Obama on abortion

Here's something I was not expecting to read today. This is an excerpt from a blog post by John L. Allen, Jr., of NCR:

In the run-up to President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated July 10 meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, an influential cardinal and Vatican adviser has praised Obama’s “humble realism” and compared the president’s approach to abortion to the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas and early Christian tradition about framing laws in a pluralistic society.

Swiss Cardinal George Cottier, 87, former theologian of the papal household under Pope John Paul II, laid out those views in a cover essay in the current issue of 30 Giorni, perhaps the most widely read journal of Catholic affairs in Italy.

Styled as an analysis of two Obama speeches – his May 17 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame and his June 4 speech to the Islamic world in Cairo – Cottier’s essay was overwhelmingly positive, repeatedly arguing that Obama’s “realism”, as well as his commitment to finding “common ground”, resonate with Christian tradition and the social teaching of the Catholic church.

Seen through American eyes, perhaps the most striking element was Cottier’s analysis of what Obama had to say at Notre Dame. The university’s decision to invite Obama, and to award him an honorary degree, were widely criticized in Catholic circles in the States, given Obama’s positions on abortion, embryonic stem cell research and other life issues. More than 80 bishops publicly objected to the event.

Cottier, however, compared Obama’s Notre Dame address to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, in its accent on dialogue and common ground, and to the document Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) on conducting the search for truth in a pluralistic society. Christians, Cottier wrote, “can be in agreement” with Obama’s “way of framing the search for solutions.”

Such progressive thinking, and from a Cardinal and Vatican advisor! As I write this, no comments have appeared yet on the site. I'm trying to anticipate what the response will be from our usually-quite-predictable brothers and sisters on the right. This is not someone who can be dismissed as a liberal or a dissident.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

Possibly the longest sentence fragment in history.

From Sarah Palin, delivered before an audience in Anchorage this week:

Reagan knew that real change and real change requiring shaking things up and maybe takin' off the entrenched interest thwarting the will of the people with their ignoring of our concerns about future peril caused by selfish short-sighted advocacy for growing government and digging more debt, and taking away individual and state's rights and hampering opportunity to responsibly develop our resources, and coddling those who would seek to harm America and her allies.

Anyone else looking forward to 2012?

Pot calling the kettle black...

From the TimesOnline:

The Italian Catholic Church today berated the French government for "presuming" to lecture Pope Benedict XVI on Aids [sic] and condoms, saying that as a former colonial power, France was in no position to "give lessons." [source]

One wonders if the Church leadership's own long history of involvement in colonialism renders it similarly incompetent to "give lessons."

Why don't North American papers publish stuff like this?

From Haaretz columnist Meron Benvenisti:

An odious scent of imperialistic mildew wafts from the Gazan operation as well as similar operations that have been launched in the past. European statesmen, who recently paid a visit here, could have swapped memories with Ehud Olmert about acts of cruelty committed by their countries... Everyone is ashamed of their past, save for the Israeli, who is actually proud of his deeds.

Ignoring the fundamental shift in international norms since the colonial era apparently has no bearing on the efficiency of the brutal Israeli operation. It created the desired results in favor of the stronger party, thus Israelis can boast of their victory when they are desensitized to the humanitarian repercussions. As such, they remove themselves from the group of civilized nations of which they claim to be part. [source]

Amazing that stuff like this is routinely published in a mainstream Israeli newspaper like Haaretz, but never in mainstream North American newspapers. Theres something not right about that.

Israeli Refuseniks

This is a really inspiring video of some very courageous Israelis who have refused to serve in the occupied territories. It deserves to be seen, widely.

Naomi Klein: It's time to boycott Israel

Naomi Klein's recent article, published recently in numerous places, makes some very good points:

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs.

It seems to me that more and more people are beginning to look at Israel a little more critically. It may be hoping too much, but maybe we are seeing the beginning of something that might finally convince Israel to end the murderous occupation of Palestine.

Here are a few places you can read the whole article:

naomiklein.org

The Guardian

The Nation

ZNet

Democracy and the "will of the people"

In a democracy, it is common to think of the outcome of an election as demonstrating "the will of the people," as if the electorate as a whole was making a single decision.

I've given a lot of thought to this idea, and I find it rather problematic.

Consider some recent developments in Canadian politics. We had a federal election only a few weeks ago -- October 14th, to be exact. The Conservative party won a minority -- 143 out of 308 seats in parliament. They received less than 38% of the popular vote.

