candidate for the presidency of our country is proposing, seriously, that we locate, round up, arrest and then forcibly deport a population of 11 million people. To find we find these undesirables in our midst, would we create a secret police like the Stasi in East Germany, so neighbors would rat on neighbors? Who would take care of the children left behind? Does this not give you the creeps?

According to Trump, poor people are poor because they do not work hard enough. His solution is to “leave the minimum wage the way it is.” If only the poor would find jobs all would be grand.

The list of bizarre policy proposals goes on and on, but Trump’s assault on reason and civility does not end there. He openly mocked a New York Times reporter by imitating his spastic movements. He dismissed John McCain’s service to his country proclaiming that “I don’t like losers.” Trump went on to say that, “He is a war hero (only) because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.” Trump believes the normal act of going to the bathroom is too gross to be mentionable. He has denigrated Hillary Clinton for taking a bathroom break during a debate saying that “I know where she went. It’s disgusting.” There has likely never been a more misogynist candidate; he constantly degrades women. He said that Arianna Huffington, “…is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.” If he does not like a question from a female reporter he will dismiss her as menstruating. Trump has called women “pigs”, “dogs”, and “disgusting animals.”

To put all of this in perspective, let us pause here, contemplate, and do a brief exercise. Go back and substitute “Obama” everywhere we have “Trump.” Now re-read this and consider even for a brief moment the holy hell that would ensue if Obama did anything remotely close to anything Trump has done. Really, do that, and then weep for your country, for its double standard, for its descent into a new era of madness.

We are plumbing new depths of depravity here; previously any one of these proclamations would have knocked a candidate out of the race within a few hours of being verbalized. Now, the crazier the talk the more traction the candidate gains. The cancer is spreading.

Two Worlds

On the bright side, Trump’s blazing ignorance is shining a light on right-wing thought so that, finally, the ugly truth, so long suppressed, is revealing itself in ways that can no longer be ignored. We have before us now a world clearly divided between two opposing world views.

We are witnessing the clash of reason and faith, between science and religion, between truth and the big lie, between demagoguery and sane debate. Nowhere is that made clearer than in the rush toward willful ignorance seen in the Republican debates. Disdain for science and the scientific method is front and center in the field of candidates on stage with Trump. With the big lie and faith-based reasoning politicians are not constrained by the annoying shackles of reality. Denying the truth of climate change is now mandatory for any Republican; the GOP is one of the world’s few remaining political organizations that reject the obvious certainty of human-caused climate change. False statements about Planned Parenthood are taken at face value by party sympathizers even when easily shown to be fantasy. Fighting evolution is part of the GOP fabric, a modern day version of the Church’s attacks on Galileo. Never mind that we can demonstrate evolution in a Petri dish; it has been proven across multiple fields of science including genetics, biogeography, and paleontology. Even the Pope in 1996 grudgingly admitted that evolution is “more than just a theory.” But the GOP hangs on to the fifteenth century.

Trump’s campaign highlights like few others could that we are in a race for the bottom, in which the candidate who best embraces ignorance and hate wins. When beliefs are divorced from reality, a hallmark of the Trump’s outrageous claims, anything goes. With no common understanding of even baseline truths, we lose the ability to have any meaningful discourse to solve our very real problems. We can magically deport 11 million people. We can identify Muslims and track their movements. We can close mosques. All without consequence. Sure, why not, because reality and objective truths are no constraint.

The slogan and its many variations of “make American great again” often show up in conservative circles. To what age are we harking back to exactly? Make no mistake; this is war, a fight for the soul of our nation. Making America great means, to the extreme right, dragging us back into another Dark Ages just as the rest of the world is embracing the knowledge and new technologies of the 21st century. Trump and his ilk are a pathological infection of, consuming us from within. Trump is no joke, his candidacy is not funny. His colleagues on stage are just as frightening. This is deadly serious. Our only hope is that like with Blackfish, the shocking truth about the GOP as revealed by Trump’s candidacy, will bring the American electorate to its senses. To survive we must reject the lies from the right so long hidden in the national basement like a crazy uncle nobody wants to acknowledge. Trump brings the crazy to light; now we can see what our real choices are for the future.

Intolerance Masked As Tolerance Is Still Intolerance

Racism exists in this country; denying that reality, a disease of conservativism, is just the latest reincarnation of a problem that never seems to die. But right wing extremism is not our society’s only ideological woe. Sadly, liberalism has developed its own disease of decay, a growing cancer that threatens to undermine the very foundation of liberal thought.

In ostensibly promoting tolerance, the essential core of liberalism, left wing extremists have taken on an ill-advised and misguided campaign to enforce an extreme version of political correctness, a form of intolerance that is ironically self-destructively anti-liberal. Before those left of center suffer the analogous fate of conservatives who lost their initiative to the Tea Party, traditional liberals must stop this madness.

Before delving into specifics, we need to explore some baseline observations. Let us be clear: There is no constitutional right not to be offended. But we need to go even further: I actually have a constitutional right to express opinions that offend you. I have the inalienable right to hold an opinion you find heinous, and have the constitutional right to verbalize those ideas.

I derive these rights from our country’s founding documents. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, specifically by prohibiting Congress from restricting the press or the rights of individuals to speak openly. Here is the actual wording:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Yet an increasing number of students on university campuses have decided that their personal and easily-bruised sensitivities trump the Constitution and my individual freedom. These anti-liberal liberals unknowingly take the radical position of dictators, tyrants and monarchs that the way to control thought is to suppress any speech that is deemed by someone, or anyone, to be distasteful. Nothing could be more distant from true liberalism, which celebrates and warmly embraces broad tolerance of disparate worldviews.

A fundamental assumption of liberalism is that the rigid control over personal liberties, opinions or speech is the unhappy realm of conservatism, something to be fought at all costs. American liberalism is centered on the very idea of social justice, free speech, freedom of religion, celebration of diversity, and an individual’s fundamental right to free expression, without fear of reprisal or being ostracized.

One can hardly imagine anything more anti-liberal than thought police. Those on the left who seek to suppress speech cannot be called liberal at all; indeed, what we get with extreme liberalism is fascism, defined most significantly by its nature of “suppressing opposition and criticism.”

But how can radical left and right become one and the same? How can this be? Consider circumnavigating the globe at the equator; the two points furthest apart converge at journey’s beginning and end. So too with politics. In walking the path of political extremism, we find that opposing ideologies tend to converge toward the common ground of totalitarianism. Political correctness is ground zero.

Campuses Gone Wild

One of the most egregious examples of intolerance is the growing trend in academics to disinvite speakers who hold views inconsistent with campus sentiment. Students make the terrible mistake of thinking that by inviting a speaker a university endorses the speaker’s views. Nothing could be further from the truth; invitations to controversial speakers are an opportunity for debate and discussion, not endorsements. Nevertheless, the headlong rush toward ideological purity seems to be winning the day. A comprehensive study from last year shows that the number of such incidents has risen dramatically in the past 15 years. Here is the disturbing conclusion from that research:

“A faculty that is hostile to the mere presence of oppositional, inconvenient, or unpopular speakers and beliefs will likely be less adept at teaching students the values of critical thinking, open-mindedness, and free intellectual inquiry that universities are supposed to embody. Students who refuse to hear opposing viewpoints will be less likely to learn critical thinking skills and less able to defend their own beliefs once off-campus. Moreover, disinvitation efforts may be fueled by a campus climate that encourages disregard for free speech rights, as suggested by the correlation between successful disinvitations and restrictive speech codes.”

Not surprisingly, the most disinvited guests are right wing conservatives. Leading the pack are former president George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Ann Coulter. But established liberals are in the cross-hairs too, an inevitable consequence of the slippery slope of censorship. There is no end point other than totalitarianism.

