Ebbs and eddies

Cognitive dissonance
I call your attention to an excellent story in the online edition of the Athens Banner-Herald. This should be required reading for anybody who takes seriously Republicans’ self-serving and self-evidently ludicrous blather about their deep and abiding respect for the Constitution, and how it’s being destroyed by the (activists, socialists, Marxists, radicals, Dementors, Legions of Lord Voldemort … pick your bug-eyed epithet of choice) of the “democrat party” and the Obama administration.

Trust me: When people who totally trashed the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting terror tell you how much they love the Constitution, you should definitely listen.

But that’s not what the Athens piece is about. It’s about the curious ways some Republicans have of squaring their supposed reverence for the Constitution with their agenda to rewrite it.

Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia explains: "We need to do a lot of tweaking to make the Constitution as it was originally intended, instead of some perverse idea of what the Constitution says and does."

OK, linguists and logicians. Break that one down.

So … the Constitution needs “tweaking” to make it “as it was originally intended.” Which, it should go without saying, is something the likes of Paul Broun and Jeff Sessions and Michele Bachmann understand infinitely better than intellectual midgets like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, etc., who wrote it in the first place.

Bachmann’s proposed amendment is especially priceless. The founder of the congressional tea party caucus and one of the most consistently entertaining spokesloons of the Nutcase Right wants the Constitution to restrict the president's ability to sign international treaties. Why? Because she’s convinced the Obama administration could replace our monetary system with some sort of global currency.

‘Fess up, now: Weren’t you getting nostalgic for those halcyon days of black helicopters and unconditional U.S. surrender to the Trilateral Commission?

Still reeks

The Troy Anthony Davis case stinks. There’s just nothing about either the conviction – or, for that matter, some of the defenses of this guy -- that smells like justice.

Davis, in case you’ve been on Mars for the last 20 years, is on Death Row for the 1989 murder of Mark McPhail, a Savannah police officer who, although he was off duty at the time (working security for Burger King), heroically rushed to the defense of a homeless man who was being assaulted, and got shot to death for his trouble.

McPhail was a Columbus High alum, and his family still lives here. I can’t imagine what they must be feeling, and maybe I need to admit I’d probably feel exactly the way they do. They’ve been waiting more than 20 years for justice, and they want this over with.

But when people as distinguished, as different and as ideologically diverse as Jimmy Carter, Bob Barr, Desmond Tutu and former FBI chief Williams Sessions all say there’s something wrong with this conviction, you have to wonder.

U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. said of Davis’ latest – and perhaps last – evidentiary review that it “casts some additional, minimal doubt on his conviction” but is “largely smoke and mirrors."

Just how much “additional, minimal doubt” about the guilt of somebody sentenced to die should it take to give reasonable people pause?

The bigger question, and one that really eats at me: Why are we, as individuals and as a culture, so much more outraged about the possibility of somebody guilty getting off light than we are about somebody innocent being imprisoned or executed?

There’s just no moral stature in that. None.

Speaking of innocence …

A Houston man was set free last month after 27 years – twenty-seven years, man – for a gang rape he had no part in. DNA evidence excluded him as one of the perpetrators. Michael Anthony Green is 45, meaning he’s spent more than half his life in the pen for a violent crime he didn’t commit.

Oh, and here’s a nice footnote: Authorities now know who did do it, but the statute of limitations has expired. So three guilty guys are free, and Green has been in the slammer since he was 18.

The atrocious frequency of stories like this would trigger all our sanctimonious superiority about human rights and justice if they took place in places like Iran or Libya (which, no doubt, they do). So why does this keep happening here, and why does it keep getting relegated to the back rows of our collective consciousness and conscience?

Here’s what we should do. We pass laws that say whenever one of these wrongly convicted folks is cleared, there is an immediate and detailed review of the arrest, investigation, trial and conviction. And anybody found to have engaged in willful misconduct does the time society owes the dude who just got out. Every damn hour of it.

Police blotter

A Houston priest is free on bond after allegedly threatening insurance giant Aflac and its employees with violence.

John Rouse –Father John Rouse, according to his lawyer – is accused of suggesting to a customer service rep that if his claim wasn’t settled promptly, he’d be back with (a) a shotgun, (b) a bomb, and/or (3) an airplane.

Obviously, this guy hasn’t been convicted of anything, so let’s play it by the book and presume him innocent. But if he’s not, you have to wonder: Just what denomination does this Padre represent? Whatever it’s selling, I’m pretty sure I don’t want any.

Vocabulary update

TV puts people into totally artificial and contrived situations and calls it “reality.”

Sports fans wager real money on real games involving real players and call it "fantasy."

What am I missing?
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Unhallowed reflections

How helpful it is that our convictions on the “Ground Zero Mosque” now define our loyalty as Americans – and, for some of us, as Christians.

The term itself, of course, is an exploitive lie, calculated to incite the easily flammable jingoist passion that passes among the devoutly ignorant as patriotism. It’s a term that ought to be, but hasn’t been, handled with care; it’s slimed with red-meat drippings and Fox mucus.

The proposed Islamic facility in question is two city blocks from the site of the World Trade Center that a bunch of Saudi Islamofascists (Saudis, remember, are our allies. The good guys. Our petro-partners.) destroyed not quite nine years ago, along with the lives of a couple of thousand Americans – Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists.

