What the Hell Was ESPN Thinking?

There’s a lot of brouhaha at the moment about ESPN’s coverage of yesterday’s Sugar Bowl game in New Orleans, or rather of the pre-game.  The game was postponed for a day in the wake of the horrific events of early New Year’s morning only a few blocks from the Superdome, where the game was played.

So why is the photo for this piece of a baseball game?  Allow me to explain.  Curmie has been a fan of the New York Mets since 1962, the year of the team’s inception.  I can tell you that the biggest home run in Mets history had nothing to do with their World Series championship years of 1969 or 1986.  It was Mike Piazza’s two-run, come-from-behind, homer in the bottom of the 8th inning in Shea Stadium on September 21, 2001. 

It was the game-winning hit and it came against the best team in the division, the arch-rival Atlanta Braves.  Vastly more importantly, it was during the first major league game to be played in New York after the attacks of 9/11.  And, for the first time in a week and a half, the locals had something to be happy about.  That night, anyone who wasn’t a Braves fan per se (and probably a fair number who were) needed that home run.  Not just Mets fans.  Not just New Yorkers.  Americans.

We’d been told the everything was going to be OK, but we needed more.  David Letterman going back on the air helped, but everything was still somber.  The Bush jokes that would cement the resolve—you don’t joke about the President if your country is in crisis—were to come later.  But first, there was Mike Piazza.  Sometimes, sports matter.

In the winter of 1980, Curmie lived in a small town in rural Kentucky.  He remembers watching the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey game on the TV.  After the incredible upset of the powerhouse Soviet team by a bunch of American college kids, after the most famous line of Al Michaels’s career—“Do you believe in miracles?  Yes!”—there was a lot of noise outside, loud enough to be not merely audible but intrusive in Curmie’s second-floor apartment.

Outside, there was a string of cars with horns blaring; their windows were down (even in Kentucky it can get a little nippy in February), with a bunch of mostly teenagers leaning out and chanting “USA!  USA! USA!”  I’m willing to bet that Curmie was one of fewer than a dozen people in the entire town who’d ever seen a hockey game live, but here were these kids who didn’t know a poke check from a blue line getting excited about the Olympic semi-final.

In the midst of the Iranian hostage situation, with the country only showing the slightest signs of emerging from the energy crisis (is it any wonder the incumbent President was routed in the election a few months later?), we—again, all of us—needed something to grab ahold of, something to suggest that we’d weather the storm.

There have, of course, been other moments that transcended sports: Jesse Owens dominating at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round, Billy Miles appearing from nowhere to win the 10,000m in the Tokyo Olympics, we might even add Spiff Sedrick’s improbable sprint to glory in the women’s rugby 7s in this year’s Olympics.

But this year’s Sugar Bowl was most like that baseball game in September of 2001: what made it special wasn’t who won, or what political statement could be wrangled out of the victory, but the mere fact that the game went on was a sign of determination and perhaps a little bit of defiance.  If you’re a Georgia fan, you’re disappointed that your team lost, but you were reminded before kickoff that there are more important things than football games. 

Well, you were reminded of that fact if you were at the game in person.  You’d have less of that perspective if you… you know… watched on TV.  ESPN, which had exclusive broadcasting rights, cut away from the moment of silence, from the Star-Spangled Banner, and by extension from the “USA!  USA!  USA!” chants at the end of the anthem.  Needless to say, a lot of folks on the political right attributed the obviously intentional omission to anti-American “wokeness.”  (Here’s one example.) Whether the decision was in fact a product of political orientation or garden-variety incompetence may be up for discussion, but this has to rank among the biggest blunders the network has ever committed… yes, even worse than hiring Bill Walton, and that’s saying rather a lot.

Please remember, Gentle Reader, that this is Curmie saying this: the guy who decried the “unrelenting jingoism” of NBC’s Olympic coverage in 2012, and the “ultra-nationalistic bleatings of Peyton Manning” at this year’s opening ceremonies.  Curmie is no fan of pretending that “nationalism” and “patriotism” are synonyms.

Except.

The attack in New Orleans was a body blow to the American psyche.  It didn’t knock us out, but it staggered us for a moment.  (Curmie mentioned last time out that there was a “what if” scenario for him personally on this one.)  There’s a difference between moving forward despite what happened the previous morning and pretending that those events hadn’t occurred.

We, as a nation, need to proceed with as close to a normal routine as is possible.  That’s obviously impossible for those most directly affected, but I was pleased to see that our favorite New Orleans restaurant re-opened last night after closing for New Year’s Day.  And the game went on: with heightened security, but it went on.

Everyone—players, coaches, officials, television crews, concessionaires, fans—who showed up for the game a day after it was scheduled to be played had to have been at least a little apprehensive.  But there they were.  They got a moment to ponder the essential truth that someone who cheers for the other team isn’t the enemy: assholes who intentionally plow into pedestrians are.  Television viewers didn’t get that moment.  And whereas Curmie was unimpressed with the rendering of the national anthem, on this particular occasion he’d have liked to have seen it, especially given the image you see here of New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell.

The crowd’s chanting “USA!  USA!  USA!” at the end was unscripted, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been anticipated.  ESPN sideline reporter Laura Rutledge was widely and appropriately praised for her reporting of events in New Orleans from the initial attack all the way through the game.  She could have told the bosses what to expect, but perhaps she was fooled into thinking there was a decision-maker with more savvy than a dead flounder.

