Wickersham's Conscience

It’s unsurprising that E. L. Doctorow, one of the best writers in the English language, could write a much better essay than WC on the absurdity of any claim by the U.S. to being exceptional. But his four phase analysis of recent history and its blight on everything the U.S. claims to stand for is devastating. WC bows to a master. Doctorow’s Phase Three of the path to unexceptionalism is succinct, spare and precise:

Given corporate control of legislative bodies, enact laws to the benefit of corporate interests. For example, those laws sponsored by weapons manufacturers wherein people may carry concealed weapons and shoot and kill anyone by whom they feel threatened.

Give the running of state prisons over to private corporations whose profits increase with the increase in inmate populations. See to it that a majority of prisoners are African-American.

When possible, treat immigrants as criminals.

Deplete and underfinance a viable system of free public schools and give the education of children over to private for-profit corporations.

Make college education unaffordable.

Inject religious precepts into public policy so as to control women’s bodies.

Enact laws prohibiting collective bargaining. Portray trade unions as un-American.

Enact laws restricting the voting rights of possibly unruly constituencies.

Propagandize against scientific facts that would affect corporate profits. Portray global warming as a conspiracy of scientists.

Having subverted the Constitution and enervated the nation with these measures,  portray the federal government as unwieldy, bumbling and shot through with elitist liberals.  Create mental states of maladaptive populism among the citizenry to support this view.

WC declines to indulge in any tendency to conspiracy, but if you were setting out to destroy everything out country stands for, that’s pretty much how you’d go about it.

WC recently read the Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General’s Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities dated May 7, 2004. The fact that it is heavily redacted – sometimes entire pages at a time – doesn’t stop it from being a whitewash of the years of torture performed by the United States. It is a sickening, nauseating chronology of what happens to a country that loses sight of its values.

Summaries and analysis of the Inspector General’s Special Review are available from the ACLU at its Torture Report site.

But as a service to his readers, WC will summarize the unredacted parts of the Special Review: by twisting law, logic and medical science beyond recognition, the Inspector General concludes that the torture inflicted by the United States on hundreds, perhaps thousands of persons who were not even charged with a crime was not torture. That despite unassailable evidence of post-traumatic shock syndrome there was no lasting harm done to anyone. And that no crimes or violations of treaties occurred.

While the Special Review makes ten recommendations, all of are left to wonder what those might be because they are are all, in their entirety, rdeacted.

The comforting, self-serving whitewash would be a lot more persuasive if it were not for this one paragraph, in a section called “End Game,” which somehow escaped the heavy black pen of the censors:

The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.

Special Review, Par. 237, p. 96

Let’s be very clear about what the CIA is saying: we are holding detainees – persons not charged with a crime – as prisoners because the CIA is worried that if they were released they’d tell the world the gruesome details of what America has done to them.

So even though the CIA’s Inspector General, over the course of the 100 pages of heavily redacted Special Review, assures his readers we have done nothing wrong, we have committed no crimes, we have violated no treaties, it’s important we keep the folks we tortured locked up so they can’t tell anyone what was done to them.

That single paragraph gives the lie to every unredacted paragraph and partial paragraph in the Special Report. And it compounds the felonies committed by the U.S. We tortured people because they wouldn’t talk; now we hold them prisoner because we fear they will.

So much for exceptional.

WC offers serious props to Spencer Ackerman, at Wired, whose Danger Room has taken a long, hard look at the United States’ use of torture in its so-called war on terror. And unflinchingly looked into the possible war crimes committed by the U.S. during the Bush administration.

WC is no expert in the area of international law or the complexities of the various Geneva Conventions. But WC does know that the United States prosecuted Japanese after World War II for waterboarding. It’s a matter of public record. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in a single month while the CIA held him at an undisclosed “black site” prison.

When President Obama was elected in 2008, WC hoped for a public investigation into the conduct of the CIA, the FBI and private contractors. Not necessarily with a view to criminal prosecutions, but rather to get at the truth. The thing about playing fast and loose with international conventions is that it cripples your ability to complain when others violate those conventions. And it surrenders the moral high ground. WC would like for his country to be the good guys. It’s not. A careful, credible investigation might have helped restore the nation’s reputation.

