Quotes

"The Republicans say that government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."
Al Franken

"In Hungary, the people took to the streets in revolution when the President said he'd lied about economic numbers... here, we call that Tuesday."
Jon Stewart

"I gave up being cool and settled for being pleasant."
Garrison Keillor

"You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons."
Jean Renoir as Octave in his 1939 film The Rules of the Game.

Lila

I've been reading Lila, Robert Pirsig's sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While not a political book, the main thrust of the philosophy gave me the language to address the Foley situation, so I wanted to share it with you.

If you've read Zen, or know someone who has, you might well imagine the mired depths of the philosophy in Lila. Like the Prez once said about his job, "It's hard." I'm going to try to break it down in as few sentences as possible.

There are three main systems in the human condition: biological, social, and intellectual.

Biology came first, obviously: before there were towns or clans, there were people. And the biological system carries great weight; in Lila, there is a humorous description of the narrator's "biology" taking over his "intellect" as it shuts him down for sleep. "Tomorrow [his cells] would need him when they got hungry, and they would turn him on to find some food..." He compares this to a computer, that biology is the hardware while the other systems, such as intellect, are the software that runs on it.

Biology is also our impulses, such as sex and eating, as well as crime, consumerism, dancing, and so on. It is what our bodies want, despite our intellect. Many of these biological impulses are good for the hardware: eating and sleeping, for example. My mother once said of sex, "If it was as boring as brushing your teeth, no one would do it and there wouldn't be babies." Sex in fact might be one of the highest biological systems because it perpetuates the body into another body. One might also think of biology as the "wild" part of ourselves, the part that wants to gambol and gamble, fight and take flight. Take away society's mores, take away the intellect's reasoned choices, and what is left is biology.

Biology run rampant in a group of people is of course anarchy. So as people began to band together, they created society to control the biology. You just can't go around killing people. Your biology might impel you to do so, but society steps in and says you can't, and puts you in jail. Laws are created to control biology.

But society can run rampant too. Pirsig uses the Victorian society as an example of society with too much control, which led to repression. (Pirsig absolves them however by asserting that all they were doing was saying Society is more important than the Individual, and putting the good of society above all else. Not a sin, just a difference of priority.) Taking it farther, the Nazis and other totalitarian society systems exert(ed) total control over the individual. This clearly can't stand any more than anarchy.

The last system is intellect. Intellect, the system of the free-thinking mind, looks for example at the Victorians and asks, "Why?" Why are these rules the way they are? Why can't I live how I want? Who died and made you the boss of me? And so come the Bohemians, the Beatniks, the Hippies, and the Slackers. Each group is a group of "contrarian" (Pirsig's word) intellectuals reacting to the repression of their societies, and asking "Why?" This is why totalitarian systems tend to jail dissidents and intellectuals-- the intellect is a threat to a society that says, "Don't question, obey."

Intellect is there to control society by making sure that it doesn't go haywire. The Great Writ of Habeas Corpus is one example-- an idea created to keep society from locking up your biology for no reason. The Constitution is a intellectual endeavor to create a society and give it functions and limitations over the biological system of the People.

The systems are dependent on each other, but Pirsig also puts them in a hierarchy of control: society is there to control biology, and intellect is there to control society. (And of course without biology, no people, no society or intellect-- it's kind of like rock-paper-scissors.) Biology will, without society, turn naturally to anarchy. Society will, without intellect to guide it, turn naturally to totalitarianism as the epitome of society's control. Intellect will forget to eat if biology doesn't rumble the tummy. Everybody has a job.

Here is the crux of the matter, and the reason this philosophy applies to how I'm feeling about politics these days.

Rep. Foley acted on his Biology (in this case, a deviant biological impulse). That's the first bad thing that happened.

But Society, in the form of the Republican leadership, failed to control Foley. Both as the management of the system of society called Congress, and as the management of our system of society called The USA, they failed to stop and correct the deviant biology that sprung up in their midst and threatened young members of the society.

Biology will out, they say-- I had a boss tell me once, "Every employee will try to get away with whatever they can, including you. It's their nature. It's up to you as a manager to rein them in, and it's my job to rein you in." Yes, Foley did something bad. But the society that fails to correct biology is even more at fault, because they weren't fighting the fog of biological impulses in Foley's head like he was. It was their job to rein him in, and they failed.

The Republican-controlled society has also tried to control intellect by secrecy (just don't let the Intellect know what's going on), and by squashing dissent. If you think of our Society as an entity, its imperative is to rise to dominance. It is therefore the fault of Intellect (philosophers, ethicists, dissidents, Democrats) that we have not made any inroads in controlling this Society. It is our job to rein them in. It's our job to defend Habeas Corpus, to curtail the domestic spying program, to correct our foreign policy. If Intellect fails to step in and parent Society, we are doomed to totalitarianism.

Maya Angelou said after 9/11, "Now is the time for thinkers to think." It was at our own peril that we ignored that admonition.

Well, sometimes you read something and it's so clear to you-- and then sometimes you read Pirsig. (Joke.) What I mean is, sometimes an idea can be clear and you wish you could tell more people about it. I hope that I made some sense. I'd love to hear comments on this!

It's the Little Things in Life

I'm happy today, but not because anything really great has happened. Today, it's all about the little things.