The chant may have been trite, it may have been was certainly eminently predictable, but it was above all else a communal monodigital salute to those who would attack us.  Ultimately, we’re family.  We can disagree, loudly and stridently, about everything from politics to what team to cheer for, but if you come at any of us just for being us, you’ll have to deal with all of us.  We are bloodied but unbowed.  We are legion.  Messing with us is contra-indicated.

(BTW, don't ask why that one paragraph is formatted differently than all the others.  Blogspot is inscrutable.)

Donald Trump Shows Why He’s Unfit for Office (Again)

Like millions of other Americans, Curmie learned this morning of the horrific, presumably terroristic, attack in New Orleans.  Obviously, we all grieve for the casualties and sympathize with their loved ones.  As this essay is being written, there are still lots of unanswered questions, but we do know some things with reasonable certainty.

Gentle Reader, you will notice the modifiers in the previous paragraph: “presumably,” “some,” “reasonable.”  Those words are there because Curmie really doesn’t want to claim as fact something that isn’t true.  If only the President-elect would be as honest circumspect… but then, he never was.

True, no intelligent person believes that Donald Trump is anything but a narcissistic, mendacious, blowhard.  His post on the ironically titled Truth Social is presented here in what Curmie presumes to be its entirety (you didn’t think I’d visit that site to check, did you, Gentle Reader?):

When I said that the criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country, that statement was constantly refuted by Democrats and the Fake News Media, but it turned out to be true. The crime rate in our country is at a level that nobody has ever seen before. Our hearts are with all of the innocent victims and their loved ones, including the brave officers of the New Orleans Police Department. The Trump Administration will fully support the City of New Orleans as they investigate and recover from this act of pure evil!

The first thing to notice is that whereas any normal person would lead with his sympathy for the victims, Trump always opens with political posturing; basic humanity is an afterthought, if it shows up at all.  Even if the conjecture about “criminals coming in” were accurate, the statement would mark Trump as an absolute asshole.  But we knew that, of course.  What we didn’t know but certainly should have suspected as a possibility is the fact that Trump’s bluster was 100% wrong on the facts… and that the so-called leftist media scrupulously avoided highlighting his bullshit. 

Yes, Newsweek does mention in paragraph five (!) that the suspect, Shamsud Din Jabbar, was a Texas-born American citizen.  Oh, and he was apparently a US Army vet.  Ah, but the headline proclaims only that “Donald Trump Says New Orleans Terror Attack Proves He Was Right.”  Anyone not reading past the first two sub-heads might be led to believe that Trump was spewing something other than his usual brand of xenophobic drivel.  Well, anyone who has been asleep for the last dozen years or so might be so tempted.  Those of us branded as “Trump deranged” by the MAGA apologists, of course, knew better were prepared to disbelieve a serial prevaricator.

To be fair, The New York Times did (finally) headline their story as “Trump Falsely Suggested New Orleans Suspect Was an Immigrant.”  Of course, the MAGA crowd wouldn’t believe the NYT if they said NBA centers are tall.  But you can bet the ranch that the truth that Donald Trump yet again made a false allegation will be ignored by most and dismissed as either leftie propaganda or irrelevant by most of the rest.  Curmie, unlike Trump, doesn’t claim to be the sole source of truth, but he’s right about this one.

The discussion will (and should) focus on what could have been done differently and what can be done to prevent a recurrence.  The answer isn’t easy.  Better training for cops: needed, but not enough.  Stricter gun laws, even if none of the deaths were caused by shooting (the two wounded cops definitely were): useful, but not enough.  And no, smug asshole right-winger, no one is calling for tighter restrictions on rental trucks.  We need to recognize that we can’t solve every problem without creating worse ones, but we damned well better do a little creative thinking.

One side note: Curmie and Beloved Spouse are grateful for a friend who asked us to look after her cats while she spent the holidays in Maine with her partner.  We otherwise might well have tried to head to NOLA for New Year’s… and our go-to hotel is about 20 yards from where that truck crashed.  It was almost certainly one of the hotels evacuated by authorities.  Curmie is fine with missing that particular bit of excitement.

 

This But That: Musings on Israel and Palestine

Curmie’s personal Facebook page lists his political affiliation as “Contrarian,” or at least it used to do so; that piece of information seems to have vanished, and there are more important things to do than investigate further.  That self-description holds, whether it’s visible to others or not. 

I was never in my adult life more conservative than when living in the small Iowa town that hosts the largest Democratic caucus in the state; whereas there were significant right-wing voices among my colleagues on the faculty of the small college where I taught, they were definitely in the minority.  

Nor have I ever been more liberal than when living in an East Texas Congressional district that elected and kept re-electing Louie Gohmert, often by landslide margins. (He’d still be my Congresscritter except for an ill-fated run for Texas Attorney General).

What this suggests is that when surrounded by largely one-sided rhetoric, Curmie tends to see the flaws in that perspective magnified relative to its strengths.  Whether that’s an admirable exercise in critical thinking or merely a stubborn petulance at being told what to believe sort of doesn’t matter.  It is what it is.

Curmie is also, of course, trained in theatre, and has taught over two dozen sections of acting classes, most of them grounded in the Stanislavsky system of beginning with a character’s objective.  This approach is especially useful in playing antagonists or even villains: they aren’t evil (necessarily, at least), they just see the world a little differently.  The world is a complicated place, and pretending that it is otherwise leads to potentially dangerous oversimplification.