That didn’t happen. Instead, there was a closed door, confidential investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, much criticized by the former Bush administration members and the Neocons for looking at even the lower levels of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism. WC can’t call it a “white wash” because no one knows exactly what was done. But the absence of a public process, the refusal to “look backwards,” raises suspicions in all but the worst of the Neocons. That “investigation” closed in June 2011 when Holder announced he’d pursue criminal investigations in just two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees.

And now, it turns out, State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.” The lightly redacted memo – thought to have been expunged by the Bush Administration – has surfaced in Danger Room, in response to a Freedom of Information request.

No big deal, you say? Think about this: the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarik, was overthrown for, among other crimes, torturing prisoners. Egypt and Mubarik hosted at least one of the black sites where some of the worst U.S. torture of prisoners occurred. Any records of those black site activities are now in the hands of Egypt’s new government. Zelikow’s letter is now a public record. Those records, in the hands of the International Criminal Court, could lead to an indictment of U.S. citizens involved. It’s true that, shamefully, the U.S. has backed out of being a party to the Rome Statute that underpins the ICC. But the court has jurisdiction of crimes committed by non-members in member states. Egypt, however, is a member state.

In the best case we will be presented with the ugly spectacle of the United States trying to wiggle out of an international crime. Publicly. For a long time. Not very “exceptional.”

Q: Why does New Jersey have all the Superfund sites and California have all the lawyers?
A: New Jersey got to choose first.

The State Integrity Investigation describes itself as “a $1.5 million public collaboration designed to expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols — and spotlight the states that are doing things right.” It has conducted a study of the corruption risk – not the current level of corruption – in all 50 states.

The idea was to develop criteria to evaluate the risk of corruption. Judging by the number of convictions – Illinois’s four governors who have gone to jail; Massachusetts’ three consecutive house speakers who are in the pen – was deemed too variable. Aggressive prosecutors, federal enforcement when the state governments get corrupt; it was found to be an imprecise measure. Which is just as well, given Alaska’s recent history.

Alaska got a D+ and ranked 27th, just barely in the bottom half. Close call. We nearly flunked! New Jersey finished first.

The limits of WordPress won’t allow WC to put a full link to the graphic here, but here’s a screen shot of Alaska’s report card:

Not a report card you'd want to show to your parents.

Oddly enough, WC finds the grading to be too generous. If you’ve ever tried to find recent campaign financial reports in the Alaska Public Offices Commission’s on-line database, you know better than to give it a C+, and if you’ve ever tried to find lobbyist reports you know a C is incredibly generous. From the track record of the Alaska Commission on Judicial Qualifications, which is in charge of policing state judges, you’d think the judiciary deserved halos.

Ethics Enforcement Agencies? Two words: Ben Stevens. See what WC means? A C- is very generous. WC’s teachers were a lot tougher with the red pencils than the SII.

If Alaska indeed ranks 27th, the 23 states that are worse must be very bad indeed.

(Memo to The Newt: Perhaps you could direct your considerable energies to your avowed “home state” of Georgia which, on the evidence, could use some help. You have that personal experience in corruption, after all.)

The Anchorage Daily News’ Sean Cockerham has written a nice article on Alaska’s rating, which WC commends to this readers.

It’s a cherished belief: Americans who work hard can succeed and reach a higher point on the economic ladder than their parents. Anyone can be a Ben Franklin or a Henry Ford and rise from abject poverty to the very highest economic success. It’s a big part of America being “exceptional.” “Only in America, land of opportunity.” As Julia Issacs, of the Brookings Institution put it,

For most Americans, seeing that one’s children are better off than oneself is the essence of living the American Dream. Indeed, much of the American spirit is grounded in the belief that with determination and hard work, one can rise from humble beginnings and achieve a comfortable, middle-class life, if not great wealth.