Students at UC Berkeley voted to disinvite Bill Maher. The petition to do so justified this action by claiming that, “Bill Maher is a blatant bigot and racist who has no respect for the values UC Berkeley students and administration stand for. In a time where climate is a priority for all on campus, we cannot invite an individual who himself perpetuates a dangerous learning environment.”

Once the principle is established that censoring speakers who hold offending views is acceptable, there is no barrier to pushing such suppression into the realm of real oppression. Promoting tolerance by becoming intolerant is ultimately unsustainable. We can see an analogy in what happened during the Civil War. The Confederacy held that states had a right to secede from the Union. But the very idea of withdrawing from the Union led to the potential disintegration of the coalition of states founded on the idea of secession. By war’s end, two southern states threatened to secede from the confederacy. The right to secede could only lead to the balkanization of separate states because secession is inherently self-destructive. Suppressing speech is equally untenable, leading inexorably to an intolerance indistinguishable from the hate it is meant to eradicate.

I despise George Bush and Condi Rice; I have nothing but disdain for Ann Coulter. But trying to muzzle right wing nut-bags is not a solution. The opposite is true; censorship only gives them strength. Instead, we must give them enough oratorical rope to hang themselves. Let them spew their hate and bigotry. Let them expose their war crimes in public forums. Let them degrade themselves with their xenophobia and racism. Let them embarrass themselves in trying to rewrite history. Let these monsters speak, and let the whole world see them for what they are. Free speech is the oxygen feeding the fire that will destroy the ugly ideology of the right. Let them speak, and then conquer them with logic, reason and fact.

History is on our side; liberalism is the ideology that has advanced the human condition. Without liberals the concepts of human rights and civil liberties would be nothing but pipe dreams rather than broadly accepted global principles. Without liberals we would still be a colony of a distant king.

As is still the case in much of the world, in the United States we would have unsafe and unhealthy working conditions, and young children laboring in horrible circumstances. Blacks and women could not vote, mixed-race marriages would be illegal, gays would be second-class citizens, women would have no control over their own reproductive destiny. The air we breathe and water we drink would be polluted.

The history of human progress is the history of liberalism. Suppressing speech is an act of desperation that does nothing but undermine the righteousness of liberal thought. Open debate can only strengthen our position; we have nothing to fear from the corrupt ideology of right wing extremism. Let everybody have their say; we only gain by doing so.

Return to Liberalism

Fighting intolerance with intolerance is self-defeating. Denying opponents a chance to express opinions openly will backfire. In suppressing offensive speech, we become what we abhor. Let us take back liberalism and renew our commitment to the full flowering of freedom of expression, including speech we do not like.

Let us save liberalism and stop this accelerating trend of silencing those with whom we disagree. Let us return to the proposition that the way to combat hateful speech is not with suppression, but with more speech, having the confidence that truth and justice can at least sometimes prevail if given a chance to flourish in the open.

Who Will Investigate the Investigators?

We are currently trying to understand the cause of what must be the worst terrorist attacks in American history. To get to the bottom of this threat to our national security, the Congress has gotten serious with 32 congressional hearings, 11 published reports, and 70,000 pages of documents provided by the State Department, all at a cost of $4.8 million to date. A former Secretary of State endured 11 grueling hours of testimony to get answers. Our representatives mean business and intend to protect us from future harm. Money is no object. If you include the cost of DOD complying with the requests of six congressional investigations, man-hours of State Department time to answer committee requests, and all such related expenses the cost could be as high as $20 million.

We can judge the gravity of the threat by comparing past efforts to investigate other American tragedies. We are now into a period of investigation exceeding 3 years (1100 days), longer than the effort to understand what happened at Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, or the Iran-Contra scandal. Kennedy’s assassination warranted a 30 month investigation; the conduct of the Civil War, 40 months.

The threat is great enough that the effort exceeds the investigations into the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, which killed 224 people, or the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.

But nothing can demonstrate that we have suffered the worst terrorist attack in our history more than the comparison to our response to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, in which more than 3000 people were killed. After a 2 year investigation that catastrophic attack warranted a 571 page report.

Worst Terrorist Attack

Surely, what we are investigating must have resulted in the deaths of multiple thousands to justify this intense effort. But no, that is not the case. On September 11, 2012, the U.S. embassy in Libya was attacked, tragically killing four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Not thousands, four. The terrible deaths of these four patriots have now been investigated more than any other terrorist attack. By that measure surely therefore this must be the worst acts of terrorism in our history.

The focus of these investigations has been on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and her culpability in allowing this tragedy to unfold. The assumption here, not unreasonable, is that the buck stops with the relevant Department leader, just as a pilot is responsible for all that happens on his aircraft.

The tragi-comedy of this is revealed when we examine the GOP’s response to 9/11. Not only do conservatives not hold George Bush or his staff responsible for allowing this attack, they make the opposite claim that Bush “made us safe.” This absurd statement is made even though truly the worst acts of terrorism ever in our history happened on the Bush/Cheney watch, with Condoleezza Rice at the helm of the national security apparatus. So, who do we hold responsible when something goes wrong? Apparently Clinton but not Bush or Rice any of those working for Bush. Anyone other than the most rabid partisan can see the hypocrisy of this position.

Let us pause for a moment and look at whether Bush or his staff was responsible for 9/11 so we can put Clinton’s role in perspective. Yes, he was and so too more broadly his Administration; we have overwhelming evidenced the attack was entirely preventable. That conclusion is from the chair of the 9/11 Commission himself. Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, appointed by the Bush Administration, said that “9/11 could have and should have been prevented.”

OK, if we don’t blame Bush, how about Condoleezza Rice? No, we blame Clinton for Benghazi, but we give Rice a free pass on 9/11. How can anybody justify this differential treatment? Makes no sense at all. Unlike with Clinton on Benghazi, Rice is demonstrably guilty concerning 9/11. Think not? Rice was Bush’s National Security Advisor on 9/11, following which she made the outrageous claim that, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

Really? Way back in 1998, intelligence agencies concluded that, “a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden airplane into the World Trade Center.” Three years prior to 9/11, the United States warned that “Osama bin Laden might use civilian airplanes in terror attacks.” A presidential briefing on August 2006, warned of the possibility that passenger airlines could be used in terrorist attacks by al Qaeda. Even more specific, on August 16, 2001, a month prior to the attack, the FBI arrested Zaccarias Moussaoui on immigration charges after he was reported to be acting suspiciously while training at a flight school. The FBI speculated that Moussaoui might have been interested in flying a jet into the World Trade Center. NORAD for years had run drills to react to “planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings.”

With that in mind, re-evaluate the statement from Rice after the 9/11 attacks: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.”

Somehow, with all this background and input from the intelligence community, Condoleezza Rice was shocked, just shocked, that planes were used as weapons; and that nobody could have predicted that. Even though many experts and analysts had indeed predicted just that. The level of incompetence is almost incomprehensible. Rice’s punishment for her mistakes was a promotion to become Secretary of State. And the GOP attacks Clinton in that role; the irony.

Where in the face of this gross negligence are the committee hearings? Where are the 11 hours of Rice’s testimony before an outraged Congress? Where are the reports, 70,000 pages of documents, the $20 million investigation? Where is the blame on Rice or Bush? On what basis is to acceptable to give Bush and Rice and pass on 3,000 deaths, but blame Clinton for four? So let’s see: incompetence in the Bush administration led to the tragic death of thousands of innocent victims, but he “kept us safe.” Clinton as Secretary of State was in the lead when four Americans died in the line of duty, and she is to blame. Oh the humanity! Oh, and will the GOP admit that Obamas has kept us safe since we have suffered no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during his nearly 8 years in office?

Benghazi in Perspective

But let us put aside for the moment the tragedy of 9/11, and compare apples to apples. Let’s look specifically at attacks on U.S. embassies and missions overseas. How do the terrible events in Benghazi compare to similar events historically? Who is to blame?

