View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

The President’s Address to Public School Children

The New York Times had an excellent editorial on Friday about the ridiculous effort of a small but vocal minority of Americans to paint the President’s address to children as some sort of socialist propaganda effort.  It is truly sad that these right-wing nuts cannot trust a duly elected president and highly educated individual to deliver what I imagine will be a sincere and thoughtful message about doing well in school and doing good in America.

The response of the American right-wing nutcases does, however, underline one thing for me: Clearly our education system has broken down somewhere because these crazy people on the right appear to be as educated as the first graders they believe will be so harmed by the President’s speech.

Read the editorial here.

Town Hall Nonsense

This post will be short because this topic hardly deserves more than a few paragraphs.

Insuring healthcare for everyone is complicated. Extremely complicated. I don’t even understand the intricacies of some of the legitimate arguments about healthcare reform, but I do know that having more people insured is better than having 40 million Americans without healthcare.

There are citizens out there who have legitimate concerns. Everyone wants to know what the current proposals will mean for them. Everyone has a question to ask, because everyone will be affected. Everyone wants to know that the proposal that is eventually adopted helps the most people in the most effective way possible. Lawmakers have gone out among their constituents to answer their questions.

Instead of the real, honest debate that should be taking place, we have organized disruptions orchestrated by people who are acting contrary to the American ideal of fierce but respectful debate. These hijackers of public forums are drowning out the voices of the millions of Americans who are wondering what will happen to them.

There is a small, but very vocal minority who claim they are out to stop healthcare reform. That is, superficially, their goal. But in reality, they are out to destroy intelligent discourse. Their mission is to show that the person who shouts the loudest is the most effective, and that is extraordinarily dangerous.

So you can agree or disagree about healthcare reform, but speak your opinions respectfully. The shouters and the screamers are in pursuit of stupidity, so the rest of America needs to show them that real debate will continue unabated.

No Compromises

Someone told me once that a compromise results in agreement that no one is happy with. I don’t think that’s always true, but it’s becoming increasingly true with legislation. The problem with legislation is that the not-happy parties aren’t just the two people who broker the agreements; it’s everyone impacted by the legislation.

Let’s take, for example, the stimulus package. At $800 billion dollars, it is far, far, far, far above what the fiscal conservatives in Congress and elsewhere want. It is positively apocalyptic for conservative economists (or at least those who write on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal). At $800 billion, it is also significantly under the over-$1 trillion that the President and more liberal economists had been hoping for.

So each side is convinced that their way is the best, so when the bill is actually written, neither side is happy. Perhaps the liberal economists and politicians are correct; perhaps the conservatives are. But what certainly does not work is creating a bill that is entirely inconsistent with any existing ideology. What we got was a bill that was packed with compromises. The President compromised on the bill’s total, and its content. In order to compromise with the Blue Dogs and Republicans, all sorts of additions of dubious stimulative effect were added. Instead of a bill run by a sound economic ideology, every representative wanted a piece of the pie.

Unfortunately, health care seems to be going down a similar path. The President wants universal health care, and a growing chorus of respected medical voices are saying that this plan is not viable. Why? This bill compromises what the President wanted to make it more appealing to conservatives. And now we have a bill that everyone hates.

The President needs to stop compromising. He needs to abandon partisanship, and abandon bi-partisanship. I’m looking for the White House to be very involved in writing bills the way they should be. Bills need to be written with some sort of higher theory or logic at work. Politicians haven’t been doing a good job of this lately. So the President should write the bill the way he thinks it should be, and get approval from the best and the brightest. Then the President should make his case to America, and do his best to get the best bill passed. Doing your best to get a mediocre bill past just isn’t worth the effort.

Marriage

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goxxy/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

David Boies wrote a remarkably well-reasoned op-ed about gay marriage published in The Wall Street Journal on Monday. His legal insight makes it painfully obvious that keeping gay marriage illegal is ideologically inconsistent, alarming idiotic, and demonstrates a harmful attachment to a sadly defective belief. Read his editorial for the specifics, but he makes a reasonable argument from a legal perspective. Boies wrote about interpreting gay marriage to be legal under our current laws, but I think this should be more about changing laws than changing interpretation. We need an ideological and a legislative shift, and the sooner the better.

I don’t think we should change the definition of marriage. I think we might even be able to save ourselves the struggle of deciding what the current definition of marriage actually means. We should instead eliminate marriage all together.