In fact, among the wealthy countries, the United States has the lowest rates of upward mobility. One well-regarded German study found,

The main driver of the difference in the pattern of male intergenerational mobility in the U.S. from that of each of the other countries in our study is the low mobility out of the lowest quintile group in the United States. Indeed, it is very noticeable that while for all of the other countries persistence is particularly high in the upper tails of the distribution, in the U.S. this is reversed – with a particularly high likelihood that sons of the poorest fathers in the U.S. will remain in the lowest earnings quintile. We view this as a challenge to the popular notion of an “American exceptionalism” in economic mobility. Indeed, the combination of a high proba- bility of American sons of the poorest fifth of fathers remaining in the lowest quintile group, the lower probability of “rags-to-riches” (poorest to richest) and slightly lower probability of “riches-to-rags” (richest to poorest), places the notion of American exceptionalism in a new light. The U.S., or at least the population of young U.S. men, seems to be distinguished from other countries by having greater low-income persistence, rather than less, having fewer very large positional changes across generations, rather than more, and possibly having a greater persistence of high income, rather than less.

Congressional Budget Office data support the German conclusion:

Income inequality in the United States

If you are born poor in America, in the bottom 20% of the economy, the odds are heavily against your ever doing better. Partly that’s because the poor in America are in worse shape than the poor in other nations. Nutrition, health and educational opportunities are all lower. At the physiological level, it’s not only hard to learn when you are hungry; it’s impossible to learn if you are malnourished. The extraordinarily high incarceration rates among the poor, usually resulting in single parent households, further contributes to the problem.

As Paul Krugman put it,

Think about it: someone who really wanted equal opportunity would be very concerned about the inequality of our current system. He would support more nutritional aid for low-income mothers-to-be and young children. He would try to improve the quality of public schools. He would support aid to low-income college students. And he would support what every other advanced country has, a universal health care system, so that nobody need worry about untreated illness or crushing medical bills.

The late Robert Heinlein, writing in Time Enough for Love, said that there were three kinds of lies: (1) the simple statement of an untruth, by far the most common lie; (2) telling part of the truth and stopping, creating a lie by omission, and (3) the most difficult and least common, telling the truth but doing so unconvincingly so that people think you are lying. Heinlein also lamented the increase in clumsy, stupid lies.

It’s against that background that WC wants to visit the role of truth and the lost art of lying in current politics. This will be a series of blog posts. The specific triggers for this series are

1. Mark Hemingway’s article in The Weekly Standard in which he calls fact-checking – discovering lies – “the liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse.”
2. WC recently completed reading James Stewart’s excellent Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff.
3. WC probably made a mistake and listened to one of the recent Republican presidential wannabe “debates,” where apparently the statements of the debaters are “not intended to be factual.”

WC has some pretty strong feelings about these three aspects of lying. This third and last post examines the Republican presidential wannabes and their colleagues and the reckless disregard for the truth they show in their debates and campaigning.

What WC Expects in a Politician: Don’t Lie

Mitt Romney ran an anti-Obama advertisement, taking an Obama quote completely out of context, inverting and distorting its meaning in an effort to gain votes. Newt Gingrich claimed the ethics scandal which led to his resignation and a $300,000 fine was a Democratic witch hunt, even though the vote was 395-28 and he admitted the charges in 1997. Gingrich worked to impeach President Clinton for lying under oath about extramarital sex while Gingrich himself was having an affair with a Congressional staffer some 23 years younger than him. Michelle Bachman, based on one alleged anecdote, claimed a thoroughly studied vaccine that can save lives can cause “mental retardation.” In April of this year, Senator Jon Kyl  (R, AZ) claimed on the Senate floor:

KYL: Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.

And then had one of his aides say that ’his remark was not intended to be a factual statement.” Planned Parenthood has demonstrated abortions constitute about 3% of its activities.

WC thinks he has realistically low expectations of politicians. Yes, they lie like rugs. Yes, they’ll attempt to impeach their colleagues while they themselves do the very things for which they seek to impeach their colleagues. And yes, Bill Clinton did his share of lying, contributing to the current state of national mendacity.