Others have carefully catalogued all the deadly attacks on diplomatic targets during the Bush Administration; these below are taken verbatim from Politifact.com, which in turn compiled these from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. I have included only those attacks that resulted in American deaths at embassies or consulates.

May 12, 2003: In a series of attacks, suicide bombers blew themselves up in a truck loaded with explosives in a complex that housed staff working for U.S. defense firm Vinnell in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (The contractors worked out of the U.S. embassy.) At least eight Americans were killed in the incident. Al-Qaida was suspected responsible for the incident. This was one of three attacks, involving at least nine suicide bombers and suspected to have involved 19 perpetrators overall.

Oct. 24, 2004: Edward Seitz, the assistant regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, died in a mortar or possible rocket attack at Camp Victory near the Baghdad airport. An American soldier was also injured. He was believed to be the first U.S. diplomat killed following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Nov 25, 2004: Jim Mollen, the U.S. Embassy’s senior consultant to the Iraqi Ministers of Education and Higher Education, was killed just outside the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Jan. 29, 2005: Unknown attackers fired either a rocket or a mortar round at the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. The strike killed two U.S. citizens and left four others injured.

Sept. 7, 2005: Four American contractors employed with a private security firm supporting the regional U.S. embassy office in Basra, Iraq, were killed when a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy. Three of the contractors died instantly, and the fourth died in a military hospital after the bombing.

Sept. 17, 2008: Suspected al-Qaida militants disguised as security forces detonated vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, fired rocket propelled grenades, rockets and firearms on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. A suicide bomber also blew himself up at the embassy. Six Yemeni police, four civilians (including an American civilian), and six attackers were killed while six others were wounded in the attack.

Where were the investigations? Where were the congressional committees dedicated to finding the truth? Where was Fox News? And these only touch the surface because I exclude all but American deaths. In all, as we all know by now, during George Bush’s presidency, the U.S. suffered 13 attacks on embassies and consulates in which 60 people died (some put the total at 87). What is important here: neither Fox News, nor any conservative media, mentioned not at all or only in passing any of these attacks and deaths. Compared to the never-ending coverage of the deaths of four Americans in Libya, I can find not one single Fox News or conservative media report on the 8 Americans killed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; not one story of Jim Mollen’s murder, and none on the murder of Edward Seitz.

The deaths in Benghazi were covered in saturation nearly non-stop for almost two full years after the attacks. According to MediaMatters, Fox News ran 1,098 segments on the Libya attacks, at least 20 per month, with a peak of 174 in October 2012. Of these, 281 segments alleged a “cover up” by the Obama administration, without offering any evidence for the claim, and pushing the story long-past when the claim was proven false. There is and was no cover up. The House Armed Services Committee report concluded that the Obama administration was “not guilty of any deliberate, negligent wrongdoing.” The GOP panel confirmed that “no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order” was given to the military. This is a Republican majority report. The bi-partisan Senate report on Benghazi came to the same conclusion that there was no cover up.

Equally corrupt, Fox aired 100 segments pushing the blatant lie that the Obama administration issued a “stand-down order” before there was any evidence for the claim and even after the accusation was known to be false. So Fox aired hundreds and hundreds of segments on an alleged cover up and stand-down order that they knew to be wrong. Compare this onslaught of false accusations concerning four American deaths to the complete lack of coverage or investigation into the deaths suffered during 13 attacks under Bush.

I have no issue with Benghazi being investigated; all the better to prevent future attacks. It is also understandable to be outraged at the deaths in Benghazi. But not if you felt no such outrage when embassy staff was killed under Bush. Or if you give Bush a pass on 9/11. This differential, selective outrage is the worst manifestation of political hypocrisy; and it is a disease largely of the right. There is no left-wing equivalent of what Fox News has done with Benghazi; nothing even close.

The Benghazi “scandal” is a fabricated creation of right wing media, untethered to reality or truth, fueling an outrage borne of ignorance and an ugly selective memory. The Benghazi hearings are a travesty, an orgy of the foulest political partisanship. This is our political world at its nadir. We need to investigate the investigators to prevent this cesspool of injustice happen again.

There is a ray of light, and inkling of hope, a positive outcome to all this. In her marathon testimony before a hostile Congress, Clinton was able to rise above the filth of the Benghazi Committee, and in doing so, strengthened her quest for the presidency. There is no sweeter revenge than having the very machine created to take Clinton down give her the momentum that will lead her to the White House. Even if we do not now, history will judge Bush, Cheney, Rice and others in the Administration for their deadly negligence; and Clinton will be sitting in the Oval Office as that history is told.

The Devils of Darwin: Satan Takes on the Tea Party

Ben Carson is interesting as a Republican candidate for the presidency, not because he could ever win, but because he embodies in one person the very worst of conservative thought. In spite of his intellectual prowess as a neurosurgeon, Carson celebrates ignorance, relishes anti-science sentiment and ignores the fundamentals of history. This describes depressingly well the right wing of the Republican Party.

We know by now that Carson said on Meet the Press that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” So a man running for president, responsible for upholding our constitution, is ignorant of basic governing principles: Article VI of the U.S. Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Excluding a candidate from the presidency because of religious belief is a clear and direct violation of our own founding documents. Yet, when questioned about using faith as a litmus test, Carson doubled down with, “I guess it depends on what that faith is,” when considering what might be disqualifying. Only Christians need apply. Carson is sure the United States is a Christian nation with the same conviction Saudis believe Saudi Arabia is a Muslim nation. In pursuing his dream of imposing one religion over all others Carson is seeking to create the very type of theocracy we so disdain in the Middle East. The irony is lost on him.

Carson’s tenuous grip on reality is embarrassing, but typical of the far right. He rejects well-established facts of biology, is terribly confused about entropy and the order of the universe, dismisses fundamental claims of physics, and of course denies the reality of climate change. Carson claims the theory of evolution was inspired by Satan. Carson invokes Einstein to bolster the view that Darwin was a dupe of the devil because someone as smart as Einstein believed in god. Well, like most of what Carson says, that is untrue. Einstein unsurprisingly held complex and subtle views on theology, but the bottom line could not be clearer, when he said:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

Therein, we discover the main problem with conservatism: Truth is nothing more than an option, nothing more valid than fantasy. Truth carries no more weight than the random musings of a madman. Faith trumps fact, religious conviction supersedes civic duty, and ignorance becomes a celebrated worldview.

Democrats do not seem up to the task of taking on this new breed of crazy. With the freak show called the GOP primary season in full swing, the time has come to offer up a political counterbalance to dangerous right wing extremism — beyond what traditional Democrats can muster. The right created the Tea Party; we will call our new movement the Devils of Darwin (DOD) Party. Hopefully the DOD acronym will confuse the unaware into thinking we are associated with the one branch of government so favored by the right. The GOP conned the poor into voting for the rich, so this misdirection is the least we can do.

Devils of Darwin: A New Party of Reason and Rationalism is Born

We the people of rational thought and sound mind in middle America, in order to establish a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the benefits of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Devils of Darwin Party of the United States of America.

Self-evident Truths

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal with no special status of birth, and that all life on Earth began as a contingent event based on standard laws of physics and chemistry involving no magic spark or divine act.

We further hold these truths to be indisputable facts of our biology and a clear demonstration of our humble place in the biosphere, which is a fundamental foundation of our political philosophy:

1) Evolution explains the incredibility diversity of life, and is an undirected process with no purpose, intelligence, or foresight. Humans, who evolved under the same laws of nature as all other creatures on earth, hold no exalted status in the pantheon of life.

2) All species exploit the environment to the maximum extent possible, until either competition, resource depletion, predation, disease or other constraints limit growth and expansion. Like every other animal, humans have followed this natural path of using all available resources in our struggle to survive.

One critical difference, however, is our technological advantage. Our species has successfully co-opted a significant percentage of the planet’s bounty as we fight to pass our genes to the next generation. This unique reliance on technology to exploit the environment, and to threaten each other using weapons of war, has had global effects over a short time period. As a result, while we act no differently than other animals in pursuit of survival, our actions may cause our extinction, either through the degradation of the resources on which we depend, or more directly through the use of weapons of mass destruction.