What is marriage but the joining of assets? After the legal side is done, people add to the concept of marriage whatever special significance they want to. I see no reason why the joining of assets, agreement to joint custody in the case of children, and all the fun tax requirements cannot be independent of “marriage” in the emotional, spiritual, or religious sense.

Marriage is not something that should be dictated by the government. Who you love and how you love them should not be subjected to debate. Let’s make the legal side open to everyone, and keep any special significance people want to attach to it separate. “Marriage” should disappear from law, and be replaced with some terminology like “domestic partnership,” or one of the terms previously used for the almost-marriages that homosexuals are allowed. These are essentially what I just described — marriages in the legal sense, but not automatically carrying the history and struggle around the term “marriage.”

If for no other reason than it’s easier, marriage should be left to individuals. Treating gays differently than anyone is just plain wrong, but treating them differently in the eyes of the law is just plain alarming. This way we can allow people to unite themselves legally, and the religious nuts can preserve the “sanctity of marriage” in their own churches.

Terrorism

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drocpsu/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

As yet another report surfaced of former Vice President Cheney’s complicity in legally questionable, morally deplorable, and blatantly dishonest conduct to “fight terrorism,” I was struck by a few things. Terrorism, despite immediate appearances, almost always fails in the end. The only possible way for terrorism to succeed is with help — help from unwitting accomplices like Vice President Cheney.

It is first helpful to understand the purpose of terrorism. In the case of Islamic extremists, they seem to take issue with our acceptance of more than one belief system. For them, it is painful that an Islamic world could relatively peacefully coexist with Jewish, Christian, and atheist ones. I don’t think they would be too happy about our freedom of speech, nor our republican government. That is exactly why terrorism is not about killing people. It is my understanding that killing people is a desirable byproduct for terrorists because terrorists know that it’s not possible to kill every person with conflicting values. It is much easier to kill the values.

The best example of this is 9/11. In the post 9/11 frenzy and fear, incredibly intelligent individuals were driven to do irrational things, like warrantless domestic surveillance. By creating fear, terrorism accomplishes one half of its purpose — to cause terror. The second half of its purpose is for the extraordinary terror to cause our value system to collapse. It’s at this point that it’s possible to stop terrorism, by not playing the same game. It is possible to protect against a terrorist threat without compromising principles like privacy, abandoning agreements like the Geneva Convention, or violating rights like habeas corpus.

No one willingly aids a terrorist, but they certainly can do so accidentally. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Deputy Attorney General John Yoo, and many other members of the Bush administration were the greatest accomplices to modern terrorism, but the damage they did was in their idiotic and poorly considered zealousness to defend the United States from terrorists. They managed to convince themselves that the world was split into good people and terrorists, so warantless domestic spying, torture, and indefinite detention — all very illegal — were justifiable. So much for privacy, the Geneva Convention, and habeas corpus. If the goal of terrorism is to end our values, and in order to stop terrorism we erode our values, then we have betrayed ourselves.

This all hinges on the ability to fight terrorism without resorting to the extreme methods preferred by the Bush Administration. It would not be unreasonable to rationalized the Bush Administration’s methods by arguing that while the methods are undesirable, it is worth it in the context of loss of life. Unfortunately, the efficacy of the Bush Administration’s policies is uncertain at best, and criminally unjustifiable at the worst. The CIA’s inspector general reported that warrantless wiretapping yielded “limited results.” Torture is also of questionable usefulness, and indefinite detention is just stupid because if there is no reason to hold people that wouldn’t stand up before a judge, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a justification to hold them.

The key to fighting terrorism is exercising all possible measures within existing laws, and creating reasonable new laws to fight new threats. If domestic wiretapping is necessary, then it should be done with warrants and with congressional oversight. If interrogations need to be done, then they should be done legally and without coercion. Secrecy will inevitably be necessary in some circumstances, but never from our own Congress. There is a judicial system for warrants, and there is a Congress for oversight. Any law that ignores those two things for any reason has gone too far astray.

New crimes call for new laws, not new legal systems. We need to adhere to the values upon which our country was founded, or we have truly let the terrorists win. Fear causes a knee-jerk reaction, but that reaction isn’t necessarily a prudent one. The Bush Administration set us on an imprudent course — one that completely ignores two hundred years of Constitutional law and American values. I would much rather be confident that the American people are safe today because of measures conducted in accordance with American principles than through questionable methods that play into terrorist plans. We are now over nine years on from 9/11; it’s time to move from fear-based policies to thought-based ones.