But when a presidential wannabe like Michelle Bachman claims vaccinations for a cancer-causing sexually transmitted disease causes mental retardation, the claim is so ill-informed, so reckless and so dangerous that the lie endangers the health of our children and the safety of our country. When Gingrich is having an affair with a staffer while seeing to impeach the president for the same conduct, he’s reinforcing every stereotype, and undermining the credibility of the U.S. Senate as a whole. At a time when Planned Parenthood clinics are attacked, firebombed and their professional staff assassinated it’s a near-criminal act to falsely characterize them as abortion mills.

Niccolo Machiavelli, writing in The Prince, said:

Every prince should desire to be accounted merciful, not cruel; but a new prince cannot escape a name for cruelty, for he who quells disorder by a few signal examples will, in the end, be the more merciful.

It’s been generalized to “The ends justify the means.” More plainly, that morally or legally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve morally right outcomes; actions can only be considered morally right or wrong by virtue of the morality of the outcome. Assuming that Machiavelli’s precept had any application in the Italian city-states like Florence, it is contemptible in a nation of laws.

In their zeal for power, in their attempts to defeat President Obama, get themselves elected President or prevail in a decades-old controversy like abortion, these political hacks, consciously or unconsciously, have decided that the end justifies the means. That the glory of their presidency or the holy grail of an anti-abortion amendment justifies any means, however despicable, to obtain it.[1]

WC utterly rejects the thesis. There are practical reasons – if you can’t trust them not to lie now how can you trust them when they are elected? There are moral reasons – there is that Commandment, after all. But for WC it’s mostly because we are a nation of laws, a nation that honors the truth, that rewards those who speak the truth.

As citizens of the United States, WC believes it is our duty to call out lies by those who want to lead us. However painful. However tedious. However Sisyphean.

[1] WC is aware of the aphorism about omlettes and eggs. But doesn’t think it applies here. In any event, this cast of clowns seems more intent on  changing the saying to “You can’t make an omelette without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others.” And the subject is the government of the most powerful nation on the planet.

The German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel has weighed in on the Republican presidential candidates and it isn’t pretty.

They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party’s boosters are horrified by the spectacle…

Harper’s Magazine columnist Scott Horton summarizes:

At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk.

Ouch. WC supposes for a given definition of “exceptional”?

Back in undergraduate school, shortly after the end of the Dark Ages, WC was made to read William E. Leuchtenburg’s The Perils of Prosperity, an economic and political history of 1914-1932. As a simple, accessible summary of the period from the U.S. entry into World War I to the start of the Great Depression, WC doesn’t think it has been surpassed. The mindset of Americans in the 1920s should sound familiar:

Americans, as one English writer noted, were “a people who, of all the world, craved most for new things, yet were all but Chinese in their worship of their Constitution and their ancestors who devised it.” Leuchtenberg, 205.

WC finds himself in a bizarre mirror image of that Gilded Age world view. The resemblance is uncanny. The Teabaggers are the spitting image of their Gilded Age grandparents and great-grandparents.

Maybe it’s because the economics are so similar, and especially the incredible concentration of wealth in the hands of so few. We find ourselves in a new Gilded Age.

Financial Inequality in the U.S., 1979-2008

The top 1% has succeeded over the last thirty years beyond their wildest dreams of avarice; the majority of Americans, over the same period, have experienced a decline in income. Not since the Gilded Age, the 15-20 years before the Great Depression, has their been such income disparity in America. Access to that lucky 1%, the mobility that Americans cherish so much, is at an all-time low.

Economic Mobility by Nation, 2005

The U.S. has fallen to the level of the famously class-entrenched United Kingdom by some measures of economic mobility. The heart of the American self-image – that your situation may be bad but your children’s will be better – is increasingly untrue.

The politically neutral Congressional Budget Office has recently released a report documenting these trends. The CBO concludes:

Like an odorless gas, economic inequality pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of its democracy. Over the past three decades, Washington has consistently favored the rich — and the more wealth accumulates in a few hands at the top, the more influence and favor the rich acquire, making it easier for them and their political allies to cast off restraint without paying a social price.