3) The large brains that gave us technology, prosperity, myths and war also give us the ability to choose, personally and collectively, to be concerned with the fate of distant generations, and to behave for the greater good. Humans are special, not because we are made in god’s image, and told to rule over the Earth, but because people have the amazing ability to choose a future in which we will thrive and develop in a just society while coexisting with a healthy natural world. If humans fail to seize this opportunity to create such a future, we will be no more than bacteria with email accounts.

The Devils of Darwin Party is committed to the development and adoption of policies, programs and laws that will help guide humankind toward a just future in which we celebrate our deep connection to all things living as a minor twig on the vast four billion year old ever-branching bush of life.

To secure the inherent rights consistent with our biology and evolutionary history, governments are created as human institutions that derive their just powers solely from the consent of the governed. No government so formed can claim to be favored by gods of its own making. The mythical god of Abraham is not Republican, Democrat, Independent, Progressive or American. Holding office requires no litmus test of faith.

A government formed by the people for the people can survive only through open debate, free exchange of ideas and reliance on verifiable facts to arbitrate disputes. The Devils of Darwin Party is therefore dedicated to rooting out hypocrisy, myth, appeal to faith and bigotry in political discourse. We vigorously reject pious calls: to balance the budget, but only when a Democrat holds the nation’s highest office; to protect the Constitution while advocating to alter the document for trivial purpose; to end “runaway government spending” when the party making that demand is responsible for the nation’s greatest debts and deficits; to repeal “government-run” health care while reaping the benefits of Medicare; to stop tax hikes that are in fact nothing but repealing temporary cuts that led to record deficits and debts; to promote energy reform that is a cloak to hide continued subsidies for the fossil fuel industry; to agitate to “take back America” without articulating who exactly America is being taken back from; to get “government off the people’s back” while advocating government intrusion into our most personal and intimate choices, including who we marry and a woman’s right to choose her own reproductive destiny; to promote limited government while urging the federal government to “do more” whenever a crisis or natural disaster occurs; to promote education while foisting upon our children superstitions and myths appropriate to the 15th century; to promote the inherent advantages of capitalism while legislating “free market” regulations that subsidize and foster corruption, harm individual investors and squeeze small businesses. Conservatives privatize profit but socialize loss. Business leaders reap all the profits and rewards of risk and claim brilliant acumen when successful, but burden taxpayers when business fails. This hypocrisy must end.

Federal Budget

We call for a government that is as big as necessary, but no bigger. The ideals of small government, balanced budgets and lower taxes are shared by all in theory but diverge in implementation. While conservative agitators attempt to paint of a picture of stark differences in fiscal ideology between the left and right, the facts tell a different story. We call on the Congress to debate federal spending on facts rather than ideological fiction. To promote such a debate, we note the following facts about the 2014 federal budget:

National defense ($605 billion), Health and Human Services (including Medicare; $921 billion) and Social Security ($851 billion) combine to a sum of $2.4 trillion out of a total federal budget of $3.8 trillion. The sum all of these government programs comprise 63% of the entire spending package. The National Science Foundation ($6 billion) and law enforcement, including border patrol ($60 billion) add $66 billion more. Farm subsidies, which mainly go to red states, add another $17 billion. Those total $83 billion. The government is also paying $200 billion annually in interest on debt created under President Bush.

This segment of federal spending has widespread and deep backing from traditional conservatives. The bottom line is that total government spending that has mainstream Republican backing amounts to $3.2 trillion, out of a total budget of $3.8 trillion. Conservatives hate big government in theory, but love big government when it comes to military spending, fossil fuel subsidies and state pork. We note therefore that Republicans actively support and defend 84 percent of the big government they so thoroughly disdain. We conclude that opponents of liberalism believe a budget of $3.2 trillion is virtuous but are outraged by a budget of $3.8 trillion. Even if liberals supported 100 percent of the federal budget (they do not), gathering up righteous indignation about the remaining 16 percent hardly constitutes an ideological divide between big and small government. Let us lose this false debate and focus on the issues of greatest importance to our future well-being.

National Security

The Devils of Darwin Party believes that we can and must protect American citizens against terrorism without sacrificing the very rights we are fighting to protect. We have faith in the strength of our Constitution, and believe that we can work within the constraints of our founding document to protect the Republic and secure a prosperous future.

Republicans scoff at the idea that “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both” (multiple variations, usually attributed to Ben Franklin). Instead, conservatives believe that our safety can only be secured by sacrificing our rights; the same ones our founders thought were inalienable. In the name of national security, conservatives advocate that the government (which they distrust in all other arenas) be given the extraordinary power to detain any American citizen and that the suspect be denied the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, denied access by families and denied legal representation. In condoning torture, disdaining Miranda rights, and dismissing the right of the accused to meet his accuser, conservative ideology has become one of the greatest threats to liberty. None of that dangerous legacy of the Bush years has ever been acknowledged by right wing ideologues. War crimes were committed but never prosecuted. Conservatives want to give unlimited power to arrest and detain to the very government they hate. The irony is lost on them.

Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Recovery

Faced with the choice of a catastrophic depression or federal debt, President Obama prudently even if reluctantly chose the latter. We applaud his precipitous actions to prevent an economic calamity with emergency stimulus money. As with health care, we acknowledge as well his leadership in getting the Congress to pass meaningful if imperfect Wall Street reform. Reform has been horribly inadequate but at least a step away from the chaos of conservative leadership.

As measured against GDP, the deficit has declined by two-thirds under Obama, hardly the epitome of liberal excess. Liberalism has proven to be the only fiscally responsible ideology. Eight years of conservative rule left the economy of the United States in shambles with double-digit unemployment festering in a deep recession, on the verge of a great depression, with record annual deficits and a ballooning national debt. Eight years of an almost religious zeal for deregulation left Wall Street drowning in a sea of massive corruption, failed banks, and collapsing brokerage houses. Conservatives have exhausted all credibility on the subject of fiscal responsibility. Whenever a Republican is President, the Party quietly buries the mantra that we are “living off the backs of our grandchildren” to rail against government spending, but brings the phrase back into use when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. Enough. The time has come, finally, to kill once and for all Republican hypocrisy on this subject.

Unemployment has declined to pre-recession levels. We note that President Bush inherited from President Clinton an unemployment rate of 4 percent, but left office bequeathing to Obama an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent and growing monthly. Bush was losing 700,000 jobs per month; in September 2015 the economy added 142,000 jobs and the total unemployment rate is down to 5.1 percent. The rolling average of job growth is 198,000 per month for 2015. Hardly the economic mayhem of liberalism so feared by the far right.

Education

Our educational system is in shambles, and our children lag far behind by every international standard. But we dither, focusing on “vouchers” instead of underlying problems. In the meantime in states where tested do not know that George Washington was our first president or that the east coast of our country borders the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than face the real issues, conservatives simply attack the Department of Education as a favorite foil. We are dooming entire generations to second class status in the world. While the rest of the world eagerly provides children with a sophisticated curriculum of science and technology, the United States lags behind under the weight of antiquated debates forced upon us by the religious right. We need to stop fighting battles appropriate to the dark ages; we need to teach basic science to all kids.

Health Care

We fully endorse the Affordable Care Act, passed in the face of unyielding right wing opposition. In doing so we recognize that the president of the United States has limited power, and must work with a divided Congress, and therefore any legislation will be less than perfect. We applaud President Obama for his success even if a single-payer system would have been more desirable. He acted in the face of a growing crisis: our health care system is an embarrassment, but is defended by the right wing through gross ignorance as “.” We spend twice as much per capita as any other wealthy democracy but get a poor return on that investment. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not offer universal health care. In the industrial world we are ranked 25th in infant mortality. We are 26th in healthy life expectancy, behind Slovenia. Behind Slovenia. This is the health care system John Boehner claim is the best in the world. Another case of conservatives losing touch with reality, where faith trumps fact. Overall our health care system is ranked 37th globally, behind third-world countries like Oman. Only the United States has the embarrassment of medical bankruptcies. Obamacare is an important first step in bringing the United States back up to the standards of a developed country. We must build and expand on this new foundation.

