The Problem of Negotiating from Weakness

I get the feeling that most of us have allowed ourselves to get distracted over the last few weeks. The national media has been covering the whole Michael Jackson death carnival and the Sotomayor hearings, but underneath it all our economy is still faltering.

As Paul Krugman noted recently, more action needs to be taken to stimulate the economy. However, I wouldn't place any bets on Congress being able to pass a new stimulus package; the last one only made it through after key aid to states (which would come in handy right now) was stripped away to get the votes of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats. This time around any attempt at stimulus will get filibustered to death.

All of this illustrates the problem of negotiating from weakness, the one truly big mistake that president Obama has made thus far. Instead of sending a vigorous stimulus bill to Congress in January, he watered it down with the kinds of tax cuts that he hoped would win GOP support. The president wanted very badly to reach out across the aisle and come up with a bipartisan measure to start his term in office, but the Republicans picked up on the fact that their outright refusal to go along with a bipartisan solution would actually reflect worse on Mr. Obama. Since he had promised to bring change by going against the Bush administration's tendency to ram through partisan legislation and to allow for compromise, the GOP could both sabotage such a compromise and then turn around and claim that Obama had not fulfilled his promise to change the way business is conducted on Capitol Hill.

Instead of asking nicely, he ought to have come from a position of strength, forcing the Republicans to find ways to compromise so that they could make changes to the stimulus instead of begging them to go along with the weaker bill meant to appeal to them. During the campaign Obama showed two sides: the idealist and the tough Chicago politician. Since he has come into office he has forgotten the latter, much to his detriment.

Of course, his willingness to throw concessions to the Republicans in Congress before they gave any to him may have arisen from an erroneous belief that he was dealing with rational people who understood unless that they were in danger of becoming a regional party of the South and Plains after their thrashing at the polls. Instead they compare the president to Hitler, give tacit and overt support to the fringe Tea Party movement, and have generally refused to play any kind of constructive role in creating legislation responding to our economic crisis. Let's just hope the president learns from his mistake and starts playing hardball.

My One Comment Thus Far on the Sotomayor Hearings

Jeff Sessions.

The same man whose own discriminatory attitudes about race sank his judicial nomination twenty years ago now has the temerity to imply that Sonia Sotomayor's racial and ethnic background will make her unfit for the bench. This, combined with the calling of Frank Ricci, the plaintiff in the New Haven case to the hearings, pretty much lets us know who the real purveyors of "identity politics" are in this country. Funny, I don't remember Samuel Alito's or John Roberts' race being a factor in discussions of their partiality during their hearings...

Some Links

Here are a few items for your edification.

I was going to write something on the Palin phenomenon, but Frank Rich beat me to it. This amazing dissection of her appeal proves once again that he is the most prescient pundit on the scene today. Here's just a taste: "Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind." Couldn't have said it better myself.

Oh yeah, it seems that Dick Cheney was setting up possibly illegal CIA programs and concealing them from Congress. Maybe the "defend our Constitution" wing-nutters ought to be concerned about this instead of whether or not the stimulus violates tenth amendment (it doesn't, by the way.)

The Economist magazine recently did one of its Special Reports on Texas that's worth reading. I have a love/hate relationship with the Economist. I love it for its extensive coverage of global events, but hate it for its tendency to only consider the economy from the commanding heights of corporate leadership. Accordingly, they praise Texas for its low taxes and wages, things that have resulted in its low quality of education, high levels of pollution, high poverty rate, and the fact that it has a higher percentage of people without health insurance than any other state.

From the Even a Stopped Clock is Right Twice a Day Department: David Brooks points out the need for people in public life to comport themselves with dignity. Amen. At least our president is no longer an embarassment when he goes abroad.

Speaking of, here's an article explaining his choice of Ghana for a presidential visit to Africa.

From the world of pop music: Brian Wilson talks about some of his musical inspirations. Wilco's new album doth rock.

Why the Recent Republican Scandals are Bad for All of Us

A lot of my liberal and progressive friends have been expressing Schadenfreude over the recent sex scandals of John Ensign and Mark Sanford, as well as the resignation of Sarah Palin. At first I have to admit that I did too. It's always good to see hypocrites exposed, especially those who want to "defend marriage" by attacking gay people when they themselves wreck their own homes by sleeping around. And it did feel good to chuckle once again at the nimrods out there who claimed last summer that Palin was more qualified to be president than Obama after she gave another rambling, non-sensical, barely literate speech. She didn't even bother to give a tangible reason as to why she was quitting her post before even serving a full term!