There were some puzzling comments made, including some by Prime Minster Stephen Harper, that suggested that Canadians, as a whole, wanted the Conservatives to have a minority.

But the outcome of an election does not necessarily reflect what anyone "wants." The Canadian people are not a single entity that is capable of "wanting" anything, or "deciding" to make something happen. The outcome of an elections is, rather, merely the consequence of millions of decisions made by millions of people. It was not intended by anyone in particular, and it's misleading to talk about a group of people as though it was making a single decision.

This may seem like an obscure point, but I think it's important because it sheds some light on what is and is not properly considered democratic.

For example, only weeks after the Canadian election, the minority Conservatives are very close to being defeated by the opposition. Normally when a government is defeated we have another election -- which would be the third Canadian general election in about three years, something nobody really wants (except maybe Stephen Harper, who probably imagines he could get that elusive majority).

Instead, the opposition parties have announced their intention to form a coalition government to replace the conservatives.

The Conservatives are complaining that this is "undemocratic" -- the Canadian people "chose" Harper as their prime minister, and it's not right for the opposition to reverse that outside the electoral process.

It would seem, though, that most of us (i.e., the 62% who voted for someone other than a Conservative) did not want Harper in power. We just couldn't agree on who we wanted instead.
(It's hard to say -- in a parliamentary system, we don't vote directly for a prime minister, we simply vote for the local member of parliament. The party with the highest number of elected MPs forms the government, and the leader of the party becomes prime minister.)

The coalition party, as I mentioned, will consist of the MPs from the opposition parties. These MPs, unlike the Conservatives, actually were elected by the majority of Canadians. Is that not more democratic?

Complicating the question is the possibility, very likely true, that most people don't vote for the candidate, they vote for the party. I, for one, don't even remember the names of the candidates I've voted for in previous elections, but I remember what party they belonged to.

Someone might argue -- and, indeed, some people have -- that while most people voted for a member of one of the opposition parties, nobody voted for anyone belonging to a coalition of all three.

Given that all three opposition parties are to the left of the Conservatives, it's difficult to imagine that many people who voted for one of those parties would have preferred a Conservative MP over an MP belonging to a coalition party. In other words, it's difficult to imagine that a supporter of the centrist Liberal, or the leftist NDP party, would prefer the Conservatives to what is likely to be a centrist coalition led by Liberal leader Stephane Dion.

The problem, I suppose, is that a Canadian election is a rather blunt instrument. The ballot asks a single question, and gives room for a single answer. The current electoral system allows someone like Stephen Harper to be prime minister, simply because the majority of the population that doesn't like him can't agree on who we like more.

Whether the coalition takes power now depends on a decision by the Governor General, the Queen's representative in parliament -- usually considered a ceremonial role. I hope if they do take power they will reform the current electoral system, perhaps adopting proportional representation, so we can maybe avoid these ridiculous and uncooperative Conservative minorities in the future.

Addendum:

Interesting comments by Justin Podur, posted on ZNet:

As for Harper's accusation that the opposition is being "undemocratic", it reveals a confusion about his mandate and the parliamentary system in which he operates. Canada is not the United States. In the US, the electorate votes for a President. In Canada, no one votes for a Prime Minister. They vote for a party. A minority government is one where no party won a clear mandate, and must therefore present policies that are non-partisan and have the backing of at least some of the opposition. Harper failed to do so. The accusation of "undemocratic" could be equally applied to the Conservatives, but would best be applied to the entire electoral system, since it lacks proportional representation. [link]

Mr. Honesty weighs in McCain/Palin; plus, Robert Kennedy Jr. on Palin's reading list...

After hearing about Sarah Palin's continued repetition of her "I told Congress 'Thanks, but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere" lie -- something she omitted in her stop in Alaska, oddly enough -- I thought of this Bizarro strip. When Karl Rove (of all people) accused the McCain campaign of going too far with the lies, I new I had to post it.

I also wanted to point attention to this interesting little piece by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list. [source]

Interesting, no? Not that Palin wrote the speech, mind you -- but someone in the McCain campaign did...

The Politics of Changing Your Mind

I've been thinking for a while about writing about the widely held assumption -- in the US, anyway -- that a politician who changes his or her mind about something should be dismissed for "flip-flopping."

I came across this brilliant Bizarro strip that makes the same point I would have, only much more effectively:

Taking liberty with the truth

Interesting article here about John McCain's penchant for "taking liberty with the truth."