Clean Energy

Now is the time to create the renewable energy equivalent of the Manhattan Project or the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. We need to push our transition to green energy technologies quickly, massively, with unwavering commitment. This is our opportunity.

We must invest heavily in research, implementation and infrastructure development: research to discover new technologies; implementation to ensure wide adoption of the technologies in play now; and a more aggressive restructuring of tax incentives to promote clean growth, discourage waste and accelerate the development of the extensive infrastructure changes necessary to widely adopt clean energy technologies. While the predominant emphasis must be on the private sector, we will also need direct government investment in certain areas beyond research, such as modernizing the power grid. This is how our national interests will be secured. This is where jobs will be created. The United States should rightfully lead this charge. The nation that first energizes its economy primarily with renewables and weans future growth from fossil fuels will be the next global superpower.

Climate Change

Climate change is real, exceeding natural background rates, and caused by human activity. We have run out of time for debate, and need to act quickly now. Cap and trade is a flawed mechanism to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but better than doing nothing and certainly a reasonable intermediate step. We call on the Congress to overcome conservative resistance and re-introduce this legislation. Obama made important progress when signing the recent agreement with Chinese president Xi Jinping on a protocol for reducing greenhouse gases.

Conservative denials of climate change are tragic on many levels. We are condemning millions to an unfortunate future of coastal flooding, mass migrations, agricultural disruptions, exposure to the northward march of tropical diseases, and inevitable wars over shifting and scarce resources. When these tragic events unfold, we will face of millions of unnecessary deaths and the preventable disruption of hundreds of millions of lives: a direct consequence of conservative ignorance.

Environment

The world every year is losing 40 million acres of tropical forests, which now cover only 6% of the globe’s surface, down from 14 percent. Humans have depleted 90 percent of all large fish from the world’s oceans. We are losing up to 50,000 species each year to extinction, a rate 1000 times natural background levels. More than half of all coral reefs are dead, dying or endangered; all coral reefs may be extinct by 2100. If you don’t care, consider that 500 million people depend directly on coral reefs for survival.

We have no luxury in time as we ponder a response. The false dichotomy between growth and the environment is an anachronism born from the failures of conservative thought. Conservatives believe that growth is only possible at the expense of the environment, and that any and all efforts to protect our resources impede growth and cost jobs. That philosophy is wrong on every count and has proven so by history repeatedly. Environmentalism is not the ideology of socialists, but instead the true engine of all future economic growth.

In just eight years, George Bush managed to undo nearly a century of progress on the environment. Obama has worked to bring us back to the 21st century with an environmental program based on fact rather than fiction. We have much work to do. We need to protect our forests and biodiversity, reinvest in clean air and clean water, sustainably manage our marine resources and improve efficiencies at all levels of production and consumption. We accomplish these goals with strict enforcement of existing regulations, improved laws to accommodate advances in our knowledge of ecosystem function and the development of a truly level playing field in which green technologies can compete fairly with traditional industries. Economic incentives, tax laws, enforcement of environmental legislation, implementation of international treaties, and government support for sustainable resource use are necessary to create the milieu in which individuals can rationally act to promote the greater good.

Declaration

We, therefore, the representatives of the rational electorate of United States of America, appealing to natural law and reason, do by authority of the good people of the United States, solemnly publish and declare that the Devils of Darwin Party is hereby established. For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of human dignity, we mutually pledge to each other our fortunes and sacred honor.

Our Embarrassing Man Crush on Pope Francis

Pope Francis arrives in Washington, D.C. as a conquering hero, with jostling crowds lining the street in rapt adulation. Trumpets, pomp, elaborate ceremony and fawning commentary herald the presence of a global rock star. This man crush is as unwarranted as it is embarrassing.

In spite of some interesting rhetoric, Francis has implemented no significant policy changes in the Catholic Church, home to 1.2 billion worshipers. Throughout most of history, Popes have claimed to be connected to the divine, the successor of Peter, infallible as a representative of god on Earth and the right and ability to judge and excommunicate angels. Yet with this power Pope Francis, like all of his predecessors, continues to support Church policies that perpetrate poverty, misery, hunger and suffering throughout the world.

An Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (Sep 24, 2015) by Nicholas Kristof starts off with what is commonly said about the Pope: “We all know that Pope Francis cares deeply for the marginalized…” This claim is perpetuated without evaluation or support, and in fact is patently untrue. Let’s focus for a moment on family planning. The Pope staunchly defends the Church’s position on contraception, giving women in impoverished nations no role at all other than to produce more offspring. Yet we know that giving women control over their own reproduction rights is the most effective means of ending the cycle of poverty and promoting sustainable economic growth. Here is the conclusion from the National Institutes of Health:

“Failure to sustain family planning programs, both domestically and abroad, will lead to increased population growth and poorer health worldwide, especially among the poor. However, robust family planning services have a range of benefits, including maternal and infant survival, nutrition, educational attainment, the status of girls and women at home and in society, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention, and environmental conservation efforts. Family planning is a prerequisite for achievement of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and for realizing the human right of reproductive choice.”

Despite this well-documented need for and benefits of contraception, the Pope opposes any effort to give women the right to control their own reproductive destiny. You cannot claim an affinity for the poor while promoting the very policies that ensure the poor will remain ever so. The Pope’s claim to care for the poor is fraud supported by media that refuse to call him on his hypocrisy.

Addressing AIDS? Pope Francis has abetted the spread of AIDS by preventing the distribution of condoms, the most effective and least expensive means of doing so. He has done nothing substantial to address the continuing problem of pedophilia among priests. More than 20 million people worldwide have died of AIDS. In the words of one Brazilian priest, “If I were pope, I would start a condom factory right in the Vatican. What’s the point of sending food and medicine when we let people get infected with AIDS and die?” Interestingly this quote about Pope Benedict XVI is in an article by the same author (Kristof) who now is drooling over Pope Francis – and there has been absolutely no change in policy between the two popes. Apparently love and man crushes are both blind.

On the subject of abortion, Pope Francis urged a group of gynecologists to refuse to perform abortions, one day after admonishing Catholics to stop obsessing about abortions. (He ignores too the obvious that distributing condoms would reduce the need for abortions). This is the Pope’s pattern: make a media friendly statement to catch attention and admiration, and then reverse that when it comes to policy and doctrine.

The nature of marriage? After some supporting statement by the Pope on gay marriage, the Church reaffirms its unyielding opposition. There has been no change in doctrine or policy. The LGBTQ community is no better off under Francis than under any of his predecessors, making the liberal singing of Kumbaya with this pope a big mystery.

Fairness and justice? This is almost obscene given that the Church under the new pope continues to defend pedophile priests, does little to prevent future abuse, and continues to deny victims proper compensation. Ask the tens of thousands of abuse victims about how fair and just the new Pope has been. Like all before him, the Pope largely ignores the issue beyond bland promises to do better. Here is Pope Francis on the pedophile crisis: “The Church hierarchy doesn’t need new rules on abuse. It needs to follow long-established secular laws.” That has not worked out so well, but there is no call for reform here; just more of the same. No meaningful change in doctrine, and no change in policy.

