Torture, Hypocrisy and Other Republican Family Values


Recently, when Michael Mukasey stood up before the Senate at his confirmation hearings, the man who would be the next Attorney General of the United States said he didn't know if waterboarding was torture or not. Maybe the Senators didn't ask the question the right way, though. Maybe they should have asked, "Was waterboarding torture when Japanese soldiers did it to American soldiers in World War 2? And if it wasn't torture, should we apologize to the Japanese for convicting their soldiers of war crimes?" Or perhaps, to clear up his confusion, they could have put it this way: "Was waterboarding torture when the Spanish Inquisition did it to get heretics to confess?" Maybe a former judge who wanted to be the next leader of the Department of Justice could answer that question.

Meanwhile, the media wants to tell you about a horse race. To make the race more exciting, once again this year they moved the starting gate further back, and they're charging more for admission. Rudy Giuliani, now listed as a possible front runner, recently found his old right hand man, Bernie Kerik, indicted in New York for conspiracy, mail fraud and other fun stuff, with hints of mob ties. Could it be that America's mayor appointed a man as his police commissioner who was mobbed up? Back when Rudy put Kerik up to Bush as the guy to head Homeland Security, a New York newspaper mentioned that Bernie had a closet full of skeletons. Now it seems that someone has cracked the closet door, and every other week or so, when a flashlight shines into it, we get another allegation of some kind of corruption. At the very least, it makes Rudy look like a very poor judge of character.

Speaking of Rudy, I expect a high number of returns after Christmas for the Giuliani parrot doll. It might look cute on the store shelf, but at home people will quickly find it annoying that the doll only says one word (and I know you know what that word is).

Now maybe you remember all those editorials back in '99 that called for Clinton's to step down? Surely you do. You must have read at least one. I did, and I understand that there were literally hundreds of them, all across the country. Oddly enough, even though we now know that Rudy had an affair on his wife at the same time as Clinton, and Rudy even charged the expenses of his affair to the NYC taxpayers, I've yet to discover a single editorial suggesting that Rudy should back off the Republican nomination because of his loose moral standards. Does that mean that what might be called Moral Relativism in a Democratic candidate is simply standard behavior in a Republican one? Judging by the sheer volume and the strange quality of Republican sex scandals coming to light lately, maybe so.

And doesn't the Lewinski scandal seem really tame now? No underage pages, no gay hookers, no $300/hour straight hookers, no public bathrooms, no cross-dressing, no gang rapes, no meetings at adult video stores with strangers at 1 a.m., no meth, no wet suits, no rubber underwear, no face masks. Leave it to Republicans to define what a sex scandal can really be! Maybe they impeached Clinton because they thought his affair was too boring! From what I can tell, Bill didn't even have any local lawmen driving Monica around!

So what do you tell your children? Personally, I'd tell them not to set their moral compass by the actions of a politician. What I ask of a politician is that he/she do the job well. Unfortunately, we still have the master of low expectations at the helm, setting the tone. But Rudy's affair doesn't register any higher on my meter than Clinton's did, except for the Republican hypocrisy factor. What does register is the way Mayor Rudy tried to force a city-owned TV station to take on Fox News, a clearly partisan company run by his former campaign manager Roger Ailes, at the point where Rog needed to get that hot air balloon off the ground. A federal judge called this "special advocacy" to "reward a friend and further a political viewpoint." After losing in court, Rudy leaned heavily on Time-Warner to hoist Fox onto the air waves at a time when TW didn't want it. That's not what I call "doing the job well."

But trying to do the job well, or at least better, a white supremacist church in Alabama has decided to stop using swastikas, red arm bands and other Nazi symbols because they think these things turn off people who might otherwise be open to their message. The United Church of JHWH apparently wants to move a bit more toward the mainstream, but while they might drop the Nazi symbols, they still stick to their message, which includes describing Jews as "enemies of Christ." Have these people noticed that in their anti-semitic zeal, they tagged the name of their group with a Hebrew word? The JHWH in their name refers to the Hebrew word for God -- Jahweh. And Hebrew is the native tongue of what group of people?

The United Church of JHWH clearly states their belief that Christians, and not Jews, are God's chosen people. While you can argue lots of stuff from the Bible, I would have figured the Jews had that God's chosen people slot nailed down, with verse after verse after verse stated plainly, with no ifs, ands, buts or percentages. But if you can use a book that says "Thou shalt not kill" as the very reason to kill, then I guess you can use it to also say "Down is up."

Wouldn't you love to know, if one possibly could, how many of these anti-semites have some Jewish ancestors they don't know about? From the early days of the colonies on, non-religious Jews and gentiles mixed and married freely, and many non-religious Jews left their former identities in the New World and took new Christian names. Of course, with that ultimate anti-semite, Adolf, it's pretty much impossible now to determine if his grandparents the Shickelgrubers were actually Jewish or not, since the German chancellor had his home town destroyed in 1938 to make room for an expanding military base. But no matter the details, the root of hatred remains the same -- what people really hate is themselves, and they paint someone else's face on their own reflection.

And over at the horse race? While Democrats talk about health care, education, alternative energy, poverty, the shrinking middle class and such, the Republicans (other than Ron Paul, of course) seem mainly to want to talk about religion, with a dash of torture and a side of how cool war is. They avoid at all costs the mention of the Republican President Bush. You remember him, right? Back in 2000, the media told us Bush was the guy you'd most enjoy having a beer with, and therefore he should be President. They forgot to mention that he'd make you pay for the beer, but with those qualifications, no one should be surprised that as President he screwed up everything. Now once again the media wants to ignore the issues that might actually concern someone voting for President, and make the horse race a question of character. And what a cast of characters the Republicans have dredged up this time around! Scratch the surface of the basic character flaws most of them hint at, such as racism and homophobia, and you quickly get to that core Republican family value -- hypocrisy. If it was something to be proud of, they could make it the central plank of their platform -- most of them seem to have plenty of experience with it. And personally, I don't care if they're buying the drinks this time around -- I wouldn't want to share a beer with any of them.

12/28/07