Context matters, in other words.  Always.  That doesn’t mean that context is all that matters, or that every rationale for an action (or inaction) is legitimate—logically, legally, morally, or ethically.  Nor does it mean that just because we agree with a perspective with respect to Issue X, we are unable to disagree about Issue Y.  It is possible, for example, to say that the Biden presidency has been largely unsuccessful and still think it’s better than any of the alternatives currently presenting themselves.  It’s possible to acknowledge that there is considerable corruption in Ukraine and still support them in their struggle against Russian aggression.  And so on.

It is also possible to grant that allegations that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians shares some similarities with apartheid have some merit (the fact that these screeds are generally overblown does not mean they’re entirely fabricated) while also condemning without the slightest hesitancy or reservation the recent attacks by Hamas against Israeli citizens (and those from other countries, including the US).  Rape, murder, and kidnapping of non-combatants, of children and the elderly, cannot be countenanced under any circumstances whatsoever.  Curmie won’t go into details here, Gentle Reader.  You’ve probably been following this story as closely as he has, and there comes a point at which the sheer horror of the situation defies description.

And then, of course, there was the reaction, or, rather, series of reactions.  The Israeli military launched a massive bombing attack on Gaza, dropping nearly as many bombs on that small area in less than a week as the US employed in the entirety of Operation Desert Storm.  They cut off electricity to the region.  They imposed a mass and immediate migration. 

The Israelis (both here and throughout this essay, Curmie uses this term to refer to the Israeli government, not the citizenry) claim with no little justification to be defending their territory and their citizenry.  Also (of course) they claimed to be attacking Hamas installations rather than Gaza in general.  That said, there has been no little death and destruction suffered by people who had no part in the attacks in Israel.  Are the Israelis the “good guys” here?  No.  They’re the less despicable guys. 

Another response, of a different kind, was that of both the international left and a bunch of unthinking post-adolescents.  Blaming the situation wholly on Israel is profoundly stupid, yet so many individuals and organizations have effectively become spokespeople for terrorism.  This is not, of course, a unanimous response of the left any more than suggesting that all Jews want Gaza obliterated.  As a friend of Curmie, a man well to Curmie’s left politically, posted on Facebook, “When the topic turns to Israel, I step away from the Left.”

One of the biggest sources of headlines comes from Harvard, where some 30+ student organizations signed off on a proclamation declaring Israel to be “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attack.  Making the obvious point that the Hamas attack “did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement then proclaims that “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”  Uh… no.

But here’s the thing: many members of those student organizations didn’t even know that such a statement was even being considered until after it had been signed in their name.  “We didn’t read or understand what we were signing” is a pretty lame excuse for an Ivy League student; “We didn’t even know it was happening,” on the other hand, is legitimate.

Some brief observations:

1. Sometimes things that appear simple are actually complex.  There’s a good and—from Curmie’s perspective, at least—balanced discussion of some of this over at TheConversation.com.

2. Does the mere presence of non-Muslim visitors at the Al-Aqsa Mosque constitute a “desecration”?  Curmie’s definition of the term would require a higher threshold, but he’s an agnostic of Christian heritage, so what does he know?

3. Policies of the Netanyahu regime in particular no doubt had a triggering effect, indirectly precipitating the Hamas attack. 

4.Sometimes things that appear complex are actually simple.  There is no excuse, none, for what Hamas did.  Context is one thing; excuses are another.

5.There’s a difference between collateral damage and specifically targeting civilians.  That does provide context (there’s that word again), but there’s also a point at which knowing in advance that the collateral damage will be catastrophic becomes relevant.

6. It is virtually certain that Hamas takes shelter among innocent civilians, so any attack on Gaza will have civilian casualties.  Both sides know this.  Neither seems much to care.

7. Hamas’s energy, indeed its very existence, is defined negatively.  It is focused exclusively on the elimination of Israel (and perhaps of Jews in general), not on improving the lives of Palestinians.  This is one of the few points on which Curmie will brook no denial.

8. Silence is not always complicity.  Taking some time to organize ours thoughts—for those of us privileged enough to not be directly affected, at least—would seem a better option than saying something you’ll regret.  Not having words is not a moral or ethical failing. 

9.The same people who (rightly) argued that criticism of Barack Obama wasn’t inherently racist or of Hilary Clinton inherently sexist are now suggesting that criticism of the Israeli government is, in fact, inherently anti-Semitic.  It isn’t.  Nor is criticism of Hamas inherently Islamophobic. 

10. Lots of people in Israel don’t support their government’s policies with respect to Palestine; lots of people in Gaza don’t support brutality against Jews.

11. Kids in Gaza are just as innocent as those in Israel.

12. You can be a member of a group without supporting everything that group does.  No elected officials in a real democracy are ever supported by all their constituents, or even without reservations by their supporters.  Any American who can’t or won’t acknowledge the failures of the candidate they voted for in a recent election is not worthy of consideration.  Anyone who merely parrots the party line—any party line—is unworthy of consideration. 

13. It is not merely illogical but unethical to blame (or praise, for that matter) all members of a group for something the majority or the power-mongers do.  American citizens aren’t responsible for what our military does just because a slight majority of voters (as opposed to citizens) elected the Commander-in-Chief.  The same logic applies both to Israeli citizens and to residents of Gaza.