May every murderous barbarian even remotely responsible for that attack who isn’t dead already die a violent death or a slow and excruciatingly painful one, and fry in Hell forever after. Amen.

Meanwhile, some of the arguments for why American citizens who own that property shouldn’t build – in some shrunken minds, shouldn’t be allowed to build – a community center and mosque there are enough to numb mind and soul alike.

First, there’s the charge that this is “insensitive.” Let’s pass over for a moment the grotesque irony of that argument coming from, among others, those legendary paragons of sensitivity at Radio Right. The historic “sensitivity” of some people acting in the name of Christianity should curdle the blood today as readily as it has spilled blood in centuries past.

Oh, so you don’t want to be tarred with the Crusades or the Inquisition? Then don’t tar American Muslims with 9-11. How damn hard is that? Wasn’t it President Bush who said, soon after Sept. 11 and many times afterward, that Islam is not the enemy? It was perhaps the finest and most principled message of his otherwise disastrous presidency.

(On a purely personal, and probably irrelevant, note re the “sensitivity” issue: A fellow Methodist who thinks some of my political convictions are un-Christian once brought me – I swear to God – an Ann Coulter book. I’m sure reading it would have brought me closer to Jesus, perhaps by infusing me with the proper contempt for the terror attack widows Coulter called “9-11 whores.”)

Then there’s the “sacred” or “hallowed” ground argument. Politicians are big on this one.

I’ve got news for you: If a two-block radius around Ground Zero is “hallowed,” then the Reverence Police have apparently missed a few strip clubs, porn shops and other, more respectable caverns of commerce. (Wall Street, come to think of it, isn’t all that far away. How sacred is that?) If the Muslims are unwelcome in this sizeable “hallowed” chunk of lower Manhattan, there are a few hundred thousand money changers who need to be chased out of the temple along with them.

And I’ve heard enough tiresome variations on “Would the Taliban let Christians build a church?” to make a buzzard gag.

Aside from the reckless insult of conflating American citizens of the Islamic faith with a horde of violently misogynistic fanatics, here’s a point I must sadly conclude isn’t as obvious as I naively thought it would be:

Aren’t we supposed to be better than that?

A Muslim group wants to build a mosque and community center on American property they own as American citizens and taxpayers. And to listen to some of the noise, you’d think al Qaeda had planted a flag on the still-smoking WTC site and was dancing on the rubble.

And to think this self-righteous bile is being spewed in the name of American values and Christianity. Thank God – literally – if you don’t believe it represents either. If it did, what an ugly and damning indictment of both.

FOOTNOTE: On the regional front, meaning here in Georgia, the mosque issue has surfaced in two political races. In the governor’s race, both Republican Nathan Deal and Democrat Roy Barnes are against it. In a congressional race, both Republican Mike Keown and Democrat Sanford Bishop are against it.

So Republicans are fueling divisive resentment, while the Democrats are pants-wetting scared of being labeled “weak” or “soft” on something, thus reaffirming how weak and soft they are.

What else is new?

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FOUL!

Did Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switch parties as a matter of pure political expediency, even of political survival?

Well . . . duh.

So did Sonny Perdue, and Richard Shelby, and a couple of smug Auburn twits a few years ago who called a press conference to “confess their sins” before switching to the straight and narrow of (Republican) political righteousness, and a few hundred other nervous Democrats in years of GOP dominance.

Shelby’s Damascus conversion, in particular, was interestingly timed, coming literally days after the 1994 “Contract With America” GOP takeover of Congress. In fact, the number of former Democrats who have jumped ship since the dawn of the Reagan Revolution in 1980 would fill a pretty good size file.

Yet to listen to the hyperventilation of the conservative media, especially here in the (Red) Peach State, you’d think we were talking about Arlen SPECTRE, a Bond flick nasty who throws people in shark tanks and makes nerve poison out of fish gonads.

"Arlen Specter has waddled and quacked and strutted his webbed feet for years," huffed the always entertaining Augusta Chronicle.

"Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter did more spinning Tuesday than a Maytag washing machine . . . he let his principles and his former party out to dry," was the verdict of the Savannah Morning News.

“Sometime there has to be an endowed chair of political survival in the name of Sen. Arlen Specter,” was the lead of the Marietta Daily Journal.

Local TV commentator Al Fleming scorned Specter as “a pathetic old man” -- which prompted one of our readers to speculate on how long it had been since Al looked into his own mirror . . . which in turn prompted my wife to speculate on whether Al even casts a reflection.

Give Specter this much (or don’t): He’s been relatively honest about his motives. He doesn’t think he can even win the primary as a Republican, so he’ll try to win one more round as a Democrat. For what it’s worth, I think he’s probably toast anyway.

It was interesting to hear Specter’s spin on the familiar “I didn’t leave the party – the party left me” routine parroted by 25 years of Democratic ship-jumpers. In his case, it sounds valid: Right-wing fulminations notwithstanding, Specter is a conservative in the Goldwater-Rockefeller-Eisenhower (even, in some ways, McCain) tradition. As he’s watched his party taken over by wing nuts, Specter, like McCain, has seldom hesitated to speak out against the grosser excesses of the right.

To acknowledge anything principled in that, of course, it is first necessary to acknowledge that the right is capable of excess. Which is, I suspect, where rational response to Arlen Specter inevitably breaks down.

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