Anyway, after having some hearty guffaws over Ensign's mommy and daddy paying hush money to his mistress, Sanford's talk show-style confessions, and Palin's creative abuse of the English language, I realized that these events are potentially very harmful. As I noted awhile back, the Republican leadership has been largely rudderless these last few months, and, with these scandals, it is even more so. Without a strong party leadership, the radio talk show hosts and other radicals have stepped into the breach, making the Right even more extreme, and now unfettered by the niceties of political institutions.

The effects of this lack of rational, institutionalized leadership have been manifest and ugly. As is well known, Republican politicians who dare to criticize Rush Limbaugh are forced to kiss his pale fat ass in apology. Glenn Beck has become a rising star on the Right, all the while predicting (and seeming to approve) of our government being overthrown. Beck's rantings and the "tea party" phenomenon have also attracted some very ugly fringe elements who are now given access to the mainstream. Militia movement types are getting to air their views on Fox News, and white supremacists see the tea parties as fertile recruitment grounds. (This is not to say that everyone who attends one of these events is a racist, but the fact that extreme racists expect to find kindred spirits there is no coincidence.)

Politicians in the GOP are feeling the heat, just witness John Cornyn and Rick Perry getting booed at one of the latest "tea parties." This thunder from the Right has led the Congressional Republicans to take a refusenik stance on everything that they can, filibustering instead offering any viable compromises. At a time when our nation is beset by several pressing problems, the radicals on the Right seem more than happy to cut off their noses to spite their faces. If the president is the moral equivalent of Hitler to them (as Jim DeMint implied the other day), and they are allowed to stop legislation in the Senate even when a majority of that body supports it, nothing will get done. Then the claims on the Right that president Obama is not bringing change will soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is a cynical strategy, and it is being abetted by a lack of serious leadership on the Right. In these crucial times where so much hangs in the balance, that is bad for all of us.

Abuse of History Alert

Yet again we have another flagrant abuse of history concerning everyone's favorite historical villains, the Nazis. This time it's Jim DeMint, who tries to compare Barack Obama to Hitler without using such overt language:

"Part of what we're trying to do in 'Saving Freedom' is just show that where we are, we're about where Germany was before World War II where they became a social democracy. You still had votes but the votes were just power grabs like you see in Iran, and other places in South America, like Chavez is running down in Venezuela. People become more dependent on the government so that they're easy to manipulate. And they keep voting for more government because that's where their security is. When our immigrants get here, they're worried, because they see it happening here."

Hitler came to power in 1933, which makes Germany on the eve of WWII a fascist dictatorship, not a "social democracy." I keep having to say it, but I will say it yet again: the German Social Democratic Party, also known as the "socialists" were Hitler's political enemies, which is the reason that they were put to death and persecuted after the Nazi seizure of power. Calling the Nazis "social democrats" is an abuse of history of the most flagrant and mendacious kind.

Furthermore, Mr. DeMint, I've got a question for you: how are warrantless wiretapping, criminalizing abortion, the war in Iraq, high defense budgets, a ban on gay marriage, the war on drugs, crackdowns on immigration, and the PATRIOT Act "less" government?

Good-bye To All That

(I apologize in advance for a slightly personal post, but I hope I can connect to the larger issues that concern the problems of the Catholic Church without too much navel gazing.)


As most of you loyal readers and friends know, I got married this weekend. What you do not know is that my wedding, held in a beautiful Romanesque church, will most likely be my last daliance with Roman Catholicism. Over the years I have criticized the Church and doubted its fundamental tenents, but it has been such a central component of my identity and life experience that I never thought it possible to break completely from it (hence my self-designation as a "Catholic Agnostic.") I grew up in an intensely Catholic household, I served as an altar boy for five years, I contemplated becoming a priest when I was in my teens, I went to a Catholic university, and the words of Jesus still stir my heart.


However, two recent events have made it possible for me to completely renounce the faith of my fathers, one positive and one negative. About a month ago I visited a friend who has been undergoing horrific personal trauma. He also happens to be a devout Episcopalian, and I attended a Sunday service with him. As a Catholic from lower-middle class origins, I had always thought of Anglicanism as the refuge of uptight elitists, and left the service embarassed by my stereotypes. The minister was welcoming and gave a moving sermon that echoed Jesus' warnings about the incompatibility of Mammon and God. The congregation seemed genuinely engaged with the ritual and liturgy, not merely going through the motions. Afterwards my friend, who himself is a recent convert to Anglicanism, discussed the great moral and spiritual help his minister had given to him after his wife's abrupt divorce. Given the celibacy of its clergy and the prohibition on divorce, I doubt the Catholic Church would have been of great help to him. I guess the whole thing got me thinking that I have let myself become overly attached to a church that is increasingly alien to my outlook on life and which I never really had any choice in being a part of in the first place (I was baptized as an infant and confirmed at the tender and irresponsibly young age of 10.)