14. Simply being a member of a group—a local chapter of Amnesty International or the Nepali Student Association, for example—which has hitherto not done anything stupid regarding Israel and Gaza should not lead to doxing.  People who make decisions are responsible for those decisions; people who don’t even know a decision is being made are not. 

15. We can count on some self-important CEO (the usual apologies for redundancy) to engage in preening twatwaffledom in any circumstance.  No one should accept a job with a boss who engages so freely and publicly in proclaiming guilt by association.  Curmie is looking at you, Bill Ackman.

16. We are placed in the unfortunate situation of having to believe news reports, which, given the sloth of most journalists and editors, are often misleading if not outright prevarications.  Skepticism is definitely in order.

17. To the extent that such poor journalism is the result of bias rather than garden variety incompetence, it tends to backfire.  The truth has a nasty way of finding its way to the light, and uncovering false allegations (e.g., of an Israeli attack on a Gaza hospital) tends to discredit subsequent, accurate, reporting from the same source.

18. The only hope for the situation not getting worse is the release of the hostages.  We can be shocked by Israel’s response, but we cannot reasonably condemn it out of hand.  Horrific and appropriate are not always contradictory terms.

19. Should this release occur and the assault on Gaza continue, the Israeli government bears the responsibility for the continued carnage.

20. Curmie doubts that the release mentioned in #19 is likely to happen.  Alas.

21. It is possible to support Palestinians and still condemn Hamas’s slaughter of innocent people.  How do I know?  The guy I see in the mirror does both.

Is it the university's fault if you don't go to class?

There’s lots of political news, of course, plus several stories from the world of education that merit comment. Given Curmie’s schedule right now, it’s unlikely he’ll even make a dent in the backlog. But here’s a start.

We begin Operation Catch-up with the saga of Balayla Ahmad, a black, Muslim woman who was studying at the University of Bridgeport, hoping to become a chiropractor. Now she’s suing the university, who, she says, ignored her allegations of sexual harassment against a fellow student but called in the FBI when he, in retribution, began spreading rumors alleging she was a terrorist.

Ahmad alleges that the other student “made repeated sexual advances at her, often hurling obscenities such as ‘I want to eat you like I am eating this sub [sandwich]’ or yelling ‘I'm going to cuff you’ while holding a pair of handcuffs.” According to the lawsuit, Ahmad talked to more than one teacher about her situation, one of whom urged her not to go to the dean, as he would speak to the harasser. Eventually, Ahmad—against advice—went to the university president, who apparently wasn’t much help.

Then campus security showed up on her doorstep with allegations of terrorism, threatening her with bringing in the FBI (as, apparently, they did). Ahmad’s attorney says “The sexual harassment investigation never occurred. Instead it became about her.” The FBI found no substantiation for the charges against Ms. Ahmad, but somewhere along the way, she was removed as a student. The university is declining comment—and we’ve heard nothing but Ahmad’s side of the story… this may or may not be a relevant concern.

Assuming what she says is both true and all there is to know, it’s pretty damning for the university. There are three problems: the lack of action on the sexual harassment allegation, the apparently swift action on what turned out to be unfounded reports of terrorism, and the failure to perceive what in retrospect (at least) would seem to be a pretty obvious link between the charges.

Let’s take these one step at a time. The news reports don’t make it clear whether the harasser ultimately stopped as a result of university action; they suggest only that Ms. Ahmad didn’t think they would. A teacher reportedly told Ms. Ahmad that the university normally doesn’t immediately suspend students for the level of sexual harassment she alleges; the dean subsequently told her that his “hands were tied.” The teacher was almost certainly both telling the truth and describing a reasonable policy. The dean, probably not so much.

I’ve dealt with two cases of student-on-student harassment in my career. Both happened to have occurred when I was a graduate student teaching Beginning Acting. One involved two theatre majors and stemmed from the out-of-class rehearsal conduct of the male partner in a two-character scene. The female student brought the case to me. I talked with her for nearly two hours, then took the case to the department chair, complete with a lengthy written report. I don’t know exactly what happened after that in procedural terms, but I do know that the female student agreed to complete the scene with the young man provided there was always another person present at their rehearsals and that she’d never be partnered with him again.

I know, too, that the department chair read the riot act to the male student, who seems to have been more unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions than really being a jackass. He was, I think, not allowed to participate in the next round of departmental auditions, although he subsequently became an active member of the department, as far as I know without further incidents. I received both a personal and a written apology; so did the female student. And that was that.

The other case involved two non-majors, and dealt with in-class activity. The man in question always managed to position himself close to the woman on days when we were talking about concepts rather than rehearsing scenes or doing exercises. He’d then mumble or whisper sexually explicit suggestions to her while covering his face with his baseball cap or when I was looking elsewhere. I suspected that something was going on, but it wasn’t until the young woman talked to me after class that I knew exactly what.

I consulted the chair again about what to do, and he said, and I believe this is a direct quote, “Send him to me. You don’t get paid enough to deal with this shit.” (Good boss!) He asked me when my class met, cleared his calendar for the beginning of the next class period, and told me to send the male student to him as soon as he arrived, without telling him why. I did. I don’t know what was said in that room, but I do know two things: 1). the big tough football player returned to class 20 or 30 minutes later having obviously been crying, and 2). there was never a problem again.