Inequality hardens society into a class system, imprisoning people in the circumstances of their birth — a rebuke to the very idea of the American dream. Inequality divides us from one another in schools, in neighborhoods, at work, on airplanes, in hospitals, in what we eat, in the condition of our bodies, in what we think, in our children’s futures, in how we die. Inequality makes it harder to imagine the lives of others — which is one reason why the fate of over 14 million more or less permanently unemployed Americans leaves so little impression in the country’s political and media capitals. Inequality corrodes trust among fellow citizens, making it seem as if the game is rigged. Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can — immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms — and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers. Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective. Inequality undermines democracy.

William Domhoff’s essay on Power in America, “Wealth, Income and Power” back in 2005 (updated October 2011) helped start the current discussion of wealth distribution in the United Sates. It’s a critical starting point.

That focus on the analysis of distribution of wealth has been brought to Congress now. For example, Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, documents that “members of Congress had a collective net worth of more than $2 billion in 2010, a nearly 25 percent increase over the 2008 total.”

That, in turn, led to the creation of one of the better graphics that WC has seen this year.

Distribution of Wealth in Congress - 2010

(WC believes this chart was created by Professor Domhoff, but cannot be certain.) If there is any reader who thinks that the Senators and Representatives who are among the top 10% of the nation’s wealth aren’t looking out for themselves and their peers, well, WC has a great deal for you on the Cushman Street Bridge.

Roll Call‘s study also shows that the wealth increase isn’t a result of the rich getting richer; it’s primarily a result of the sea change in the 2010 election. That’s right. The Teabaggers who gained control of the House are wealthier than the Representatives they replaced.

And this chart gives a whole new level of understanding to the Republicans’ refusal to consider taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans, doesn’t it? The fix is in, and it turns out not to be the fix the Teabaggers thought they were getting.

It’s as simple as this: the whole improbable story, never supported by a competent economist, that a tax increase on the rich would discourage jobs creation? It’s a lie. This is all about greed, and the unwillingness of our Plutarchic Congress to impose a tax upon themselves.

The whole idea of electing successful businesspersons to run our government? Can we agree we’ve tried that? Can we agree it hasn’t worked out so well? For anyone except those rich folks we elected?

Six of the 100 U.S. Senators (6%) live where 80% of their constituents live. 30 House members (7%) live where 80% of their constituents live. So much of “exceptional.” So much for a representative democracy.

President Obama, October 19, Chesterfield County, VA, Photo Jay Pau/Getty Images

WC has criticized President Obama from time to time because no president of the United States is ever above criticism. If you examine his actual record, as opposed to the mischaracterizations, lies, distortions, hyperbole and – frankly – racism from the right, it’s a pretty remarkable set of achievements in very difficult times.

The truth is that this President has done a good job in what has been one of the most challenging periods of modern history. Among his accomplishments:

• He saved the economy from ruin (until the Tea Party took over the U.S. House) with a stimulus that was as large as possible given the political realities.
• Presided over a stock market that fairly quickly recouped many of its losses.
• Presided over nearly unbroken consecutive monthly increases in private sector job growth (unfortunately balanced by monthly decreases in public sector jobs which WC blames mostly on the Republican tactic of starving government).
• Enacted the only meaningful healthcare reform ever in our history.
• Passed financial reform (no matter what my progressive colleagues say, he did achieve this).
• Saved the auto industry (which all of the Republicans are on record as opposing).
• Fired the first salvo of the Arab Spring with his remarkable speech in Cairo in June 2009
• Greatly reduced the number of U.S. soldiers in Iraq in a responsible way (and headed toward almost total withdrawal)
• At least partially stabilized the situation in Afghanistan.
• Stopped numerous terrorist attacks in this country
• Stopped torture as a United States policy, and has proven it is unnecessary as wellas illegal.
• Repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
• Joined the international community in a measured and responsible way to bring down an odious tyrant in Qaddafi, without the loss of a single American life.
• Killed a whole generation of al Qaeda leaders.
• And WC believes his audacious assassination of Osama bin Laden will go down as one of the bravest military actions in American history.