The Pope has been lauded as bringing new transparency to the Vatican bank, but has done little to increase transparency in policy. Where is this transparency on the question about condom distribution, homosexuality in the priesthood, female education and female clergy? What about transparency within the Vatican? Pope Francis oversaw a new law punishing any Vatican whistle-blower with eight years in prison, which includes anyone who leaks information concerning the “fundamental interests” of the Vatican. This is the opposite of transparency

So when you see the Pope, see this: a man who is responsible for perpetuating the never-ending cycle of crushing poverty (opposing contraception) for a billion people globally, the unnecessary spread of AIDS (opposing condom distribution) and the unabated continuation of priests molesting children (no policy change, no assigned responsibilities to those who committed the crimes). This is the man being celebrated in Washington.

Yes, the Pope is charismatic. He sometimes makes statements that seem modern or progressive. He talks a good game. But he is nothing new, only old wine in a new bottle. Nothing has changed; no major policies have shifted. You all need to get over your man crush. It is embarrassing.

Selective Outrage: Hypocrisy at Its Worst

As a front-runner for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, Hillary Clinton is a legitimate target for close scrutiny. Clinton has a long history ripe for criticism as First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State. What is so striking therefore in the attacks from the right wing is the paucity of substance in conservative opposition research. Of Clinton’s long career as a public official, all we hear from the right is Benghazi and email. Yet these two areas of complaint reveal more about the intellectual and political bankruptcy of conservative thought than they do about Clinton herself.

Benghazi

On September 11, 2012, the U.S. embassy in Libya was attacked, killing four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Clearly the loss of lives is terribly sad. Understanding what happened, and why, is important to reduce the possibility of more deaths in the future. But the outrage from the right, and the insistent drumbeat to investigate Clinton’s supposed incompetence as Secretary of State, is nothing but the very worst of selective outrage. Others before me have cataloged all the deadly attacks on diplomatic targets during the Bush Administration; these below are taken verbatim from Politifact.com, which in turn compiled these from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. I have included only those attacks that resulted in American deaths at embassies or consulates.

May 12, 2003: In a series of attacks, suicide bombers blew themselves up in a truck loaded with explosives in a complex that housed staff working for U.S. defense firm Vinnell in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. (The contractors worked out of the U.S. embassy.) At least eight Americans were killed in the incident. Al-Qaida was suspected responsible for the incident. This was one of three attacks, involving at least nine suicide bombers and suspected to have involved 19 perpetrators overall.

Oct. 24, 2004: Edward Seitz, the assistant regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, died in a mortar or possible rocket attack at Camp Victory near the Baghdad airport. An American soldier was also injured. He was believed to be the first U.S. diplomat killed following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Nov 25, 2004: Jim Mollen, the U.S. Embassy’s senior consultant to the Iraqi Ministers of Education and Higher Education, was killed just outside the Green Zone in Baghdad.

Jan. 29, 2005: Unknown attackers fired either a rocket or a mortar round at the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad. The strike killed two U.S. citizens and left four others injured.

Sept. 7, 2005: Four American contractors employed with a private security firm supporting the regional U.S. embassy office in Basra, Iraq, were killed when a roadside bomb exploded near their convoy. Three of the contractors died instantly, and the fourth died in a military hospital after the bombing.

Sept. 17, 2008: Suspected al-Qaida militants disguised as security forces detonated vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, fired rocket propelled grenades, rockets and firearms on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. A suicide bomber also blew himself up at the embassy. Six Yemeni police, four civilians (including an American civilian), and six attackers were killed while six others were wounded in the attack.

Where was the outrage then? Where was Fox News? And these only touch the surface because I exclude all but American deaths. In all, as we all know by now, during George Bush’s presidency, the U.S. suffered 13 attacks on embassies and consulates in which 60 people died (some put the total at 87). What is important here: neither Fox News, nor any conservative media, mentioned not at all or only in passing any of these attacks and deaths. Compared to the never-ending coverage of the deaths of four Americans in Libya, I can find not one single Fox News or conservative media reports on the 8 Americans killed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; not one story of Jim Mollen’s murder, and none on the murder of Edward Seitz.

Benghazi brings to us a new virulent form of selective outrage never before seen. The deaths in Benghazi were covered in saturation nearly non-stop for almost two full years after the attacks. According to MediaMatters, Fox News ran 1,098 segments on the Libya attacks, at least 20 per month, with a peak of 174 in October 2012. Of these, 281 segments alleged a “cover up” by the Obama administration, without offering any evidence for the claim, and pushing the story long-past when the claim was proven false. There is and was no cover up. The House Armed Services Committee report concluded that the Obama administration was “not guilty of any deliberate, negligent wrongdoing.” The GOP panel confirmed that “no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order” was given to the military. This is a Republican majority report. The bi-partisan Senate report on Benghazi came to the same conclusion that there was no cover up.

Equally corrupt, Fox aired 100 segments pushing the blatant lie that the Obama administration issued a “stand-down order” before there was any evidence for the claim and even after the accusation was known to be false. So Fox aired hundreds and hundreds of segments on an alleged cover up and stand-down order that they knew to be wrong. Compare this onslaught of false accusations concerning four American deaths to the complete lack of coverage or investigation into the deaths suffered during 13 attacks under Bush.

I have no issue with Benghazi being investigated; all the better to prevent future attacks. It is also understandable to be outraged at the deaths in Benghazi. But not if you felt no such outrage when embassy staff were killed under Bush. This differential, selective outrage is the worst manifestation of political hypocrisy; and it is a disease largely of the right. There is no left-wing equivalent of what Fox News has done with Benghazi; nothing even close. The Benghazi “scandal” is a fabricated creation of right wing media, untethered to reality or truth, fueling an outrage borne of ignorance and ad ugly selective memory. This is our political world at its nadir.

Clinton eMails

Unlike with Benghazi, a story about tragic American death, the email episode has no underlying substance. Experts on both sides of the aisle have said that Clinton violated no federal laws. The entire controversy comes down to the question of whether Clinton did or did not send or receive classified information over her private email account. There was no other issue at stake here. That was the controversy; of course Clinton’s slow weasel-like response to the controversy generated more.

Two years after leaving office the State Department requested a record of her emails; she turned over 30,490 messages. The problem, and what fuels the fire, is that Clinton also had erased 31,830 messages from the server, deeming those communications as private.

That Fox News will push this plot line is not shocking, but what may be is that the story has legs in the absence of any real story. That is due in large part to Clinton’s lawyerly mishandling of the issue in the media; and because the accusations reflect an uneasy sense that many of her supporters have that Clinton is too secretive and insular in her management style. Her explanation for why she used personal email is weak, saying it was a matter of convenience. It sounds very “Clintonesque” and squirrely, as she is prone to be. Clearly, Clinton has shown bad judgement here even if there is no real substance to the scandal.

But we are focusing here on differential and selective outrage; and the email commotion is an example every bit as egregious as Benghazi. There are two problems, which are explored below: her predecessors used personal email, and the Bush administration erased millions of emails (not just Clinton’s thousands); yet there was no outcry in either case. Differential outrage.

Colin Powell used personal email when he was Secretary of State. There is not a single Fox News story or conservative media story I can find on Powell’s use of personal email in his official capacity. Chuck Hagel used a personal email account when he was Secretary of Defense. No news coverage. Karl Rove, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff, used his personal (RNC) email 95 percent of the time. Little news coverage.

We have with just this example another case of shameful selective outrage. But this is only the beginning. Conservatives not only conjure up a scandal where there is none, they ignore completely a real scandal and cover up. The right discounts completely the fact that the Bush/Cheney White House deleted millions of emails in a blatant obstruction of justice. The emails were erased during a controversy in which eight U.S. attorneys were dismissed by the Bush White House. During a congressional investigation, the White House was forced to reveal that “not all” White House emails were “available” because they were transmitted via an email server not controlled by the federal government. In other words, they were using personal email accounts. Yet this topic of millions of missing emails never came up on any of the major news shows when first coming to light or after; while Clinton’s email account was mentioned more than 100 times on the first Sunday the story broke. Indeed, Bush’s missing emails were dismissed by the media as nothing more than “sloppy guidance” on email protocol.