It is unreasonable for Ms. Ahmad or her lawyer to think the university should have expelled the alleged harasser without due process, especially since (as my own experience indicates) there are often less drastic but nonetheless effective means of solving the problem. Plus, of course, as this case itself demonstrates, allegations aren’t always true—there is no objective reason to believe that a specific claim of sexual harassment is any more credible than a specific charge of terrorist sympathies.

All that said, the “my hands are tied” defense is more often than not the go-to position of the lazy, the diffident, and the dishonest. It may be true that the dean was not in position to impose a punishment on the alleged harasser, but that would only be true if a judicial board or some similar agency had reviewed the case and dismissed the charges. (They might have been incorrect to do so, but such a decision might well have been founded on an innocent-until-proven-guilty rationale rather than on a firm belief in the male student’s innocence.) Even if the dean had no authority to exact a penalty, he could certainly use the power of his office—as my former boss used the power of his—to make it very clear that any further complaints against the alleged harasser would be taken very seriously indeed. But—apparently, at least—he punted, instead.

Campus security types always like to pretend they’re more important than they are. If every college and university fired every campus cop who is more interested in strutting than in serving, the unemployment lines in college towns would be out the door. Ahmad argues, according to the Huffington Post, that “college officials recklessly disseminated false accusations by the harasser that they had good reason to believe were unreliable and threatened her with arrest by the FBI.” That’s a serious charge, especially if a). it really was college officials disseminating the accusations, and b). they did so even if they suspected the reports were of dubious provenance.

But imagine what would have happened if the alleged harasser’s claims had been legitimate: if security hadn’t investigated, if the FBI hadn’t been called in… and if there had been an attack of some kind. Yes, it is a threat to say you’re going to call in the FBI. But even a die-hard civil libertarian like me doesn’t read that as inherently creating an environment in which it is impossible to do one’s work.

It’s important to note that Bridgeport apparently didn’t suspend Ms. Ahmad for either her allegations against a fellow student or for his against her. Here’s the ABC report: “Ahmad was dismissed from the school in June 2009 after, she says in the complaint, she was unable to attend class because of the alleged persistent harassment as well as perceived threats of federal prosecution.” Translation: she flunked out.

Forgive me, but I just have a little trouble believing that the harassment was so severe and unchecked, and the (perceived) threat of prosecution so portentous that it was impossible for a 35-year-old woman to go to class. (And if they were, dropping as opposed to failing classes would seem to be an appropriate course of action.) Not that students have ever before blamed their truancy on someone else, of course…

There’s enough on the surface here that the Bridgeport administration might be worth a Curmie nomination. But until we find out a little more information, this one is on hold.

"I'm Erick, and I'm a Pseudo-Christian Moron." "Hi, Erick."

There’s a wonderfully instructive post by the reliably stupid Erick Erickson over on RedState.com.

Erickson was certainly not alone in buying into the easy narrative coming out of Norway that the terroristic attacks there were perpetrated by Islamic radicals. The New York Times, the BBC, and other allegedly reputable outlets all signed on without bothering to do any… you know… fact-checking or real reporting. (There’s a good chronicle of how what is now pretty clearly a false report spread here.) The sloth of the mainstream media is, of course, a running theme on this blog: a couple of the more recent examples are here, here, and—perhaps most relevantly—here.

But Erickson is a special case: he’s stupid enough to try to be clever: he tweeted “Terrorist bombing in Oslo. I bet you it was not Lutherans who did it.” Well, Erick, ol’ boy, I bet you lost that bet.

Still, most of us have confidently, even smugly, made a prediction that didn’t turn out to be accurate. The difference between you and me on the one hand, Gentle Reader, and wastes of potentially useful protoplasm like Erick Erickson on the other is precisely this: when we screw up, we admit it, apologize, and move on. He, on the other hand, while admitting he has a fair amount of egg on his face, wants to blame everyone else for his lapse. In this, of course, he is not unlike a lot of self-styled pundits, mostly but by no means exclusively on the right, who simply cannot admit that they got one wrong.

You see, it’s not that his prejudice blinded him to the possibility that an act of terrorism might be perpetrated by the quintessential Aryan (after all, Europe has never had any trouble with that lot, right?). It’s those wild-eyed leftie pinkos in the media who are always making excuses for Muslims. After all,

In the Arkansas army shootings and the Ft. Hood shooting and a host of others, the media and the left have sought to downplay any possible connection to Islam the attackers or would be attackers have had. And when those of us on the right have pointed it out, we’ve been accused of racism and those on the left have demanded to know why it even mattered.

Really, because all I heard for days was about how Nidal Hassan was Islamic, and the New York Times article, for example, (I just picked one at random from the list of allegedly left-leaning media sources) on the Arkansas shootings includes this: “In a lengthy interview with the police, Mr. Muhammad said he was angry about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chief Thomas said. Previously known as Carlos Bledsoe, Mr. Muhammad told investigators that he had converted to Islam as a teenager, Chief Thomas said.” By the way, that was in paragraph 6 (see below). Sounds to me like there’s no cover-up there.