He’s accomplished all this with a Congress that is as bitterly divided as any time since the eve of the Civil War, while dealing with thinly disguised racism and revolting accusations about his parentage, his religion and his family.

Compare him to each of the whining, bitter Republican candidates and ask yourself how there can be any question of the President’s chances of re-election.

Yes, WC is proud of President Obama. Don’t let his occasional criticism make you think otherwise.

You want “exceptional”? How about a country that can produce a leader like this?

Just when you think American culture has sunk as low as it can go, something comes along to demonstrate there is no longer any lower limit to what our culture will put on display. It’s all in limbo: “How low can you go?”

Readers will forgive WC for thinking this was a headline from The Onion, but yes, The Quitter’s hair styling salon, Beehive Beauty Shop, will get its own reality television show. Produced by TLC, the same folks who brought you The Quitter’s surreality television show.

Gag me with a spoon.

Coming next year: septic tank pumping reality television, where the metaphor becomes the reality. It would be a crappy show about crap. All crap, all the time. Have your people contact WC’s people; we’ll do lunch.

When I think back on all the crap
I learned in high school
It’s a wonder I can think at all
But my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Paul Simon, “Kodachrome,” There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973)

There are probably as many interpretations of Simon’s song as there are thoughtful listeners, but WC is a photographer and for WC’s purposes, it stands for the tendency of Kodachrome film and photographers to make the world and history look like a slightly over-saturated, summer’s day. There aren’t many cloudy, stormy or rainy days captured on Kodachrome. And it’s an excellent metaphor for the Republicans’ increasing tendency to mythologize U.S. history.

U.S. history more than any other subject filled our heads with crap. An important part of a liberal arts education is unlearning the lies we were taught in high school, learning the inconvenient details that were left out of our history books and appreciating our country for what it is, not some idealized fiction.

Much of Palin’s recent blathering about the American Revolution comes from her own natural gift for arrogant ignorance, but a considerable portion traces to the nonsense that is stuffed into the heads of high school students. As a journalism student, The Quitter apparently missed or slept through any college courses that might have given her a more accurate understanding of American history.

WC recommends any readers who think high school history classes are truthful read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen (Amazon link). Loewen reviewed a dozen high school U.S. history books and, to put it kindly, found the textbooks made some mistakes. It’s not a matter of “political correctness” or  ”balanced views;” Loewen demonstrates that the dozen texts he reviews are chock full of lies, mythologized views of events and blatant Eurocentricity. The lies range from stupid (“President Truman ‘easily settled’ the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb.”) to outrageous (“Reconstruction removed the worst of the obstacles facing Blacks in the South.”) to infuriating omissions (half the books never mention the Ku Klux Klan).

So when Palin says the U.S. Constitution was drafted to “make everyone equal,” to a considerable extent she’s simply parroting high school textbooks’ omission of the enshrinement of slavery in the U.S. Constitution. Sure, shame on The Quitter for not knowing better, but critical thinking is a learned skill.

And at the risk of upsetting some readers, when you believe that one book is literally true – the Bible, for example – perhaps it is hard to avoid carrying that belief over to other books.

When WC was in high school, the shocking differences between what we were being taught and what we saw on the television news each night trained WC in skepticism. When his history book stated, “America has never been invaded” and WC’s family members died in the Aleutian Islands, well, it teaches you unintended lessons. When you read the very few sentences in The American Experience on the War of 1812 admitting the British burned Washington, D.C. you know someone is lying. When you hear politicians on television and read in your textbook claims that “America has never lost a war” and know that the U.S. sued Britain for peace back in 1812; well, you just might think that writers like Loewen are on to something.

When your teacher says, “Our country, right or wrong” and you buy into it, you get disasters like Vietnam and the invasion of Iraq. If you’ve read the Federalist Papers, you know that was the last thing that Hamilton, Madison and Jay wanted.

