These Truths Won't Set You Free.

There has been a spate of honesty from the right in the last few days—no, not anything really substantive, like an admission that tax breaks for millionaires don’t really create jobs, or that the only reason to support literally negative taxation on oil companies is that they’re really good campaign contributors.

But still, the revelation that Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea Party, really does want to destroy public education is pretty significant. So is the overt cynicism of Mitch McConnell, who really isn’t having a good week. McConnell has a habit—an annoying one, no doubt, to his brethren on the right—of saying out loud what most of us already know: that nothing is more important to him than getting control of the government back from the Democrats. That would include, of course, getting the economy going… because if that were to happen, President Obama might get the credit.

And, just as he burbled after the 2010 elections that the centerpiece of his legislative agenda would be to prevent the re-election of Mr. Obama, now he’s abdicating any role in the negotiations about raising the debt ceiling:

I refuse to help Barack Obama get reelected by marching Republicans into a position where we have co-ownership of a bad economy. It didn't work in 1995. What will happen is the administration will send out notices to 80 million Social Security recipients and to military families and they will all start attacking members of Congress. That is not a useful place to take us. And the president will have the bully pulpit to blame Republicans for all this disruption.

If we go into default he will say Republicans are making the economy worse. And all of a sudden we have co-ownership of a bad economy. That is a very bad position going into an election. My first choice was to do something important for the country. But my second obligation is to my party and my conference to prevent them from being sucked into a horrible position politically that would allow the president, probably, to get reelected because we didn't handle this difficult situation correctly.

Senator McConnell is an ass, of course, but that’s not exactly a revelation. Nor is it exactly shocking that a politician—any politician of any political stripe—would choose policy decisions based on politics rather than on a good-faith consideration of the consequences. What’s different is that McConnell is so forthright in his utter disdain for anything that might actually help solve problems. His objective now is what it has been all along: to put a Republican in the White House. And the best way to do that is to make sure the economy doesn’t get better in the next 16 months.

Interestingly, the McConnell plan in all its crassness is despised by one and all. Democrats think it’s a trap; Republicans think it’s a surrender. What is universally accepted, however, is that it is all about politics and not even a little bit about policy.

Here’s Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

This is possibly the most juvenile, most buck passing, most transparently mendacious proposal I can recall from any party leader in recent memory. The bright idea here is to force Democrats to repeatedly vote to raise the debt ceiling during campaign season, and to repeatedly force Obama to lay out enormous budget cuts that have no purpose except to piss off interest groups. The whole thing is so patently, ridiculously political that it's breathtaking. It ought to be named the “Gratuitous Embarrassment of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party Act of 2011.”

OK, but that’s from the left, from a journal not likely to be favorable to Senator McConnell’s cause. What about the right? Well, R.M. of The Economist cites Drum approvingly, then adds:

The idea, from a Republican perspective, is to saddle the president with full responsibility for the unpopular move of raising the debt limit and back away from fomenting a new economic crisis (always a smart move). It was likely that the debt ceiling would be raised, but under [Mr.] McConnell's plan Republicans would be able to avoid casting an embarrassing vote to that effect. They could then vote against increasing the ceiling with the comfort of knowing it will rise anyway.

It is, in short, universally acknowledged that McConnell’s plan is cynical, just as GOP votes against TARP were cynical (or, to be fair, then-Senator Obama’s vote against increasing the debt ceiling was cynical). Politicians do that stuff, in between calling each other “the honorable” and “the gentlelady from…” and then describing them as Sharia-loving atheist communist Nazis ten minutes later. It’s McConnell’s blithe dismissal of anything but politics as a motive for apparently anything that’s troubling. Drum compares it to The Lord of the Flies, complete with shameless Machiavellianism and overtones of early adolescence. I think he’s being kind.

Note: I am not being facetious in the above sentence. Yes, McConnell is being crassly partisan, placing the fortunes of his party above those of his nation. Yes, he’s strutting his amorality like some sort of perverse talisman: the red state badge of honor, perhaps. And yes, he’s probably a lot smarter, politically, than he appears. But there’s more to it than that. He has also (skillfully? accidentally?) diverted attention away from anything that might prompt even the sloths in the mainstream media to talk about what’s really important in these deliberations: the virtually unchallenged assertion (by Speaker Boehner, among others) that Congressional Republicans are simply doing the will of the people.