Ah, but Erick the Oblivious isn’t done yet: “Contrast that with the coverage of the Oslo shooter and already the New York Times is making sure in its first few paragraphs everyone knows the guy described himself on Facebook as a ‘conservative Christian.’” Might that be because he’s a conservative Christian? Oh, and confessed culprit Anders Behring Brevik isn’t identified as “right-wing” in the first Times article to identify him until paragraph 11 or as a Christian until paragraph 16 (see above). He was in fact described as a “right-wing fundamentalist Christian” in a follow-up report, only after what the Times describes as “a detailed manifesto calling for a Christian war to defend Europe against the threat of Muslim domination” came to light. (OK, that one was in paragraph 5: you got me, there.)

In fact, if a perspicacious reader were to be troubled by the Times’s reporting, the distress would more likely be founded on sentences like the following, taken from a since-removed article: “Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday's assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida's signature brutality and multiple attacks.” You catch that? The clear implication is two-fold: 1). it isn’t terrorism unless it’s Islamic terrorism, and 2). it’s still al-Qaida’s fault. This is the allegedly pro-Islamic, anti-Christian coverage that has Erickson’s skivvies in a twist.

In fact, Glenn Greenwald has a point when he argues:

Thus: if it turns out that the perpetrators weren’t Muslim (but rather “someone with more political motivations”—whatever that means: it presumably rests on the inane notion that Islamic radicals are motivated by religion, not political grievances), then it means that Terrorism, by definition, would be “ruled out” (one might think that the more politically-motivated an act of violence is, the more deserving it is of the Terrorism label, but this just proves that the defining feature of the word Terrorism is Muslim violence). The final version of the NYT article inserted the word “Islamic” before “terrorism” (“even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause”), but—as demonstrated above—still preserved the necessary inference that only Muslims can be Terrorists. Meanwhile, in the world of reality, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one—1 out of 294—was perpetrated by “Islamists.”

Of course, minor details like facts never get in the way of Erickson’s narrative. Ultimately, however, this part of Erickson’s baseless screed isn’t really the troublesome part. Idiot conservative commentators’ lying about the facts is hardly news. Then we get this: “The fact of the matter is violence and Islam may not be very common among American muslims, but internationally it is extremely common and can fairly well be considered mainstream within much of Islam.” Once again, of course, the accusation is unmitigated bullshit (see Greenwald’s numbers, for example, which come not from some random guy with a Twitter account, but from the European Union’s Terrorism Situation and Trend Report for 2010). Ultimately, Erickson’s argument boils down to an allegation that wacko Christians aren’t really Christian, but wacko Muslims are really Muslims. Just because Erickson says so. The really outrage is yet to come, however:

Secular leftists and Islamists are both of this world. Christians may be traveling through, but we are most definitely not of the world. In fact, Christ commands us to throw off our ties to this world. But the things of this world love this world and hate the things of God. That’s why secular leftism can embrace both activist homosexuals and activist muslims when the latter would, when true to their faith, be happy to kill the former.

In fact, Mr. Erickson, you bigoted asshat, Christ tells us to love one another. That’s why “secular left[ists]” like me can embrace homosexuals and Muslims: because they are God’s creatures, made in His image. Because we, not pseudo-Christian pietists like yourself, who read only the parts of the Bible that conform to your manifold prejudices, actually try to emulate the compassion embodied in Jesus. We might not do it for that reason, but that’s what a belief in social programs, in Welfare and Social Security, in health care for all is—that’s what we believe in. And I’m here to tell you, you mendacious Mammon-worshipper, that Jesus is a lot more likely to be on our side than on yours.

I will grant you one thing, though: you are “most definitely not of this world.” We don’t mind your visiting our planet, and we hope you enjoy your stay. Just don’t try to pretend you live here.

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.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Zardari?

The diplomatic aftermath of the successful mission against the Osama bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan was predictable, especially when it became clear that US authorities not only didn’t inform the Pakistani government of the imminent raid, but President Obama trebled the size of the assault force so, in the face of possible resistance from Pakistani police or armed forces, they could fight their way out. There may or may not have been a deal in place, giving the American military free access to pursue a raid against bin Laden but providing for vociferous after-the-fact protests by the Pakistani government. I wrote about all this on May 12.

Now, according the AP’s Kimberly Dozier,

U.S. officials say Pakistan has apparently tipped off militants at two more bomb-building factories in its tribal areas, giving the terror suspects time to flee, after U.S. intelligence shared the locations with the Pakistani government.

U.S. officials believe Pakistan's insistence on seeking local tribal elders' permission before raiding the areas may have most directly contributed to the militants' flight. U.S. officials have pushed for Pakistan to keep the location of such targets secret prior to the operations, but the Pakistanis say their troops cannot enter the lawless regions without giving the locals notice….

The latest incidents bring to a total of four bomb-making sites that the U.S. has shared with Pakistan only to have the terrorist suspects flee before the Pakistani military arrived much later.

Apparently, the American military got suspicious and satellite-monitored suspected bomb-making sites after alerting the Pakistanis. “In each case, they watched the militants depart within 24 hours, taking any weapons or bomb-making materials with them, just as militants had done the first two times. Only then, did they watch the Pakistani military visit each site, when the terror suspects and their wares were long gone, the officials said.”

Anyone paying attention will have long since come to the conclusion that the chances of real cooperation from the Pakistani government--any Pakistani government—are roughly equal to the chances that Lucy will let Charlie Brown kick the football. But while the news can hardly be described as surprising, it is certainly disappointing in at least two ways.