All else being equal, a candidate who is willing to use dirty tricks has a tactical advantage over one who is not.

Which probably goes a long way toward explaining why the Republicans are leading the polls in the US, and the Tories appear to be headed for a majority parliament here in Canada.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

I heard an interesting interview on CBC Radio One today with Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University, and the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter.

I haven't read the book -- and, after hearing some of Caplan's suggestions,¹ I don't plan to. But I agreed with some of his arguments.

He points out that the large majority of voters isn't merely uninformed, but badly misinformed. Bad ideas and false notions are accepted uncritically by large segments of the population, and this has significant consequences at election time. And a lot of people, he said, make irrational choices for emotional reasons.

One doesn't have to look too hard to see this at work. I read the other day about the large numbers of women who have changed their mind about voting for Obama now that Sarah Palin -- a regular mom, like them -- is McCain's running mate. Only when politicians' actual political positions are considered less important than the shape of their reproductive organs could such a switch possibly take place. Utterly irrational, but still happening right in front of our eyes.

Here in Canada, the Tories are playing right into voter stupidity with their asinine TV spots. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is shown talking about how much he loves being a father, how much respect he has for veterans, blah, blah, blah. At the end we see: "Canada: We're Better Off With Harper."

Why? Because he likes to play cards with his kids? It's sad to think that anyone might actually be influenced by this.



Notes

[1] One of Caplan's suggestions in the interview (but not, apparently, in the book), is that there should be a test that everyone should be required to pass before they can vote. That a politically neutral test could ever be created and fairly administered strikes me as profoundly naïve. I sort of lost interest in what he has to say after he suggested that.

Some Thoughts About the Bristol Palin Controversy

I've been giving a lot of thought to the controversy over Bristol Palin's pregnancy and the implications thereof.

It seems a bit silly to make any judgments about a person's ability to serve as vice president based on her and her husband's apparent failure to instill in their children what are presumably (for them) very important values.

It's been fascinating to see prominent Evangelical leaders like James Dobson openly expressing their understanding and compassion, and even citing Bristol's pregnancy as evidence of Sarah Palin's "pro-life" bona fides.

A lot of people (including Obama) have been arguing that candidates' families should be "off-limits." And so they should. I couldn't help but wonder, though, if perhaps the family members who are "off-limits" should be kept off the stages and perhaps not paraded in front of the cameras. If Sarah Palin doesn't want people talking about her kids, why are we seeing so much of them?

Iraq: Image and Reality

"Iraq is like a French cheese that can’t be pasteurized for the palates of a reading public that has grown up on Kraft slices of Good Guy/Bad Guy. Of course, Iraq has good guys and bad guys; they just switch roles a lot depending on our perspective."

An amusing analogy from a very engaging article by Patrick Graham in a recent cover story in Maclean's. The title of the article is "How George Bush became the new Saddam," but Bush is actually given little attention. Presumably it has something to do with the fact that Washington has now allied itself with a lot of Saddam's supporters -- the very insurgents responsible for killing most of the American troops who have died in the conflict -- but part of me suspects the title was chosen to justify running a cover image of the American president sporting a Saddamesque moustache and military garb.

Graham lived in Iraq for a couple of years, and has a highly developed sense of what is actually happening on the ground -- and in the minds of ordinary Iraqi people. One of the salient themes of this piece is the disjunction between the popular western conceptions of the Iraqi situation on the one hand, and the actual social/religious/ethnic/political reality on the other. It's a lengthy article, but definitely worth reading.

Check it out here.

War Profiteering

Just read "The Great Iraq Swindle," a terrific (and quite angry) article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. It's about war profiteering in Iraq, and the astonishing (but not really surprising) refusal of the Bush administration to do anything about it.

The fact that a number of (mostly American) companies are getting very, very rich off the war in Iraq is hardly news, but the scale of the problem of profiteering, and the sheer brazenness of the abuses, are not widely appreciated.

I thought I'd describe one representative story from the many related in the article, but there are just too many to choose from: a construction firm called Parsons wins a contract to build the Baghdad Police College, resulting in "one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors." The cost to American taxpayers: $72 million.

An inexperienced security company called Custer Battles is given millions of dollars to do things like provide security for civilian flights into the Baghdad airport (even though there were no civilian flights into Baghdad during the term of the contract). They were given "scads of money" to buy x-ray equipment and set up a canine bomb-sniffing unit. Well, they didn't buy the equipment. As for the canine unit, the inspector general of the Army, Richard Ballard, described it thus:

"I eventually saw one dog. The dog did not appear to be a certified, trained dog." When the dog was brought to the checkpoint, he added, it would lie down and "refuse to sniff the vehicles" -- as outstanding a metaphor for U.S. contractor performance in Iraq as has yet been produced.