Thankfully, there’s Nate Silver, now of the New York Times, to supply some cogent analysis. He points out that the various deals proposed by President Obama (who may not be a great President, but is pretty clearly the only grown-up in the room) range from about 17-25% tax increases (often achieved simply by closing loopholes rather than changing the marginal rate even a smidge). This puts Mr. Obama not merely in synch with, but to the right of, Republican voters. By contrast,

If we do take the Republicans’ no-new-taxes position literally, it isn’t surprising that the negotiations have broken down. Consider that, according to the Gallup poll, Republican voters want the deal to consist of 26 percent tax increases, and Democratic voters 46 percent—a gap of 20 percentage points. If Republicans in the House insist upon zero tax increases, there is a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones.

And that’s the dirty secret away from which McConnell’s ploy was consciously intended to distract us: Congressional Republicans have no interest in doing what’s best for the country or even what the people want (which, obviously, isn’t necessarily the same thing). Their only real constituency is the big-money Wall Street cabal: not the American people, not the voters in their respective districts, not even the rank and file GOP base. We knew that, of course. But this reminder was a little more blatant than others.

A similar phenomenon is readily observable with respect to the Tea Party and public education. On the one hand, it’s not much of a surprise that a TP spokesperson would think that public schools ought to “go away”:

Our ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It’s going to happen piecemeal and not overnight. It took us years to get into this mess and it’s going to take years to get out of it.

On the other hand, the proclamation does mark a sea change to the extent that anyone would be so brazen about it. Whether this openness is a function of hubris or naïveté, I’m not sure, but there is clearly no longer a felt need to disguise such a contempt for public education (I’d say for education in general, but they’re not admitting that… yet) that the rhetoric has shifted from “reform” to destruction.

James Kovalcin, a retired teacher interviewed by Bob Braun, the (Newark) Star-Ledger columnist linked above, suggests that the initial impetus for this antagonism came from the religious right’s anger at the removal of prayer from public schools; James Harris, head of the New Jersey NAACP, traces it all the way back to Brown v. Topeka in 1954. The more perspicacious among you might notice that neither of those rationales have anything to do with the Tea Party’s stated purpose. Which, frankly, makes them fairly likely to be accurate.

Certainly the opposition to public education of the right in general and of the Tea Party in particular is manifest. Part of the problem may be the kinds of social history mentioned above: please take note that the public schools themselves had nothing to do with ending either school prayer or segregation—they were simply the site where those battles were fought. The schools are responsible for having the audacity to teach actual science in science classes, for insisting that James Madison really is worth of study (and really did argue against “an alliance or coalition between Government and religion”), and for suggesting that slavery was the principal cause of the Civil War War between the States Struggle for Southern Autonomy. Oh, and a lot of teachers are in a union.

I happen to have a job at the nexus of two of the professions that everyone else thinks they could do better: theatre and education. Everybody’s a better actor (or director) than people who actually have to do it; everyone can home-school their kids better than certified teachers can. I have no doubt that there are those people who are quite competent to home-school their kids, and for whom doing so is an appropriate decision. I also have no doubt that the majority of students who are home-schooled are ignorant, socially inept, chauvinistic asses.

Of course, the voucher systems espoused as yet another litmus test of true Republicanism (although a sizeable percentage of them couldn’t tell you what a litmus test is, either literally or figuratively) purport to offer “choice.” They in fact offer state-subsidized religion (I seem to remember some document saying that was a bad idea…) or teaching by people hopelessly unqualified in intellect, training and temperament for the job at hand. Secular or non-sectarian private schools often offer an excellent education, but it comes at a price: well above the amount many families could afford on an ongoing basis, even after vouchers.

I have a good friend who is “head of school” at such an institution. There is no doubt that the education offered there is excellent, but even with considerable support from alumni and other donors, they still charge over $11,500 a year in tuition and fees (and that doesn’t count the cost of meeting the dress code). Financial aid is available, but “only rarely will awards exceed 50% of tuition.” In other words, even after a voucher ($3000 per student per year seems to be the standard sought by proponents) and maximum financial aid, a family with two kids would still be looking at an annual cost of $6000 or more.