The problem is that Palin has bought (or pretends to have bought) the lies, simplifications, omissions and distortions. She has wrapped herself in the flag of the myth of American exceptionalism. It’s a mixture of cynicism, ignorance and arrogance. To see her posturing for a run at the Republican presidential candidacy… It’s frightening to any thoughtful person, regardless of political party. And a damning indictment of our educational system.

From Ta-Nehisi’s New York Times review of the movie “X-Men – First Class

I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn’s widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states’ rights, minus the “right to own people” part.

About the only time WC saw his high school friend, Jerome Davis, really angry about the racism at the high school, Jerome cut loose with a similar screed. It says too much about America that more than forty years later things haven’t gotten much better.

WC has fallen out of touch with Jerome. If a reader knows how to find him, pass it along.

As usual, Sullivan nails it.

Sure, Sullivan brings his own orientation, but in terms of understanding and articulating the inherent contradiction between Christianity (as distinguished from Christian fundamentalism) and free market capitalism, no one understands or writes about it better.

Recommended.

Among neoconservatives, there is a movement to characterize the United States as “exceptional.” We are different. We are special. With an emphasis on its divine origin (Christian gods only need apply). In a series ofirregular posts, WC is examining the credibility of this claim.

WC has taken flack in comments and emails for disputing that America is “exceptional,” at least in a number of ways that matter a lot to WC. Secret concentration camps, an extremely expensive and dangerously ineffectual health care system, the largest prison population in the free world – larger than all of Western Europe’s combined; at least for these issues, America isn’t exactly “exceptional” in the accepted sense.

But perhaps, as some of you have suggested, WC is using the wrong metrics, or applying metric weights incorrectly. WC was pleased to discover a web site that allows you to assign weights to each of eleven metrics. The OECD Better Life Initiative uses flowers and petals in an interactive tool to show you how different countries rank, depending on the weights you assign to the eleven metrics.

There may be some combination of weighted metrics that will put the United States on top, but WC wasn’t able to find it. Perhaps that’s okay for a given definition of  ”exceptional.” Like, “Better than Turkey!”

Enjoy.

Among neoconservatives, there is a movement to characterize the United States as “exceptional.” We are different. We are special. With an emphasis on its divine origin (Christian gods only need apply). In a series of irregular posts, WC will examine the various aspects and credibility of this claim. WC next will examine Guantànamo Bay in the context of this claim.

The Bush-Cheney years gave America massive debt, two land wars in Asia and a gravely damaged economy. And they marked the end of the rule of law in America. The concentration camp  America created at Guantánamo Bay is a permanent stain on any claim that America is a nation of laws, that we subscribe to human rights conventions, or that we don’t engage in torture of prisoners. America will solve the debt crisis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – or at least our involvement in them – will eventually end. But Gitmo’s stain on our honor, on our claims of loving freedom, that stain is likely permanent.

When faced with the challenge of 9/11, we abandoned the right to claim we are exceptional. We turned out to be no different than a tin pot dictator. We engaged in torture. We kidnapped persons we suspected, without proof, to be terrorists and delivered them to real terrorists, like the secret police in Egypt under the euphemism “extraordinary rendition,” for torture by proxy. We have held political prisoners for almost ten years now, not charged with any crime.

The U.S. Courts, for the most part, have preserved some shards of the law by refusing to admit evidence obtained by torture. But in the situation that Bush-Cheney have created and by the twisted logic of Guantánamo Bay, that actually makes it worse. We don’t know if it is safe to release the concentration camp prisoners or not; they are surrounded by haloes of fuzzy, suspect data, half-truths, statements obtained by bribery, statements obtained by torture. The government can’t bring them to trial for fear they’ll be acquitted. The courts have said they won’t stand for the “show trials” of military tribunals.

And because some few who have been released have committed terrorist acts after release, we are paralyzed by fear that more will. Of course, if you hold a man prisoner for years, torture him (or subject him to torture by proxy), deny him basic civil rights; well, you can’t expect him to love you when he’s freed.