First, there is the obvious lack of détente after the Abbottabad raid. If there was a deal in place to allow American forces to go after bin Laden, the Pakistanis sure aren’t acting like it. Their indignation that they would be accused of tipping off terrorists is so transparently false, it’s laughable. Or, rather, it would be if the stakes weren’t as high as they are. No, they didn’t directly phone up and say, “by the way, we’re raiding you tomorrow; just thought we’d let you know.” No, they called up the local tribal chiefs, and they passed the word along. It’s like saying you didn’t tell anyone your friend’s secret… you just posted it on the Internet.

The second concern, of course, is the rather too frank admission that the administration of Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari doesn’t really have control over its own territory. Apparently they need the equivalent of a hall pass to enter certain areas, which oh-so-coincidentally happen to be where much of the terroristic activity is taking place. So even if Pakistan were an honest and reliable ally, it wouldn’t be much help.

Yet while it is true that no one believes the Pakistani government can be trusted, they’re no doubt better than the alternative. That means the allowing distrust to spiral downward into real belligerence is not a legitimate solution. But it’s clear that Pakistan has neither the desire nor the ability to clean up pockets of terrorism within its own borders. I presume that logistical problems such as the potential for extensive civilian casualties prevents using drone strikes against this type of target.

The US, therefore, is left with three unsavory choices. Possibility #1 is to continue to pretend the Pakistanis really are the allies we have long trumpeted them as being (not that anyone really believed it). That means we’ll catch the occasional low-level insurgent when the string of failures starts looking a little too long to be otherwise plausible, rather like the crooked roulette wheel generates a winner every now and then to keep the suckers interested. But don’t hold your breath for a real payoff.

The second scenario would involve simply giving up on pursuing anyone—bomb-maker, militiaman or mastermind alike—who manages to make it over the border into Pakistan. This seems even less tenable than the first option.

Finally, we could decide to take matters into our own hands and pursue any military target we want, Pakistani sovereignty be damned: if they’re not a friend, they’re an enemy. This, of course, has serious repercussions not only in terms of international law, but also in terms of the widespread perception—fueled, alas, by idiots like Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain—that the US is indeed at war with all of Islam. It is a strategy to be pursued only as an absolute last resort, if even then.

Needless to say, none of these choices is a happy one. Some real diplomacy is called for, then, to see how cooperative the Zardari government can truly be made to be, and how much actual steel can be packed into the velvet gloves of negotiation. The US has provided nearly $18 billion in military and economic aid in the decade since 9/11; its continuation (or not) could be a bargaining chip, but expect Congressional criticism of continuing the assistance regardless of what path the Pakistanis take: both from those who object to the notion of foreign aid in general (especially to a Muslim country) and from those who expect a little more quid pro quo bang for their buck.

Killing Osama bin Laden had great symbolic value and provided the Obama administration a short-term bump in poll numbers. But the raid has already faded from the public consciousness, the approval ratings have dwindled back down to where they were in April, and US-Pakistani relations are marked with an even more profound skepticism on both sides than in the past. Dealing with bin Laden may have been a walk in the park compared with negotiating this minefield.

The link, alas, is cowardice

One of the things any scholar does is to seek patterns other people might have missed. It becomes, in a sense, a variation on the theme of the $10K/25K/100K Pyramid. If you’d like to play along at home, here are the clues:

• a screed by Michael Moore about what Democrats need to do to maintain their control of Congress

• a story a couple of weeks ago that Senate Democrats would postpone until after the election a vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for everyone except the over-a-quarter-million-a-year-crowd

• a recent story week about how the Obama administration is issuing waivers to employers and insurance companies alike “to maintain even minimal coverage far below the new [health-care legislation’s] standards.”

• a travel advisory from the State Department about a potential terrorist attack in Europe

• a photograph of the statue of Oliver Goldsmith in front of Trinity College Dublin that came around on one of those annoying Facebook feeds

Okay… what do they have in common? The answer: Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman and philosopher. For the Goldsmith statue, the connection is that a statue of Burke is the other famous memorial at the front gates of TCD. For the others, it’s Burke’s best-known line, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Another way of putting that famous aphorism: “Have some damned balls, good guys.” With me, now?

I start with a point Moore sort of buries in his piece, but which would make a huge difference: “announce that you will force the Republican senators (who until now simply have had to say they ‘intended’ to filibuster in order to kill a bill) to have to actually filibuster! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and read from the phone book 24/7. They won't last a day. And America will see them for who they really are.” I’ve been saying this for a long time: make them do the Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” thing.

Conventional Wisdom and the New York Times story (if there’s a difference), say the reason Harry Reid is parading his signature brand of cowardice with respect to the Bush tax cuts is to “[spare] some politically vulnerable incumbents from casting a potentially difficult vote to let taxes rise for the rich.” The polls show a pretty much divided electorate, with different results apparently (to me, at least) a function of how the question is asked. Thus, a CBS News poll from late August showed that by 20 points (!) Americans believe “the tax cuts should expire for households earning over $250,000 per year.” And while a subsequent poll by CNBC seems to suggest an opposite finding, I’d argue that the difference comes in large part from the phrasing: “increasing taxes on any Americans will slow the economy and kill jobs.” (Note the italics!) Or so it would appear the question was—I pulled that phrasing from the story; the alleged “complete poll results” are, to be polite, incomplete.