My personal breaking point came very recently, when my wife and I decided to get married in the Catholic Church. The priest who married us took the most unloving, haughty, and mean-spirited attitude towards us that he could. This included a long gay-bashing rant during our first meeting with him, which came completely out of the blue. (I was informed that Rome fell because of homosexuality, which was news to me.) His marriage advice consisted of the following: go to confession, take communion, and pray the rosary. During the ceremony he also refused to use my wife's first name, which is different from her legal name. I had been willing to overlook the ridiculousness of a man committed to celibacy dispensing marital advice, but could no longer do so after getting a lecture about the evils of contraception. His homily, in which he extolled old-fashioned separate spheres bullcrap about the wife being the "heart" and the husband the "head" only made my animosity more intense.

I certainly understand that not all priests are like this, but over the years I have known plenty of narrow minded, by the book, "do as you're told priests" who make up in rigidity and sanctimony what they lack in compassion, empathy, and understanding. They remind me of nothing more than the spiritually dead yet religiously zealous Pharisees denounced by Jesus. In a church that is increasingly out of step with the world, new members of the priesthood are becoming more and more ideologically zealous and less compassionate with each passing year. There really isn't room for anyone else anymore.

What I experienced recently is indicitive of a larger culture of reactionary authoritarianism that is arrogant in the extreme. Currently the Catholic hierarchy is doing what it has done ever since the Reformation when confronted with social change: it has taken on a bunker mentality and tried to pretend that it can stop the inexorable march of time. During the 19th century, in response to the wave of democratic yearnings in Europe and a rapidly modernizing industrial world, Pius IX claimed that democracy was not consistent with Catholicism, and codified the misbegotten doctrine of papal infallibility in the first Vatican Conference. In his infamous "Syllabus of Errors," Pius IX condemned the following statement: "The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization."

The present situation carries echoes of the past. The reign of Ratzinger has brought more rigidity and less tolerance, just recently the church has decided to force long suffering American nuns back into traditional convent life. At the same time that many American Catholic bishops denounced a visit by Barack Obama to Notre Dame University, the pope reinstated priests belonging to extremist conservative splinter groups, including one who is a Holocaust denier. At a time when the church is excluding Catholics with a more liberal bent, it has turned around and embraced preachers of hate and those who would like nothing more than to tear down the advances of Vatican II. In America church officials rail day and night about the dignity of fetuses, but spend relatively little of their moral capital on the plight of children once they are born into a society where they are likely to be poor, neglected, and without health insurance.

I once naively thought that the church could actually change, that we might somehow see a another pope like John XXIII who wanted to "throw open the windows" with Vatican II, but not anymore. Others still think they can reconcile their Catholicism and political and moral beliefs that contradict official church teachings, a position eloquently argued in a recent New York Times blog entitled "Born in Again in Brooklyn." More power to those who want to fight the good fight within the Roman Catholic Church, but it's sure to be a lost cause that even St. Jude cannot save.

Like all long-term relationships that must come to an end, my break-up with Catholicism is extremely painful. I have a great deal of regard for the men and women of the cloth who use their calling to serve the neediest and more downtrodden of the world. I love the liturgy of the mass and its rhythms. As my recent experience in the Basilica of Notre Dame in Montreal demonstrated, the interiors of Gothic churches and the whiff of incense touch deep emotional reservoirs in my soul. But like lots broken relationships, the Church and I have simply grown apart, and I've finally come to grips with the fact that though I have been born into Catholicism, I need not be afraid of leaving it. There are real reasons why "former Catholic" is becoming one of the largest denominations in America, at 10% of the population. I'm gladly joining that tenth, and hoping to find a spiritual home that better represents my beliefs.

I'm Back

The two week period of my wedding and honeymoon appear to have been the time for all Hell to break loose in public life. There's so much to address, and not enough time to do it: Michael Jackson, the death of Robert McNamara, the coup in Honduras, violence in China, Mark Sanford's fiasco, new arms agreements with Russia, Bernie Madoff going to jail, the Supreme Court decision about the New Haven firefighters, another round of teabag protests, and the resignation of Sarah Palin. I'll probably write about some of these topics soon anyway. In case you're interested in some web surfing, here are some links on a few of the aforementioned topics that I enjoyed and/or found informative:

This much-cited Vanity Fair piece about Sarah Palin and the 2008 campaign makes for some disturbingly comic reading.

This Michael Jackson song was played at my wedding, and really got people out on the floor.

Courtesy of Chauncey DeVega, Slate has a good series on the background to the New Haven case that isn't getting play in the national media.

Frank Rich uses the Madoff sentencing to once again put the spotlight on the bankers who swindled the public and brought on financial ruin, but got big bonuses instead of jail time.