Custer Battles, it seems, were not simply being lazy. Sometimes some effort was put into ripping off the American taxpayer, like when they "found a bunch of abandoned Iraqi Airways forklifts on airport property, repainted them to disguise the company markings and billed them to U.S. tax­payers as new equipment."

The story of how they were caught, and why they nevertheless got away with it, is by turns hilarious and infuriating, but for that you'll have to read the article for yourself. I definitely recommend it.

George W. Bush: More than meets the eye?

Funny stuff by Andy Borowitz, posted on HuffPo:

Increasingly frustrated by the Iraqi government's failure to meet a series of defined benchmarks, President George W. Bush today proposed sending a group of giant robots known as the Transformers™ to Iraq...

In announcing his new proposal, the president authorized an $85 billion defense contract to Hasbro, believed to be the largest military contract of its kind ever awarded to a toy company.

Read the whole post here. The made-up quotes from Bush are hilarious.

More surrealism from Fox News...

Neil Cavuto of Fox News recently had a very earnest conversation with some random guy about a possible link between universal health care and...terrorism.

Yes, terrorism.

Random guy asserts that the British shortage of doctors has led to a dependency on imported foreign doctors, who often come from the Muslim world. They then have to work in a massive bureaucracy, where it is easy for terrorists to go unnoticed. This makes the UK and other countries with universal heath care vulnerable to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Therefore Americans should shun the very idea of universal health care.

Uh huh.

You can watch the video here (opens new window). It's a riot.

Oh, Mahmoud...

Just read this on IMDB.com:

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has turned down a request by director Oliver Stone to be interviewed for a documentary film about him. Aides to Ahmadinejad said today (Tuesday) that they had been contacted by Stone through
Iranian filmmakers acting as intermediaries. But Mahdi Kalhor told the Fars news agency: "While it is true that Oliver Stone is considered to be among the opposition in the U.S., the opposition is still part of the Great Satan. ... We believe that the American cinema system is devoid of all culture and art and is only used as a device." Stone responded: "I have been called a lot of things, but never a great Satan. I wish the Iranian people well and only hope their experience with an inept, rigid ideologue president goes better than ours."

I thought that was a terrific response.

Gays in the military

According to this AP story, 58 Arabic language experts have been discharged from the American military for being gay.

I wonder if those Americans who support the ban of openly homosexual people serving in the military have any idea how medieval that sounds to the rest of the world. Not that they would care, mind you. But I wonder.

More insight from Chomsky

On February 12, the statements of Osama bin Laden were reviewed in the New York Times by NYU law professor Noah Feldman. He described bin Laden's descent into utter barbarism, reaching the depths when he advanced "the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets." Utter depravity, no doubt. Two days later, the lead story in the Times casually reported that the United States and Israel are joining bin Laden in the lower depths of depravity. Palestinians offended the masters by voting the wrong way in a free election. The population must therefore be punished for this crime. The "intention," the correspondent observed, "is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections" so that President Mahmoud Abbas will be "compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement." Mechanisms of punishment of the population are outlined. The article also reports that Condoleezza Rice will visit the oil producers to ensure that they do not relieve the torture of the Palestinians. In short, bin Laden's "perverse claim"; but when the United States advances the claim, it is not ultimate evil but rather righteous dedication to "democracy promotion."¹

Notes: 1. Noah Feldman, "Becoming bin Laden" (review of Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden), New York Times Book Review, February 12, 2006, p. 12; Steven Erlanger, "U.S. and Israelis Are Said to Talk of Hamas Ouster," New York Times, February 14, 2006, p. A1.

This is from Noam Chomsky, an excerpt by from a new book called Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar, which is coming out in a couple of weeks. This was taken from a larger excerpt found here. I recommend checking it out, of course.

More on the Middle East

In his latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one."

Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these are perhaps the most important words.

This is from a terrific article by the Israeli writer/peace activist Uri Avnery.

People who criticise the state of Israel are often accused of anti-Semitism (or "self-hate," if they happen to be Jewish). But when a state is intent on doing everything it can to ensure it's own destruction, criticism is the only loving thing to do. Avnery articulates that point very nicely.