The recent release of secret records to the New York Times and National Public Radio underscores the mess. A prisoner may be held based upon supposedly credible statements from another prisoner, but that prisoner’s own record may in turn say he is not credible, or has been driven insane by his treatment. Another data point: just 8 prisoners’ testimony is the basis for detaining an amazing 255 other prisoners, even though several of the 8 appear to have been tortured to obtain their statements. Prisoners have been tortured to death there. One prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who was was cited in an extraordinary 127 detainee files, was reported to have been waterboarded at least 83 times. His attorney, Brent Mickum, recently told McClatchy that “he provided tremendous amounts of information that was worthless.”

What the law requires is that the accused be brought to trial or set free. But the law has little weight in Guantánamo Bay.

The information on Wikileaks makes clear that the supposed standards used to judge who to detain and who to release are shockingly subjective, selectively interpreted and applied, and sometimes vague to the point of being meaningless. If the “Threat Matrix”  the Times published is accurate, it is a damning indictment of the U.S.’s ability to discern and evaluate danger. “Refusal to cooperate” – we call that the Fifth Amendment – is evidence of guilt.

Andrew Sullivan says “the stain of Gitmo” will be with us for a long time. WC thinks it will be with us forever.

The Dred Scott case.

The internment of the Japanese on the west coast in World War II.

Gitmo.

It will have to be a fairly narrow definition of  ”exceptional.”

Among neoconservatives, there is a movement to characterize the United States as “exceptional.” We are different. We are special. With an emphasis on its divine origin (Christian gods only need apply). In a series of irregular posts, WC will examine the various aspect and credibility of this claim. And WC will examine health care costs and quality next.

Can we look at health care costs from the perspective of a claim of being exceptional?

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

WC can’t possibly add anything to this excellent graphic, and will not try. WC will grant that it demonstrates America is indeed “exceptional,” but perhaps not in the sense that neocons trumpeting American “exceptionalism” intended.

Among neoconservatives, there is a movement to characterize the United States as “exceptional.” We are different. We are special. With an emphasis on its divine origin (Christian gods only need apply). In a series or irregular posts, WC is examining the credibility of this claim. WC has already discussed our crime and prison rates. Today, we’ll look at eight categories in comparison to other advanced countries.

There’s not much to add to this chart, except that WC urges you to study it carefully:

Maybe Not So Exceptional?

WC freely grants that there are a lot of ways to measure the good aspects and the bad aspects of a country. But the mighty United States finished 33rd out of 33 among a broad selection of advanced economies.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow said, “At the very time that many Americans — and the very country itself — are struggling to emerge from a very deep hole, the Republican proposal would simply throw the dirt in on top of us.”

A positive definition of “exceptional” does seem to be getting strained.

Among neoconservatives, there is a movement to characterize the United States as “exceptional.” We are different. We are special. With an emphasis on its divine origin (Christian gods only need apply). In a series or irregular posts, WC will examine the credibility of this claim. We’ll start with crime.

According to the Bureau of Prison Statistics, as of December 31, 2009, there were 1,613,740 prisoners in the United States. That doesn’t include probation. That doesn’t include parole. It doesn’t even include home confinement. Prisoners. People pulling time. If you add all of them up it’s more than 7 million.

And while the United States has only about five percent of the world’s population, it has 25% – that would be one quarter – of the world’s prisoners.

It’s the highest rate in the world.

True, China and Russia outrank the U.S. in political prisoners. The International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London reports we have 751 people in prison per 100,000 in population. The world average is 125 per 100,000 in population.

WC blames democracy. Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected. The voters, bless their hearts, are in favor of being “tough on crime.” So judges issue long sentences to get themselves re-elected.  In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Does that give us a lower crime rate? Not overall. Some property crimes are lower than most other countries, but for drug offenses and, in particular, violent crimes, the U.S. still tops the charts.

In 2006, the last year for which WC can find statistics, the U.S. spent $216 billion on the criminal justice system. Once again, leading the world.

WC supposes that makes us “exceptional,” although perhaps not in the way that neoconservatives who trumpet the word mean.