The Meaning of the Benghazi tragedy

Fox TV News has gone All Benghazi All Day for the last week. Congressional Republicans are implying that this is worse than Watergate (since no one died in Watergate), and further implying that the President should resign over it.

Of course embassies and consulates and American foreign service personnel have been attacked and murdered under every president. Big world, lots of bad guys, foreign service can be a hazardous occupation, and we can have a company of Army rangers marching behind every foreign service staffer in dangerous areas.

I shouldn't have to prove this. Anyone who's followed the news generally for the last few decades will know this is true.

So with that in mind, here's the meaning of Benghazi:

The Republican Party's leadership has, for the past several decades, discarded one of the cornerstones of any democracy: abiding by the results of an election.

They impeached President Clinton for offenses that were not impeachable offenses. When Obama won in 2008, they vowed to make defeating him in 2012 their first order of business--not doing the People's business, but instead making the Party's business their job--at taxpayer expense of course.

And now they're challenging the results of this election in every way they can. Romney claiming Obama bought the votes (where's the vaunted Republican Grownup principle of not making excuses and taking your lumps?). Senator McCain proving he was never presidential material with his jihad over Benghazi. Accusation by Party leader Karl Rover of Democrats carrying out voter suppression--how's that for irony?

They don't have to like Obama having won. I sure wouldn't have liked it if Romney has won--especially since he has now proven that he has nothing but contempt for nearly half the country, showing exactly the attitude of entitlement that out of touch plutocrats are said to have in the popular stereotype. Well, the stereotype is there for a reason--some plutocrats really do think that way, and Romney's one of them.

The fact that so many Republican poo-bahs were blindsided by Obama winning shows the greatest danger of being a con artist: you can start to believe your own con. To accept that Obama won fair and square, beyond any local issues at the polls being able to change it, would require also accepting that they are out of touch with reality.

I'm not expecting them to adopt a liberal philosophy. But I am expecting them to say things based on evidence, not just wishful thinking--or mind-obliterating animosity. What sane person would want to entrust the Presidency to someone who didn't know the facts on the ground of this country--whether his political philosophy agreed with yours or not?

Bottom line is we have one of the two parties that won't accept election results except when it wins.

That is profoundly unpatriotic.

Anarchism: the glue that binds extremists of every stripe

There's one belief that's shared by so many different sorts of politically active people: "My way or the highway." i.e. a contempt for democracy. This becomes anarchism when an ideologue acts on his beliefs even when they violate his country's laws--asserting that he is, all by himself, a sovereign nation.

Recently a Swedish art historian and cartoonist was physically assaulted by Swedish Islamists at the start of a talk he was giving at a university in Sweden. University cops intervened and rescued him but the Islamists succeeded in preventing him from speaking.

His crime? Drawing and publishing the cartoon shown here. It's hard for Westerners to imagine how offensive this is to Muslims. You might compare it to how a Christian might react to a pornographic drawing involving Jesus, since Muslims consider dogs unclean and forbid any depiction of Muhammed whatsoever.

Islamic extremists believe they have an obligation to murder whoever drew or published such a drawing, while in a comparable circumstance Christian fundamentalists would simply be very offended, and if the publisher were a mainstream publication they'd agitate for something like an advertiser boycott.

Which gibes with what Obama bin Ladin said about Muslims being in love with death, while Christians (and I suppose Jews) were in love with life. He meant that as a criticism of the West. Seriously.

But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that opposition to freedom of speech and of the press is limited to Islamic fascists. Recently, in Canada, leftists disrupted a campus speech by right wing harpy Ann Coulter--and they were enabled to successfully stop the speech by yet another spineless university administration. And both right- and left- wing acitivists have worked ceaselessly to eliminate the other side's point of view from American textbooks.

Ideological extremism always opposes democracy, always believe that "everyone is entitled to my point of view." Islamic fascism only represents the most extreme flavor.

But they all join in dismissing the advantages we all gain by living within framework of a country--a framework that always requires surrendering a certain amount of personal freedom in exchange for the collective freedom a nation confers on its citizens. Most such people would never call themselves anarchists--indeed they often present themselves as hyper-patriots. This simply makes them hypocrites as well as anarchists. At least leftist anarchists are slightly more honest.

