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Profoundly Disturbing Trend
Mr. Ashcroft warned against "excessive judicial encroachment on functions assigned to the president" in his first major address since his resignation was announced Tuesday.
Mr. Ashcroft told the conservative Federalist Society during a Washington meeting that a "profoundly disturbing trend" among some federal court judges interfered with the president’s obligations under international treaties and agreements.
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Mr. Ashcroft .. said that "intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations" put the nation’s national security at risk at a time of war, adding that "risks of invasive oversight and micromanagement" had become "all too familiar."
Ashcroft rips federal judges on national security
Yes Mr. Ashcroft, there is a trend some do find profoundly disturbing. This speech was just another small step, preparing the grounds for other small steps to come. As you say, a profoundly disturbing trend.
To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted.’
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Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.
From They Thought They Were Free : The Germans, 1933-45 cited at ThirdReich.net
@jj I tried to get to that voting page for wikipedia and it crashed my browser. will try again with a different browser when I have time.
Meanwhile, I want to juxtapose two very different sources. Here’s Barbara Ehrenreich, thoughtful as usual:
Where secular-type liberals and centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a form of “irrationality,” akin to spirituality, sports mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the current “Christianization” of red-state America bears no resemblance to the Great Revival of the early 19th century, an ecstatic movement that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today’s right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on “faith” but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients.
Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you’ll find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Sen. James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the “Career Ministry”; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in D.C. and operates a “special needs” ministry for disabled children.
MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services – childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America’s bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state.
and here, amid a frothing rant (which I have to confess I didn’t much care for, personally) is a flash of insight which I’ve had vague feelings about but never articulated to myself or others:
. . . their hatred of California is a hatred of what America has become, a hatred of American culture and power, since modern American culture and technology are produced in California. Their hatred of Hollywood is the same hatred of Hollywood you find in any resentful Third World country. Middle Americans hate California and the Northeast because those are America; the South and Midwest, on the other hand, are merely a kind of Third World within America, a large free-trade zone full of gullible consumers and cheap land and labor, and they know it.
The insight here is that the US has, in common with several other industrialised countries, replicated the imperial model within its borders as well as outside, pillaging and stripmining designated areas in order to transfer wealth to other privileged areas. In doing so it creates “third worlds” within its own borders, with many of the same political patterns seen in external nations subjected to the same stresses. I think Ames is right that the jihadist-xtian tendencies in the marginalised, exploited areas of the South and Midwest are identical emotionally, structurally, to the jihadist-islamist rage that fuels fundie hatefulness of the Taliban flavour. They’re not merely metaphors for each other, they’re actually the same thing. And this may explain why Ames’ rant, perhaps intentionally and satirically or perhaps unconsciously, mirrors in its contempt and spite towards the Red State voters, the contempt and spite of the wealthy elites for the Third World countries and peoples they gut in order to extract maximum profit. I’ll give Ames the bennie of the doubt and suggest that he may be mindfully, viciously parodying the hatespeak of the “nuke the ragheads” brigade. But the parody is all too realistic/believable — combine this with the FtS rant and other recent fulminations of frustration and rage and you have an attitude not unlike that of the British to the Zulus, etc.
Wild thoughts wander across the marquee of the brain… the “Third World” is not a place… it’s a condition… deprivation breeds barbarism and extremism and these two qualities will always prevail (in the short term) over “civilised” beahviour… well anyway I’m tired, maybe this is a big Ho Hum to y’all but it seemed interesting to me, nothing formal, just scraps.
Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 16 2004 18:04 utc | 24
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