Christian Leftist

Everyone hates someone else they haven’t met because they never think they’ll walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Maybe you’re certain that all veterans are gun-loving warmongers until you go on a camping trip with one of them who happens to be an environmental pagan. Maybe you view all foreigners with suspicion until you find out that the wife of that grocer down the street teaches your children. It’s hard not to take cues from those around you who have already formed intractable opinions on people who they dislike.

Try.

That’s what I want to say when I see these conservative ‘family values’ politicians and their ilk exposed for the liars and cowards they are. Sure, some of them are just misguided ignorant people, but most of them are willfully ignorant and intolerant, especially towards non-Judeo-Christians, leftists and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. How many times must we remind those who insist on dragging religion into the public square that Christ himself said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” (John 8:8)

For those of you still hung up over Bill Clinton, let’s take a look at the recent role call (if I’m leaving anyone out, which I’m sure I am, please let me know):

∙ Ted Haggard, the minister of a mega-church in Colorado springs who had sex with a male prostitute and did drugs—meth, I think?
∙ Mark Foley, the Republican congressman from Florida who resigned after a teenage male congressional page turned over explicit instant message conversations between them
∙ Glenn Murphy Jr., the Clark County Republican Party (Utica, NY?) chairman who resigned both that position AND his appointment as president of the Young Republican National Federation after a colleague reported that Murphy, Jr. sodomized him while he was trying to sleep over at his house during a campaign event, also accused of sodomizing another minor several years earlier
∙ David Vitter, the Louisiana Senator? whose phone number appeared on the D.C. Madam’s call list for having sex with one of her call girls
∙ Bob Allen, the Republican elected official from Florida who blamed his solicitation of a police officer to let him blow the officer in return for paying the officer $20 on fear of racial violence from the police because the officer and his friends were large and black
∙ Larry Craig, the Louisiana Senator who pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from an undercover cop in the men’s bathroom at a Minnesota airport and then tried to publicly disavow his plea

The Young Turks, a liberal-leaning blog that does a segment on Air America, has reported on a GOP sex scandal every week for a while now and never run out of material. Now THAT’s sad.

I don’t have a problem with gays having sex. I don’t see why Craig was arrested. It’s the fact that Ol’ Larry has been campaigning to pass anti-gay rights legislation in Congress that really sticks in my craw.

I don’t know, maybe, just maybe we’re all human beings who make mistakes and we shouldn’t try to legislate flawed ideology and force-feed it down the throats of our fellow citizens? Just a thought.

Jared Hubbard and Jeremiah Baro were best friends who went to Iraq. They lived together, laughed together, and died together as snipers during the second year of the second Iraq War. Their families thought it fitting that they be buried together as well.

Now their Central California town is mourning the loss of Jared’s younger brother Nathan, only 24, who enlisted after Jared’s death with their older brother Jason. Nathan was one of 14 soldiers to die when his Blackhawk helicopter crashed due to mechanical failure; Jason arrived on the scene as a rescuer in time to discover that he was the last surviving son.

In a harrowing twist not unlike the plot of Saving Private Ryan, the military has ordered Jason to return home to his family to grieve, before some unseen, violent catastrophe takes the eldest Hubbard son from this earth.

It’s hard to imagine the odds of this kind of event happening more than once. I would think losing one son would have been sufficient service to this country, but the Hubbard brothers felt called to serve, and it’s far better to have people serving who want to be in a war than drafting those who don’t. Still, every tragic loss of life in Iraq seems so empty, so damning an indictment. What is it going to take to convince the rest of the country that we can no longer afford to spend people’s lives in this doomed pursuit?

At least if Bush is too stubborn to withdraw troops from the Middle East, he could consider pouring help into Afghanistan. At least there our military protection has some measure of public support. It’s not too late to save Karzai’s fledgling administration from the resurgence of the Taliban.

It’s cognitive dissidence at its worst. You say a story like this is a pointless loss of life, and conservatives jump on you for saying that ‘a soldier’s death was for nothing.’ It’s not so simple as that. Soldiers die serving their country; the administration that send them on a foolhardy assignment have made the specific outcomes of that task a waste of human life.

