Putting the Worst Face on It

Or, I promise to write about something else next time.

As I have made clear recently, of the major candidates for President of the United States beginning in 2012 - which I currently estimate as current president Obama, and challengers Romney, Paul, and Santorum - I am most sympathetic to Santorum, with Paul running a close second and Romney a distant third.  Practically this matters very little at the moment as I am not registered with any party affiliation at all, but there it is.

The reasons for my attraction to Paul and dislike for Obama should be clear to anyone reading this blog; I will not go into them in detail here.  Romney I distrust as a consummate politico, though I have little objection to his current "face".  Why Santorum?  There are three main reasons.

In the first place, I agree in large part with Santorum's presuppositions and, unsurprisingly, also most of his political conclusions.

In the second, he is of all the candidates - and this includes Paul - the one most open about what he believes and has done.  Even if I disagreed with him substantially, I could respect him for that, as I hold Biden or Nader in relatively higher regard than our current actual President, given what I know of them.  Santorum is the only candidate about whom I can confidently say that the reasons for voting for him are the same reasons as those for voting against him.

And in the last place, Santorum is the candidate most maligned and misrepresented both in the mainstream press and by my recent favorite whipping boys, the internet liberals.  After my last post, I wanted to let the subject drop, but then the ugly side of uncivil discourse raised its head again.

I have The Daily What in my feed for a number of reasons - tech stuff, nerd news, cool videos of Messi, random trivia - but when it comes to political discourse they exemplify the failures of the collective liberal internet.  Here is the post in question.

Let's look through what this supposedly informative post does to Santorum.  It takes little analysis to conclude that the entire post is made from a viewpoint of supporting Obama.

First, the graphic presents a good picture of Obama and a bad one of Santorum.  (Thus my headline.)  We like to think superficialities like that don't matter, but we know they really do make a difference.

Second, Santorum's positions are given either the worst possible spin, or misrepresented entirely.  Look:

• "Rape victims should make the best of it," is what is quoted.  This is part and parcel of the steadfast refusal to admit the humanity of unborn children, on which point myself and others have said so much as to make further commentary here fruitless.  But not even a tiny effort is made to understand Santorum - the poster is only interesting in discrediting him to like-minded people.
• "Free prenatal testing leads to more abortions," is, I am forced to assume by the tone of the post, held up for ridicule.  Yet we live in an age where "sex-selective abortion" is the new big PC worry, and where mothers are encouraged to abort "defective" or handicapped children.  How exactly is Santorum wrong on this one?
• "Contrary to the Constitution, the separation of church and state should not be absolute," - oh wait, I just wrote about that.

To review, a la fact checkers: the three positions mentioned are, for the first, presented with bias; for the second, Santorum's position is factually correct; and for the third, he is being provably misrepresented.

Now it is important in civil discourse to be as accurate as possible and - perhaps more importantly - to assume the best when possible.  Thus I largely keep silent on the record of Obama's administration.  But I am losing patience, and feel called on to demonstrate what could be done.  If I wanted to apply an "internet conservative" approach to the President, I would discuss in detail at least the following two things, which - unlike the attacks on Santorum - are beyond disproof.

• The administration itself, if not Obama himself, is fundamentally dishonest.  The Obamacare package was rushed and bullied through Congress and we still don't know the half of it; bad enough, but that is politics.  Worse, the package was reputedly passed on the back of an executive promise to issue an order mandating protection for those not wanting to be forced to pay for abortions: even if not, the Constitution and all of American law is rife with such protections.  Obama still has not, to my knowledge, given such an order, and in fact - well, you've maybe heard of the HHS mandate which is both diametrically opposed to the alleged promise and in clear defiance of American traditions.  His so-called compromise is anything but.
• The administration has made investments - in, most notably, Solyndra - driven by ideology, cronyism, or sheer bad judgment.  Meanwhile, such economic progress as has been made has been made in the interval while the freshly reinvigorated Republicans in Congress have tied the administration's hands to prevent any of the neo-socialist bailouts that didn't help the mess in the first place (thanks Bush - or Keynes?  FDR?).  And the lesson goes unlearned by either Democrat bigwigs or the administration itself, while the Republican candidates, noticing facts and listening to constituents, are all doubling down with promises to continue the approach and in fact go farther.

You may justly say that I am clearly biased myself.  Very good - I admit it.  I admit it blatantly and without shame.  In case you have not figured this out yet: in the modern American political continuum I count myself - however inaccurate the name is objectively - as a conservative.  What you cannot demonstrate - and I will publicly correct myself, on this blog or wherever else you may comment, if you can demonstrate it - is that anything I have said here is factually incorrect.  If I have accused someone incorrectly, I will not only correct myself but apologize.

Bring it.

The Mud-Slinging Will Bring Down Perry in 3... 2... 1...