Still, I always wait for those who set their own beliefs above our nation's laws to forego the benefits they get from this framework. To go off the grid, to never call the cops, even after armed gangbangers have invaded their home; to never call the fire department, even as the flames rise around them; to never flush a toilet that's connected to a sewer system; to never all the American consulate when they're arrested in a foreign country.

I'm invariably disappointed.

killing democracy by killing debate

Both parties pay lip service to debating the issues. But both sides work hard to make their hot button issues non-debatable.

Of course they won't admit this. But look at their actions.

Time after time conservatives have been prevented from speaking on college campuses by left-wing student quasi-riots aimed precisely at shouting down the speaker. The notion of defending an opponent's right to speak was meaningless to them. Worse yet, in every case college administrations caved, either through cowardice or complicity.

Meanwhile, every single day well-financed right-wing demagogues such as Limbaugh and Hannity are on the air trying, among other things, to make their hot button issues non-debatable--mainly through attaching so much rage to the issues that rational concerns are swept aside.

For example, yesterday, on Hannity's TV show, one of his guests--an anti-abortion fanatic--equated Obama with Hitler. Hannity didn't object. And he himself has called Obama a "Bolshevik" repeatedly. Nor are issues debated on these shows. 95% of the time they'll bring in a fellow traveler on an issue, lob him softballs and bash the other side--including feeding the guest inflammatory "analysis" that are often even more extreme than that of the guest.

At this point I don't think most people even know what a real debate is.

Instead, tacit model is instruction--or the logic of the mob.

By instruction, I mean things like a Sunday school bible study class. Here, analytic study isn't the point. These classes are about what I'd call worshipful study. It's not a place where the existence of a God is going to be debated, nor the legitimacy of the Bible. (nor am I proposing that they should; just that they don't provide a model for debate)

Next, consider a discussion of evolution in a college biology class. Here, analytic study is the point, but within parameters. Assertions of biblical literalism will be summarily dismissed. This isn't worshipful study, but that fact won't be apparent to many. It is instruction, and the purpose of discussion is, again, to help the student understand the subject matter better--not to challenge the teacher's premises.

Then consider a public debate, such as the presidential debates, or debates on talk shows where people of opposing views are present. Moderation is usually weak, except on the PBS New Hour with Jim Lehrer, where the debaters are held to proper debate form by a firm moderator who shapes the discussion. But usually it's a shouting match, usually dominated by aggressive right wingers who won't let opponents finish a sentence without talking over them. A real moderator wouldn't let that happen, but that rarely happens. Even the presidential debates were nothing more than each candidate stating his or her talking points, in turn. Nobody refuted anybody else's points. Not really.

And the rise of a zillion cable channels and the Web has enabled people to insulate themselves from the opposition. Lefties don't watch Fox. Righties don't watch MSNBC. And within each fold there's rarely debate. Instead people egg each other on in the absence of opposition, yielding more extremism, more demonizing of the other side.

Look how all this gets expressed in specific areas.

Illegal immigration:
If you oppose illegal immigration you're a racist. Why should I debate a racist? They're outside the realm of reasonable discussion. This is how lefties avoid actually debating the issue, and it's gotten so extreme that journalists now rarely mention overpopulation, because left wing propagandists have managed to association complaints about overpopulation with racism. And even when illegal immigration is debated, the fact that American culture is being degraded by millions of Mexican peasants is never raised by mainstream immigration opponents, for fear of seeming racist. The arguments are focused on pocketbook issues instead. People fear to defend their own culture against the encroachments of another. Yet pro-illegal immigration activists would be outraged if a million Americans moved to, say, Guadalajara and insisted that the locals learn English, that the government print ballots in English and Spanish, and the they be given automatic citizenship by the Mexican government.

Abortion:
Both sides have tried to kill debate through labeling. "Pro-choice" makes opponents "women enslavers" without having to say so in so many words. "Pro-life" makes opponents "pro-death"--against without having to say so in so many words. Nobody's interested in a debate using neutral terms. Abortion opponents call opponents murderers. You can't debate with a murderer, can you?


Time after time, each side doesn't debate an issue--it simply labels the opposition with some inflammatory descriptor, rather than analyzing the other side's points. Nor do they ever acknowledge that the other side might have even a sliver of a point about anything.

Zealots actually detest real democracy--and half the country is zealots (somewhat more right wing than left wing, but psychologically equally totalitarian).