The voucher plan would in fact make access to such stellar prep schools more affordable for some people, and that’s a good thing. But we also need to make two important points. First, not every private school is “better” than public education. Secondly, and more objectively, there are many students whose families simply can’t afford the cost. If you can afford a Civic and somebody offers you a Lamborghini for the price of a BMW, you’re still going to drive a Civic. These people, the most vulnerable in the society, need a thriving, excellent public school system: and every dollar that gets diverted from that system hurts not merely those students affected directly, but all of us.

Public education, good public education, is one of the irreplaceable stanchions which support a free society. The Tea Party either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care. That’s not news. Their admitting it is news, or ought to be. But the Democrats have been their traditional craven selves, no one in the Republican leadership is willing to differentiate themselves from the most pathetically ignorant elements of their party, and the media have, as usual, been deafeningly quiet.

Both of these stories are troubling, not because this or that political figure is a cynical charlatan, but because there no longer seems to be any shame associated with appearing to be so. This says more about us than about them. While it’s true that there is a certain refreshing quality to hearing any politician, especially a Republican, actually tell the truth, I almost wish they’d keep lying to us about some things: it would certainly make convincing myself of their sanity and their good intentions a little easier.

The Casey Anthony Trial Rorschach Test

I seem to have been the only reasonably news-conscious person in the country who paid extremely little attention to the Casey Anthony trial. It struck me at the time that this was simply another media-created sideshow that matters little to the common weal except for providing a little diversion for people for whom such slop is the ultimate reality TV show, and for news agencies that wanted an excuse not to have to put in the actual work to cover something that matters. My opinion hasn’t changed in the last few days.

Except for one thing. The not guilty verdict on the most serious of the charges has made a lot of folks, spurred on by the insufferable Nancy Grace, apoplectic. “Of course, she was guilty,” bellow these Judge Roy Bean wannabes. “That whole ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ thing is all well and good, but I’ve got a strong feeling [not to be confused with a thought process] she dunnit.” The trouble is, “beyond a reasonable doubt” does matter. It is the foundation of our system of criminal law: the belief that it is better to allow the guilty to go free that to condemn the innocent. (Lawyer and ethicist Jack Marshall has made this point persuasively and repeatedly, most relevantly here.)

It doesn’t take any great acumen or a particular skill set to be a good juror. It requires only a willingness to pay attention, a respect for the system, and a fundamental sense of honesty and fair play. In my admittedly limited and by definition anecdotal experience, juries take their work seriously. I’ve written in the past about the importance of authority, of expertise, and I’ve got a piece simmering on the back burner in which that concept is especially foregrounded. And the experts on this case are the people who were there.

I do mean that quite literally. I happen to make my living in part by determining what behaviors are likely to make an audience believe in the truth of a moment, but that doesn’t mean other people don’t have that same facility. On a good day, I can help an actor become more believable; John Doe in the audience might not be able to do that, but he can tell you whether a performance was convincing or not. And trials are, to use the word I trot out in the Advanced Play Analysis class, performative.

One of the advantages (and disadvantages) of live theatre relative to, say, movies, is that the spectators can watch whatever they choose rather than what the director chooses to show them; jurors can not only hear the nuance in a witness’s voice, they can watch the defendant while the cameras (if a judge is silly enough to allow them) are pointing at the witness or vice versa. In my only experience as a juror, I happened to catch a glance from the junior policeman to his senior partner. It spoke to me of a desire to please a superior rather than an imperative to tell the truth. You can be sure it didn’t show up in the transcript, and even a courtroom camera, had there been one, wouldn’t have followed the line of his gaze.

I didn’t base my opinion on that split second alone, but I did look at the purported evidence against the defendant from a slightly different angle. And that led me to “reasonable doubt” about the most serious of the charges. Make no mistake, the guy was what my grandmother would call a “wrong ‘un.” He was almost certainly guilty of a fair number of crimes with which he hadn’t been charged, and probably of the ones for which he was being tried. But “probably” isn’t good enough in a criminal trial. We convicted him of the one count we were sure of and acquitted him of two others.