If you haven't seen this ad yet, watch it now so you have some idea what I'm talking about:

If you don't feel like watching the 30 seconds, here's the beef: Perry says, in almost precisely as many words, that something is wrong in America when homosexuals can serve in the US military openly, but Christian children can't openly celebrate Christmas in schools.  Let's get the obvious out of the way first: in the current media climate, this was an absolutely suicidal ad to run: even if it somehow won the governor the primary election, after that MSNBC or somesuch would just loop this 24/7 and Obama wouldn't even have to campaign.

So on to the more pertinent question: what exactly is wrong with what he said?  Imagine if he had instead said any of the following were heinous:

"...that Christians can serve openly in the military, but gay teens have to worry about bullying in schools."  Media darling.

"...that gays can serve openly in the military, but Muslims have to worry about discrimination."  Again, mad media props would be forthcoming.

"I'm gay, but I think it's absurd that we have convinced the military to let us serve openly while Christian kids have to worry about not being allowed to pray."  The mainstream media – I guess – would be dumbfounded.  Sort of like they ignore the Log Cabin and other homosexual (or women's) conservative groups.  (Note: I am not suggesting that Perry is a homosexual, if for no other reason than I try not to offend people.  This is a purely hypothetical scenario.  Why do I feel like this CYA disclaimer is necessary?)

And on the facts of what Perry said, it's really not that outrageous.  Recently courts (and the threat of the courts) have been limiting, or trying to limit, not just "official" school prayers, but prayers by anyone associated with a school – even student groups.

As for what he said about the importance of faith (especially Christian faith), we may have "moved past it" in much of the public mind but he's following a long American tradition, going back to Lincoln... the Founders... the colonists... the point is, are we now going to discriminate against a man on the basis of finding his religious faith uncomfortably real?  What's the real difference between that and discrimination against someone because we find ourselves uncomfortable around a flaming gay?

Right... religion.  Christianity is one; being gay isn't.  Which brings me to a constitutional point.  The relevant text would obviously be the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I can see several possible interpretations of this:

Historically speaking, it recognized that religion (meaning as such the various Christian sects, though the extension to other religions follows logically) is a unique category of behavior, and speech; and that given religions exist, we treat the nature of the subject with respect, but studiously avoid all legal favoring of any one religion.  (Incidentally, this renders the National Cathedral an extremely curious artifact, let alone trying to figure out which clergyperson should be allowed to officiate there.  Why do we have the thing, anyway?  Not that it's not impressive.)

A more modern interpretation suggests that religion is to be removed from the "public sphere" entirely.  Driving this are various ideas, from explicitly anti-religious sociology to a reasonable reticence in offending others to a growing casual unbelief.

However, on strict textual grounds, it would seem (and this is the third option, which is both straightforward and tolerant) that while religion is explicitly barred from receiving favored treatment, all speech is still protected – and this includes religious speech.  Which brings me back to the point I think Perry was trying to make.  We preach tolerance, especially for historically persecuted groups... but still prove intolerant of other groups.  The fact that they've been historically favored (in this country) doesn't excuse this behavior.

A secular country – assuming that's what the USA is, and we can make a plausible argument this is true at least in modernity – has to, almost by definition, regard religious speech as just another kind of speech.  To do otherwise is to either legitimize the supernatural in public affairs, or to declare itself not secular (which is to say, sticking to common things) but expressly anti-religious.

Anti-religious?  Not a reasonable option.  I would feel extremely confident in arguing that in the state of Alabama – to pick on the "Bible Belt" – far more death threats are issued each year over the Iron Bowl than over matters of faith or any discrimination "ism".  Obviously we need to ban football from schools.  Or maybe just 'Bama fans, I'm not sure.  After all, we're kicking Christian prayers out while championing idiots suing Catholic universities for not being Muslim...

Thought Experiment: Country Singers and Politics

So ESPN dumped Hank Williams Jr. from his Monday Night Football intro music video spot thing because the singer said that President Obama inviting Rep. Boehner golfing was like Hitler going out with Israeli president Netanyahu.

It was a dumb thing to say.  At the very least it was a farcical exaggeration (which also happened to break Godwin's Law in style).  At worst it was indefensible disrespect to the sitting President.  I lean towards the latter, although I think there was no disrespect intended toward the office, which means I'm not comfortable with just hammering the guy, no matter how much I can't think of a time it would be appropriate to say.

Of course it created a small furor on the mainstream news and on the interwebs.

So I want to take a step back and pose a question.

Suppose some liberal (or African-American, or both) highly public entertainment figure, say somebody on Glee, had said something like:

"It's ridiculous, Obama inviting Boehner to go out for a round of golf is like Sarkozy inviting Hitler to hit the links."

That's almost equally indefensible, and only less so in that Boehner's a Congressman, not our head of state.  Still, you don't compare people to Hitler unless they're actually people like Hitler - looking at you, Joe.  Stalin, that is, not Biden.  In case that wasn't clear.

Would the reaction have been the same?  I'd like to think so, but I'm not comfortable actually predicting it – mainly because we have way too many loonies running around saying almost equally dumb things about the last president without a mass reaction calling them to account.