By the way, lest you think that the change is better explained by when the respective polls were conducted, there’s another one from Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion, taken essentially contemporaneously with the CNBC poll. It shows a slight preference for continuing the Bush tax cuts for the middle class but not for those in the $250K income bracket. Interestingly, 54% of Republicans don’t think that income level qualifies as “wealthy.” Really. I’m a tenured faculty member at an accredited university; my wife is the Financial Aid Director at a community college. We’d need about a 150% increase in our family income to reach that threshold. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d suggest pretty damned strongly that bringing in a quarter million dollars a year would qualify a family as well off. Certainly, they’d be doing well enough to be able to afford a modest tax increase on income over $250,000 a year.

More importantly, it doesn’t matter. The nation is, at worst, divided. And this after an onslaught of post-Citizens United decision, anonymously-funded, misrepresentations of reality. The Republicans and their minions at Fox News (or is it the other way around?) have consistently mis-defined “small business,” fiddled with statistics, and pretended that they’re interested in the deficit while making sure their fat-cat friends continue to profit from the policies that are largely responsible for creating the size and scope of the deficit to begin with.

Even more to the point: you’re supposed to be Democrats. Stand for something, dammit! Remind people of why they voted you into office to begin with. Give them a reason to re-elect you, not just to prevent that lunatic you’re running against from getting into office. You’re going to be smeared by RepubliCorp anyway, so don’t worry about them. Put together a bill that extends the tax cuts for 98+% of the country. Vote down the inevitable amendment to extend the cut for the terminally-entitled rich.

And make the sons of bitches filibuster the bill! Make them stand on the floor of the Senate and, in full view of the American people, argue against a bill that would prevent a tax increase for the overwhelming majority of us. Or, alternatively, to “read from the phone bill 24/7,” demonstrating such contempt for the middle class they pretend to care about that they’ll do anything to thwart a bill that would help the 98% at the expense of the 2%. Do this before the mid-term elections and run on your attempts to help regular people, contrasted with Republicans’ petulance, arrogance, disrespect for the Senate and the citizenry alike. The chances of this happening, of course, are precisely zero, because the only thing in American political life as certain as Republican mendacity is Democratic cravenness.

We see this phenomenon again in the Obama administration’s unconscionable capitulation on healthcare. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to bargain away anything that looked like real reform (in exchange for what? and with the upside of how many Republican votes?). No, they’ve got to grant waivers to everyone with a lawyer and a lobbyist. Come on, who honestly believes that McDonald’s can’t afford to provide the very fundamental level of health-care dictated by so-called Obamacare? Or that insurance companies can’t make money except by extortion? Give me a damned break. If some company says they’ll pull out of a market, let ‘em, because they are passing up an opportunity to make money.

Indeed, there is something to be said for the claims that President Obama is a socialist. Not for the reasons the professional prevaricators of the right are claiming, of course. But the President doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in the free enterprise system. Even in this economy, companies need to compete for good employees. Cutting insurance coverage isn’t going to help do that. And executives who choose to make no profit instead of some tend not to endear themselves to investors. There are times to regulate markets and times to butt out. This is the latter, especially if the rationale is somehow to avoid criticism. As Mr. Obama has repeatedly pointed out in recent days, the GOP is going to complain, regardless. So do what’s right.

A different kind of cowardice is at play in the “terrorism” nervousness. Of course there’s going to be a terrorist attack somewhere in Europe, sometime in the not-too-distant future. There’s also going to be some crazy with a gun on an American university campus, soon. (A week after the fatal incident at the University of Texas, for example, an “armed and dangerous” murder suspect was spotted on my own campus.) The chances that someone will be driving while drunk, stoned, texting, making calls on a cell phone, or otherwise not paying attention at any given moment in my small town: metaphysical certitude. I’m driving to work tomorrow. I’m also going to London over the holidays. This isn’t reckless behavior. I may be peculiar, but I’m not crazy.

I confess to being somewhat at a loss to explain the State Department’s curious warning. There doesn’t appear to be any specific new information that precipitated the announcement, and the advice is remarkable in its uselessness: “U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling.” Exactly what “appropriate safety measures” might constitute, we’re left to guess. Well, pretty much so, anyway: in a telephone briefing, State Department Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy argues for “common sense precautions” like avoiding unattended parcels, knowing how to use pay telephones, having contact information for the American Embassy, etc. Wow. Has the nanny state really reached the point at which we need a government edict to not be freaking stupid?

More to the point, if “we’re not recommending, that American citizens of any kind–business, tourism, study abroad–we are not–we are not, not, not saying that they should defer travel to Europe at this time, absolutely not,” then what the hell is the point? What is gained from this bizarre release? If this were the Bush administration, I’d be looking for a wag-the-dog moment, and I’m not so naïve that I believe Democratic administrations incapable of such chicanery. But there’s no reason for it: no particularly bad news to try to bury, no scandals to cover up. And, if anything, the Dems have been making inroads into the presumed GOP landslide in next month’s elections.

The best I’ve got as an explanation is pure, unadulterated cowardice. Two terms of Bush/Cheney fear-mongering apparently took their toll. Democrats are running from their own good work, avoiding confrontation instead of standing on principle (with the result that they’re beginning to look like they in fact have no principles). Americans in general are supposed to cower at the prospect of a specter which will almost certainly affect someone, but which is extremely unlikely to directly affect any particular individual. The post-9/11 bumper sticker of the American flag with the cutline “These colors don’t run” is looking increasingly fanciful.