I wonder about all of the numerous lives the Hubbard brothers could have helped has they served in a mission that didn’t send them off to die.

Normally I don’t just link to interesting articles without saying something of substance about them, but this is Nicholas Kristof, and the title says it all, really.

Last week, the Bethel Park H.S. administration decided to expel one of its students after someone reported an airsoft gun in the trunk of his car. That’s right,: not in the school; in the trunk of his CAR.

Airsoft guns shoot plastic BBs. They are painful if you get hit on bare skin, but they rarely cause seriously injury outside of freak accidents and random bouts of idiocy by people whose parents never should have allowed them slingshots, much less air-powered toy weapons.

It’s the height of idiocy to kick out a kid because of an after-school hobby. The details aren’t important as long as he didn’t shoot at anyone in the school.

My brother owns a ton of airsoft guns and plays with them all of the time. He’s also one of the best-behaved, non-violent people you will ever meet. I can only imagine what a stink the local chapter of the ACLU could make of this case if it tried. Doesn’t the board have better things to do than to comb through cars in a parking lot looking for reasons to punish its students?

FBI Director Robert Mueller’s heavily redacted notes that the House Judiciary Committee released on Thursday confirm that Andrew J. Card Jr. and Alberto Gonzales put enormous pressure on then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve an extension on controversial warrantless wiretapping by the NSA within the U.S.

The Bush administration has denied that Gonzales’s and Card’s talks with Ashcroft right after his gall bladder surgery were about the warrantless surveillance, but James Comey, who was acting as Attorney General while Ashcroft remained hospitalized, said that he “thought he saw [the two men] trying to take advantage of a sick man] when they pressed Ashcroft to sign the extension. Comey had already refused, saying that parts of the bill were illegal, so Gonzales and Card, then the White House’s Chief of Staff, headed over to Ashcroft’s bedside to convince him to sign the bill, thinking that his signature would override Comey’s temporary power. It is clear from his restraint during testimony that Comey was livid about the event, and the scandal nearly caused a wave of resignations at the Department of Justice.

Apparently, Robert Mueller arrived after Card and Gonzales had left, and Comey related the incident to him in front of Ashcroft. Mueller’s notes also describe frequent visits by Vice President Dick Cheney to Ashcroft’s bedisde prior to the showdown with Comey, indicating that Cheny may have played a significant role in the move to have Ashcroft’s office authorize the legislation.

I want to make it clear that I am not certain whether this warrantless wiretapping extension was a bill, and act, etc., so I just used the words bill and legislation to represent the legal action presented in the proposal.

You can read more about the chain of events in these NY Times articles:

Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over U.S. Spying [older NYT article, so read it while you still can]
FBI Chief’s Notes Detail Ashcroft Visit [the AP report]
Notes Detail Pressure on Ashcroft Over Spying [NYT article from today]

An interesting turn of events in the NSA wiretapping scandal. Here’s an excerpt:

Three federal appeals court judges hearing challenges to the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs appeared skeptical of and sometimes hostile to the Bush administration’s central argument Wednesday: that national security concerns require that the lawsuits be dismissed.

“Is it the government’s position that when our country is engaged in a war that the power of the executive when it comes to wiretapping is unchecked?” Judge Harry Pregerson asked a government lawyer. His tone was one of incredulity and frustration.

Read the full article here.

Another example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Chavez is trying to change Venezuela’s constitution to eliminate term limits so that he can run for president again in 2012 (and presumably in every election thereafter until he dies).

Here at Christian Leftist, I try to point out the upsides and downsides to any and all systems of government, although I obviously have access to more news on American democracy than anything else. Chavez is not a true leftist because he is ultra-authoritarian; anyone who curtails civil liberties while espousing economic egalitarianism is not an egalitarian but a despot who seeks to slowly acquire all political power within his sphere of influence.

Anyway, here’s the article from the New York Times.