Have you hear Fox News or any right wing newspaper giving Clinton a pass with the excuse of “sloppy guidance”? Yes we have a right to be incensed at Clinton’s use of private emails; but not if we were not unhappy about Powell, Hagel or Rove. Yes, we can be outraged that Clinton erased thousands of emails; but not if we were not outraged when Bush and Cheney erased millions.

Selective outrage now seems to be the currency of right wing ideology. We see only two examples here, but multiple dozens are seen in response to Obama’s policies and programs; fodder for another blog. Politics always involves an element of hypocrisy on both left and right. But the differential and selective outrage we see today takes us in an entirely new direction and to a new extreme. The conservative play on Benghazi and Clinton’s emails is nothing short of despicable. Perhaps we are witnessing the consequences of a right wing reeling from Obama’s successful presidency; perhaps this is a manifestation of conservative desperation. No matter the cause, conservatives have once again diminished our political lives.

Earth 2.0: Bad News for God

The discovery of Kepler-452b is not likely to see the public swoon with a collective rendition of Kumbaya. But this Earth 2.0 is a huge if under-appreciated discovery, not because Kepler-452b is unique but for just the opposite reason; there are likely thousands or millions or even billions of such earth-like planets in the universe. The discovery of just one such world is good evidence for many more: after all, we know of 100 billion galaxies each with as many as 300 billion stars (big variation per galaxy). Astronomers estimate that there are about 70 billion trillion stars. Math wizardry is not necessary to conclude we did not by chance find the only other possibly habitable planet among that huge population of stars.

With this discovery we come ever closer to the idea that life is common in the universe. Perhaps you are not convinced. That is OK; let me speculate what would happen should we ever find evidence of life beyond earth even if you think such discovery unlikely. I would like here to preempt what will certainly be a re-write of history on the part of the world’s major religions. I predict with great confidence that all will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings. My goal here is to declare this as nonsense before it happens. I am not alone in this conclusion that religion will contort to accommodate a new reality of alien life.

Let us be clear that the Bible is unambiguous about creation: the earth is the center of the universe, only humans were made in the image of god, and all life was created in six days. All life in all the heavens. In six days. So when we discover that life exists or existed elsewhere in our solar system or on a planet orbiting another star in the Milky Way, or in a planetary system in another galaxy, we will see a huge effort to square that circle with amazing twists of logic and contorted justifications. But do not buy the inevitable historical edits: life on another planet is completely incompatible with religious tradition. Any other conclusion is nothing but ex-post facto rationalization to preserve the myth. Let us see why more specifically.

From Genesis 1:1, we get:

God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of god he created him; male and female he created them.

Nothing in that mentions alien worlds, which of course the ancients knew nothing about. Man was told to rule over the fish on the earth, not on other planets. But god would have known of these alien worlds, so it is curious he did not instruct the authors to include the language.

There is also a problem with Genesis 1:3: And God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. Well, the earth is only 4.5 billion years old, yet the universe, and all the light generating stars in ancient galaxies, are more than 13 billion years old. So when god said, “Let there be light” there already had been light shining bright for at least 10 billion years. He was flipping a switch that had been turned on eons before by the thermonuclear reactions in billions of stars that predate earth. That light bathed other suns and other planets long before the earth was a loose accumulation of rocks orbiting our sun. Since this is the story of all creation, these tidbits seem an important omission that will undermine the entire story when we find life elsewhere. We were late to the game of “let there be light.”

We are also told in unambiguous terms that all life was created in six days. Genesis 2:1 says, “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” So here we learn that all life, in all the heavens, was complete, and all found on earth and on earth alone. The complete totality of that creation in all the heavens, all of which was here on earth, is made clear in the preceding sections of Genesis 1:1-31 with “every herb bearing seed” and “every beast” and “every fowl of the air.” There is no modifier like “every fowl of the air, that is, on earth but excluding life on the planet Zenxalaxu.” We know all of this took place in six days because Genesis 2:2 says, “And on the seventh day god ended his work which he had made.” Now some say that these are not real days, but allegorical “god days” which could be millions of years each. But no, when god said let there be light and created life in six days, he tied these events to seasons on earth, which are governed by real days. So the Bible tells us that all life, in all the heavens, was all put on earth in six days, that is six earth days. Let us be perfectly clear that this leaves no room for alien life in this creation story. The discovery of alien life would therefore undermine the entire saga.

We can also have no doubt that the earth is the center of the universe, because this is where god placed man. In the trial of Galileo, Pope Urban VIII made perfectly clear the church’s understanding of god’s word that the earth is unambiguously the center of the universe:

We say, pronounce, sentence and declare that you, Galileo, by reason of these things which have been detailed in the trial and which you have confessed already, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: namely that Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

Yet it would be difficult to claim the unique position of universe center if other planets held life that was zipping around in anti-gravity cars traveling at the speed of light. Clearly, if the ancients knew there was alien life, any form of life at all, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe would be more difficult to sustain. Again, though, there is no mention of alien worlds or life beyond this little blue dot.

None of the 66 books of the bible make any reference to life other than that created by god here on earth in that six day period. If we discover life elsewhere, one must admit that is an oversight. So much so in fact that such a discovery must to all but the most closed minds call into question the entire story of creation, and anything that follows from that story. How could a convincing story of life’s creation leave out life? Even if the story is meant to be allegorical, the omission of life elsewhere makes no sense.

Be clear I am talking here only of how just the simple existence of life elsewhere undermines religion. I leave the question of how religion would accommodate thornier questions like would such life go to the same heaven as earth life, or the same hell, or would such life be tainted by original sin even if not descendant from Adam and Eve. Maybe childbirth would not be painful. That is fodder for another blog.

As I stated at the beginning, none of this will matter upon life’s discovery elsewhere. Religious leaders will simply declare that such life is fully compatible with, in fact predicted by, the Bible. Just like they eventually swept under the rug being wrong about earth’s position in the heavens. Or evolution. They will create contorted justifications to support this view, cite a few passages of the bible that could mean anything, and declare victory. Don’t say I did not warn you.

Confederate Flags: A Day Late, A Dollar Short

“I told you so” just seems so inadequate. We needed a hideous hate crime for the nation to see the obvious; that any flag of the confederacy is a symbol of hate, bigotry and treason. I’ve been agitating to take down those flags for the past 15 years. The news today is not that South Carolina has decided to remove a Confederate battle flag from the statehouse; nor that Mississippi and Tennessee are now mulling over the same. No, the “man bites dog” story here is that we are still talking about Confederate battle flags in the year 2015.

The real news is that there remains in the deluded minds of the South the idea that the war’s history justifies one to fly a Confederate flag over a state capitol building, or paste one on a F150 bumper or wear one on a T-shirt. Does a confederate flag indicate pride about the effort to defend slavery? Or attempting to secede from the Union? For starting a war in which two percent of the population died? For losing the war? These are odd banners to carry around for more than 150 years. Perhaps the pride comes from the fact that the South stood up to a greater power, at least checking or slowing the pace of an expanding federalism. But even that does not pass the smell test; by starting but then losing the war the South created the exact opposite effect, solidifying federal power like never before.

Few things could be more absurd than simultaneously flying Old Glory and a flag of the Confederacy over a state capitol, a practice we debate today only after racist violence. Forget not that when a state seceded from the Union one of the first acts was to destroy the Union flag, that is, the flag of the United States, atop the state capitol building. In fact, the moniker Old Glory comes from 1831 when Captain William Driver, a shipmaster in Salem, Massachusetts, unfurled on his ship a brand new banner with 24 stars prior to embarking on a voyage that would eventually lead to the rescue of the mutineers of the Bounty. He was so taken by the magnificent flag waving to the ocean breeze that he yelled “Old Glory.” He took the flag with him when he retired to Nashville. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, Rebels were determined to find and destroy this flag. So let us not romanticize what secession meant; it was anti-American by every definition; Rebels were set on destroying the symbol that represented the union they sought to dissolve. That is the very same Stars and Stripes that they now so proudly wave as patriots. The inconsistency and hypocrisy are horribly ignorant of our history.

