Shooting

While everyone appears to have an opinion on what drove Jared Loughner to want to kill Congresswoman Gifford, we just don't know at this point what his motivations were.

Having said that, it does not seem surprising that the rhetoric of the last two years would lead to an incident like this. There has been a lot of focus on Palin's "Reload" statement and the maps with crosshairs on them, but to me the dangerous part has been much broader.

For the last two years especially, but really for a lot longer, politicians and pundits on the right have said outright and repeatedly that liberal politics was "destroying America". They have portrayed their "mission" as saving America in a battle for its very existence.

Tea party people shout "I want my country back" and invoke Goldwater's "extremism in defence of liberty is no vice" quote, Glenn Beck makes up conspiracies involving the President, George Soros, Chevron, and any number of other "liberal" groups, Birthers deny Obama's nationality in spite of undeniable evidence to the contrary (in fact the better the evidence, the more it proves how pervasive the conspiracy is), Jonah Goldberg says that all liberals are really just fascists, etc, etc.

When one side demonizes its opponents in this manner, it is hardly surprising that someone, mentally ill or not, would believe that conservative v. liberal represents a battle for the nation.

Mosque

Since everyone else has an opinion on a planning issue in lower Manhattan, I'll offer mine too.

Scattered among the chorus of virulent bigotry, I hear a smattering of presumably well-meaning people saying that, while they acknowledge without exception the right of this group to build their mosque in the planned location, maybe these muslims should be a bit more sensitive and consider moving a few blocks over. It wouldn't really hurt them to do that, would it?

The answer is yes, it would hurt them to move, and not just financially (which it surely would), but also on a much deeper level.

Religious freedom is about more than simply the right to BE christian or buddhist or muslim. It's a recognition that all religious beliefs are on an equal footing, that all people of faith (or those with no faith) will have their beliefs respected, and that intolerance from the community is just as bad as official constraints, and just as unwelcome.

Asking this mosque to move, whether from sensitivity or any other reason, necessarily puts Islam on a lower level than Christianity. It's asking them to hang their heads in shame, and acknowledge that their right to free religious expression is conditioned upon the terms set by a Christian majority and what that majority chooses to allow. This is not religious freedom.

As for sensitivity, how about not blithly and ignorantly grouping all muslims together as though they constituted one, homogeneous bloc. If we're doing that, then all christians must answer for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan and can be judged along with them.

Control of Congress

Conservatives frequently blame the poor state of the economy on the Democrats. In particular, they will say that the Dems have control of both houses of Congress and the White House and that therefore "the buck stops there".

The problem with this statement (notwithstanding the fact that Obama inherited a huge deficit and high unemployment) is that it is not true. Control suggests the ability to take action, to do something. It's true that the Democratic party has control of the House and the White House, but it does not have control of the Senate. Since the GOP has decided that it's best policy is an obstructionist one, and since the Democrats do not have a super-majority in the Senate, no-one has control of that body. It is similar to what is known as a hung-parliament in the UK; one party may have more seats than another, but without enough to pass legislation that majority is meaningless.

It may seem weak blaming the GOP while the Democrats are in power, but when it was because of the Republicans that health-care reform took an entire year and eclipsed almost everything else; when it was because of the Republicans that the last jobs bill was $15bn instead of the $80bn it should have been; when it was because of the Republicans that unemployment insurance lapsed for millions recently; it's hard to see why they are not largely to blame.

Birthers

Although the birthers have somewhat quietened down in recent months I had a couple of thoughts about them the other day.

The easy criticism is to just label them racist, but for most of these people I don't think it's as simple as plain old prejudice (although for some it probably is that simple).

It seems to be part of a broader conservative trend of labling liberalism as somehow un-American. We saw this with the characterization of opposition to the Iraq war as "unpatriotic"; we saw it in the 2008 campaign with McCain's people talking about the "real" Virginia (code for rural and Western); and we see it when tea-baggers say that they "want their country back". This last position resonates particularly strongly with conservatives if they believe that the president is actually a foreigner posing as an American. Just as it was believed that Catholics received secret orders from Rome and communists from Moscow, a malevolent, foreign influence proves that liberal values are not American values.

To me, this helps explain the sudden fealty to the "natural-born-citizen" provision of the constitution. People who probably never even knew of its existence until recently are suddenly acting as though it mattered more than anything.

Government Interference?

So two independent panels of Doctors concluded that women might consider having mammograms and Pap smears less frequently.

Am I the only one who sees the unfortunate irony with Republicans condemming these proposals. These are, after all, the same politicians who claim that they want to protect the doctor-patient relationship. Maybe they should take some of their own advice and stop using valid medical advice as a political tool.

Show Some Backbone

Many conservatives are decent people with an honestly-held set of values which differs significantly from my own. This is fine. Many others, however, display a spinelessness that boggles the mind.


A case in point is the recent trend of those on the right trying to project themselves as populist agitators against the "elitist Democrats", by claiming that the Dems are all in bed with Wall St. corporate interests and do not care about regular people on "Main St." The evidence presented to support this distortion of fact is, of course, the Wall St. bailouts.


Let's be clear. The policies which favor Wall St. bankers (deregulation, low corporate income and capital gains taxes, lowering of trade barriers, etc) are CONSERVATIVE POLICIES! The foremost political advocates of these types of policies are REPUBLICANS! The application of these policies by the Bush Administration led to the current recession. Those conservative fiscal policies also led to the increasing income inequality that was witnessed during the Bush Administration, largely as a result of the rich-orientated tax cuts.


I can accept conservatives who genuinely believe that these policies are somehow "right", or at least, "best". What I have a harder time accepting, are the former advocates of those policies, denying ownership of their obvious consequences. If you believe in deregulation and low taxes then stand by that belief. But don't advocate policies which primarily benefit the wealthy and then accuse your opponants of being elitist when things go tits up.

Comparative Healthcare

One of the arguments that keeps cropping up against the proposed health care reform is that a growing number of people in Britain are choosing to buy private health insurance due to the failures of the NHS. Notwithstanding the fact that nothing being proposed even closely resembles the NHS, it's worth addressing this misconception.

As with the best deceits, this does contain a grain of truth, but it also misses a great deal.

The insurance that Brits are buying in no way resembles the standard U.S. health insurance. The primary difference is that British insurance plans cover almost nothing. All regular primary care, as well as many simple procedures, and emergency care are still handled 100% by the NHS. The insurance that people are buying typically covers a small number of procedures that they may require later in life, a hip replacement for example.

Because of this structure, the insurance 'model' actually makes sense; many persons contribute to a fund from which only a few will actually need to withdraw. This is the same as your household or car insurance. This means that the premiums are very low compared to U.S. insurance, maybe £20 or £30 a month.

Although no one is seriously advocating this right now, my feeling is that the model of insurance for health care will become increasingly untenable in America.