I am not ever—I promise—going to condemn a jury for acquitting someone. There’s a point at which we have to trust the system. (Of course, guilty verdicts when there is a clear demonstration of doubt are another matter.) Was the case a little less airtight than the moronic punditocracy would have us believe? I don’t know, and neither do you. The jury thought so. They examined all the actual evidence—you know, including the stuff that didn’t make it onto the three-minute-long “in-depth” reports on the nightly news shows—and found enough holes in the prosecution’s case to make for—here’s that phrase, again—reasonable doubt. As one juror put it, “When the prosecution rested ... I was stunned. I thought there would be more. I really did. And I was waiting for more. ... A lot of us felt that way, that there was not enough evidence to fill in the gray area that we needed to be filled in.”

But no one, apparently, told the chattering class that an acquittal when the jury is not entirely convinced by the prosecution’s case is a good thing. Instead, not only do we get death threats against jurors from the usual morons, but also the mockery of… well, whoever wants to make a point.

If you’re Alan Caruba of Tea Party Nation, the case is symptomatic of the decline in American values and tells us that President Obama is a liar in large part because he grew up in a single-parent family. It makes us wonder, moreover,

Do we have time to turn around a wounded society that allows sexual deviants to parade in our streets and preach their lifestyle in our schoolrooms?

Do we have time to end the practice of same-sex marriages?

Do we have time to put an end to all the calls that any symbol of the Christian and Jewish faiths be removed from public display, any mention of God or any prayer in public meetings be silenced?

If you’re Bill Maher, an average person's voting for the Republicans “is as stupid as voting not guilty for the mom who lost her baby for a month and went looking at a wet t-shirt contest.” It’s a clever line, I suppose, but more problematic than useful. Those jurors didn’t ask to be in the limelight; they simply did their duty to the best of their ability—or at least we have no evidence to the contrary.

The most disturbing of these Casey-Anthony-was-guilty-but-got-away-with-murder-and-that’s-just-like-fillintheblank riffs, however, comes not from a fringy right-wing pundit wannabe nor from a professional comedian whose forays into politics are often more cringe-inducing than actually humorous. No, the worst of the offenders (that I know about) was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who decided that the Anthony case was evidence for why Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame shouldn’t be tried in a civilian court: “We just found in the Cayley Anthony case how difficult it is to get a conviction in a US court.”

There are two responses to this drivel. The first: I challenge you, Senator McConnell, to cite a single case, one, in which a suspected terrorist was tried in civilian court and allowed to walk. You say that Senator Schumer opposed trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York. Fine, he’s an idiot, too, but at least his concerns were based on things like security issues and cost, not because we might not get a conviction.

Because, of course, we can. And have. There were, depending on how you count, either 150 or 390 such cases a year ago. (The smaller number counts only those convicted of terrorism-related charges; the larger number, to those with presumed terrorist links convicted of other charges, such as obstruction or perjury.) Since then, there have been numerous others: Tahawwur Hussain Rana, Amen Ahmed Ali and Ahmed Ghailani, to name but three. True, Ghailani was acquitted of most of the charges against him, meaning he will receive only life imprisonment instead of… erm… life imprisonment.

Ah, if only this were the more compelling reason to be alarmed at Senator McConnell’s comments. At least the possibility, even perhaps probability, exists that the chances of conviction are greater in a military tribunal. And it is not an outrageous assertion that foreigners ought not necessarily expect the same rights as US citizens in dealing with our government. The more fundamental problem with McConnell’s argument is in its implicit—damned close to explicit, actually—assumption that convictions equal justice. If there really is a suspect at Gitmo whose fingerprints are on IED’s, I’m betting a civilian court would convict the SOB (just like they have in every other such case). But if there isn’t really a case, then yes, a civilian court might be more likely to acquit. And that is precisely what should happen.

But as a Los Angeles Times editorial points out, military courts require the same degree of proof as their civilian counterparts:

Before a vote is taken on the findings, the military judge must instruct the commission members “that the accused must be presumed to be innocent until his guilt is established by legal and competent evidence beyond reasonable doubt.”

There’s that phrase again. Dammit, where can a red-blooded fear-mongering demagogue go for a good, old-fashioned kangaroo court, with guilty verdicts whether the evidence supports them or not? Well, says that editorial, there’s always Saudi Arabia.

I really don’t care about Casey Anthony, her lifestyle, or even, in any real sense, whether she did it. The trial was instructive, however, as a sort of Rorschach test not on the American judicial system itself but on our responses to it. I don’t particularly like what I’m seeing in those inkblots.