Any version of the confederate flag flying anywhere is an affront to all Americans, at least those who live in the 21st century. We should not need a tragic shooting and hate crime to realize this. Southerners claim a deep allegiance to the good old United States of America but ironically celebrate their ancestors’ efforts to dissolve the very union of states whose flag they now so proudly fly. They honor a campaign to dissolve our country but claim the mantle of patriot, wrapping themselves in the very Stars and Stripes the South sought to leave behind. That makes no sense. The contradiction is always swept under the rug, but that must stop. Now is a good time to close this chapter of hypocrisy and inconsistency. A southern loyalist cannot be a patriot; the two ideals are mutually incompatible. You cannot simultaneously love the United States and love the idea of dissolving the bond between states that constitute the country. To claim both is insane, the equivalent of declaring that you love all Chinese food but hate chow mein. The claims are each exclusive of the other and therefore by definition both cannot be true. You can’t be proud to be among those who wanted to secede from America while claiming to be proud to be American. That is crazy.

Why War?

To see just how crazy it is to fly a confederate flag today, look at the war’s history. At Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, the South began to wage a war that nearly destroyed the United States. In that conflict more than 630,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in four years of hellish war. To place this in perspective consider that the entire population of the United States at war’s end was 35 million, putting war casualties at nearly two percent of the total populace. Equivalent rates of casualties today would result in five million dead or wounded, dwarfing our losses in World War II, or any other war.

Two percent of our population suffered death or maiming over the issue of state sovereignty and the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment (ratified in 1791). The text is simple enough:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

But we also have the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution, which states,

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The poetically put “terrible cause” of the South is usually thought of as the defense of slavery. This is what we are all taught in school; and the idea is strongly entrenched today. In the April 10, 2011, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. defined the Civil War as a conflict over property rights, the property being of course four million slaves living in the South at the time. He concludes that the “Civil War was about slavery, nothing more.”

He is wrong; we just have to look at the tension between these two sections of our Constitution. To place this in contact, I urge all to read Shelby Foote’s award-winning treatise on the Civil War. Yes, stating the terribly obvious, slavery was of course the central point of contention, but as an example of state sovereignty versus federal authority. The war was fought over state’s rights and the limits of federal power in a union of states. The perceived threat to state autonomy became an existential one through the specific dispute over slavery. The issue was not slavery per se, but who decided whether slavery was acceptable, local institutions or a distant central government power. That distinction is not one of semantics: this question of local or federal control to permit or prohibit slavery as the country expanded west became increasingly acute in new states, eventually leading to that fateful artillery volley at Fort Sumter.

Specifically, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in protest against federal legislation that limited the expansion of slavery claiming that such legislation violated the tenth amendment, which they argued trumped the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the Constitution. The war was indeed about protecting the institution of slavery, but only as a specific case of a state’s right to declare a federal law null and void. Southern states sought to secede because they believed that the federal government had no authority to tell them how to run their affairs. The most obvious and precipitating example was the North’s views on slavery. So yes, the South clearly fought to defend slavery as a means of protecting their sordid economic system and way of life, but they did so with slavery serving as the most glaring example of federal usurpation of state powers of self-determination. The war would be fought to prevent those states from seceding, not to destroy the institution of slavery. The war would be fought over different interpretations of our founding document.

The inherent repelling forces between Article VI and the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution have kept lawyers busy and wealthy from the day the words were penned, and the argument goes on today. But the South went a significant step further than arguing a case. In seceding from the Union those states declared the U.S. Constitution dead. The president of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution, had no choice but to take whatever measures were necessary to fulfill his commitment. Cleary if any state could withdraw from the Union whenever that state disagreed with others, the Union over which Lincoln presided would not last long. So war came.

But freedom for slaves did not. President Lincoln did not issue the Emancipation Proclamation until January 1, 1863, more than one and a half years after the war started. His goal was initially to preserve the Union, and he only issued that proclamation when he felt doing so would promote that objective. One could argue that if the primary cause of the war was slavery then Lincoln’s first act would have been to free them. Historians have written many volumes on Lincoln’s timing and motivation, but one thing is clear: slavery was not his first priority.

To support the idea that the war was only about slavery, Mr. Pitts cites newspaper quotes from 1860 that note the grave threat to the economic value of slaves if the North prevailed politically; and Mr. Pitt provides quotes from a few articles of separation from states that specifically reference slavery as a cause for seceding. But that just proves what we already know: the South wanted to defend slavery and their cotton economy. We understandably focus on this specific while ignoring the broader issue in contest. But a subset of a set is not the set. An example of an issue is not the issue. Slavery was a specific issue of a perceived violation of a state’s rights, over which the country went to war. Claiming the Civil War was about slavery alone is like saying that the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt was about unseating Mubarak and nothing else. That conclusion misses the more important point that the real issue in Egypt was self-determination and the right to a representative government. Mubarak was not the issue, only a specific example of the larger problem of a non-representative government. Ousting Mubarak was a subset of a larger set. The South left the Union because they rejected federal authority over state government. The same federal government which they now so patriotically defend. You know, the sentiments you read on pickup trucks, such as “these colors don’t run” or “love it or leave it” or “freedom is not free” or most ironically, “united we stand.” We have one of history’s odd quirks that the irony of patriotic fervor from a supporter of secession is not immediately recognized by the bumper sticker crowd.

Succession is Destruction

Let’s be clear that no matter what drove the action, whether slavery or the broader concern of states’ rights, the South’s quest to secede could only lead to the destruction of the United States, not only through war but just in the act of secession alone. Once the principle of seceding is established the glue holding the Union together would soon dissolve. The legitimacy of secession could lead to nothing but balkanization, a group of independent states much like we see in Europe. The United States of America could not exist. Some southern loyalists try to skirt this historic reality by claiming they did not seek to harm the United States, only secede from it. But that is patently absurd because with the ability to secede comes disunion as an inevitable consequence. Proof of that is in the fact that during the war the Confederacy began to dissolve through the secession of Southern states from the Confederacy. South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, also threatened later to secede from the Confederacy, as did Georgia later in the war.

Southerners today seem incapable of understanding that the South waged and then lost a war that nearly destroyed the United States. The South lost decisively. The rebel cause was unjust, immoral and treasonous. The economic justification was unseemly. There is no part of the Confederate cause of which to be proud. There is no moral high ground here. There is no flag to fly with pride. Secession, treason, slavery, bigotry, racism – these are not what we wish to memorialize and romanticize with a symbol of hatred waving obstinately over a statehouse.

The war mercifully ended before the Confederacy collapsed under its own weight of moral decay and disintegration through secession. On April 3, 1865, Richmond, Virginia, fell to Union soldiers as Confederate troops retreated to the West, exhausted, weak, and low on supplies. On April 5, Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant started an exchange of notes that would lead to Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. But damn if the South does not hold on to the war as if they never actually lost and as if their cause was just. To them Appomattox was a setback only. The war still is being waged.

Southerners seem unable to admit there is nothing to celebrate. The South engaged in a war that nearly destroyed the United States in pursuit of a terrible cause. The South fought well but lost decisively. Let it go. Let. It. Go. Their cause was unjust. Their actions were nothing short of high treason. There is no part of the Confederate cause of which to be proud. There is no moral high ground here. Waving the American flag while fiercely defending the effort to tear that flag down is untenable. Make a choice; be a proud American or a proud Confederate. You cannot possibly be both. And you can’t with pride fly a flag that represents treason, bigotry, racism and hatred. Yes, you can put the flag in a museum to recognize and discuss the past; but these flags have no role in our future. Perhaps the tragic deaths in a black church will finally get the nation’s attention. So sad we had to wait for such vile acts to realize the obvious. Take them down. Move on.