The workers on my street are busily making homes for my future neighbors, and today they are farther up the street from my house, which means they're quieter. In return, I'm trying not to think too much about their legal status as immigrants.

I remembered to buy greeting cards AND send them, which is remarkable for me.

Warren Jeffs, the Big Bad Polygamist, is in custody-- not that I care, but the little bit of happy here is that I will never again have to listen to Anderson Cooper drone on and on about him! Especially in that Voice, dripping with emotion, which I totally bought during Katrina, but when it was applied to Jeffs, I realized how hollow it was.

Tim Grieve over at Salon's War Room posted this today:

CQ Politics has just moved the November outlook for the district once represented by Tom DeLay from "no clear favorite" to "leans Democratic."

Ah yes, I have no complaints today...

Well, you know that's not true. On the topic of little things, we don't know who killed JonBenet after all. I know, we're all supposed to be ashamed at the way we've been fascinated by her like there wasn't anything else going on in the world. But I am fascinated! I had always thought that we would never find out whodunit, that it would go the way of Bob Crane, Kennedy, and the Black Dahlia. Those stories have always fascinated me because of their unsolved nature (I am so psyched for this upcoming Black Dahlia movie!) I was aghast at the idea that we had actually caught JonBenet's killer-- no so much for justice, I admit, but just for knowing... And while I'm glad that they didn't go ahead and prosecute an innocent (and clearly bonkers) man, I'm a little grimmer today that the mystery remains on my list of Things To Ask God When I Die.

There are many real and important things to worry about, but I'm banishing those thoughts and instead worrying about how I'm going to fit all these new shows* on my TiVo. Because sometimes, there is Katrina, and sometimes, it's just August.

* :)
:(
(In order to get to the Salon links above, you will probably have to watch a short commercial, sorry!)

Winners

The interesting thing about following a war that your country isn't in is that for once you can see it, if not dispassionately, at least more objectively than one might if it's your country. Our involvement (what a euphemism!) in Iraq is so politically laden, and each American watches it through the prism of his own domestic politics. In the current war, especially for people like me who are neither Arab-American, Muslim, nor Jewish, one can take a step back. What do we see?

War sucks. War is bad. War is messy. War is death. No one can say how many Hezbollah fighters have died, the Israelis have lost something like less than 50, but civilians die by the hundreds. Civilians, civilians, I just keep hearing that word and seeing small feet poke out from dusty blankets, from a pile of blankets all alike.

All the things man has created, strong bridges and sleek buildings and gleaming airports, gone. A world made up of ideas and designs and construction and effort and pride reduced to meaningless rubble. And even if we find a way to stop the fighting, if the sun came out tomorrow, the mess left behind is worse than 10 Katrinas. The life's work of so many people, building homes and careers and families, torn apart and blown into the wind like dandelion seeds.

And as Israel moves farther into Lebanon, and the rockets keep hitting Israel, it seems somehow like the Israelis are "worse" (this is what we've been talking about in the past couple of posts) because they are causing more damage and death-- but today it dawned on me, this is just what it looks like when one side is winning. When one side in a war is more successful, it means they are doing more damage. Hitting critical routes, airports, buildings. Trapping people in their villages. And Israel is really winning on that score, although the rockets keep hitting Israel in record numbers so this may in fact be the old adage you've used a thousand times-- winning the battle but losing the war (or at least keeping it at a draw). The horror of war means that whoever is better, who is succeeding, who is riding a rocket trail of glory, they are in fact the Huns, the Mongols, the Spartans, the Thing To Be Feared, The Bad Dudes. And of course nice people like us don't like The Bad Dudes, so the tide of public opinion turns away from Israel.

I asked myself, "What is Israel supposed to do?" and I still don't have an answer that satisfies me, but I do have one word: win. (I mean, I don't want Hezbollah to win and "eliminate the Zionists from the earth", so I guess I do want Israel or at least the wider world to prevail.) They're supposed to win, and that's what they're doing. This is what winning looks like. We're not used to seeing this in the US because when we are winning, we don't show the damage we leave in our wake on our media. But take a good look kids, before you shout your jingoistic slogans and yell "Sic 'em" to our military and send them out to win. This is what it looks like.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

[Please go to my last real post, and see Caribou's comments.]


"In my opinion, both sides are equally wrong in this war."

I agree with your assessment of pretty much everyone being jerks in this conflict. I guess I'm pretty spoiled. I'm used to there being Good Guys (sometimes us) and Bad Guys (sadly, often us) and being able to root for someone (like the people caught in the middle, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Israel) or condemn someone (like us, for say, coming over to "help", destroying their country, and floundering around in our Big Mess, all for the benefit of Halliburton, as far as I can tell).

In this conflict, you're right, everyone's to blame. Maya Angelou said about 9/11, "Now is the time for thinkers to think," and I guess I fault Israel-- a modern, educated, democratic people with a history of vast loss of life in war-- for not being somehow above this, above the death and destruction and willing to find alternative solutions. I have no idea where I got this silly notion. Clearly, if the bombs are falling on them, being smart either doesn't help or isn't working. Or maybe their past didn't make them as creative as I would have hoped.

And of course, the other side, while having nicer sides to it-- remember the IRA and Sein Finn-- has sworn to destroy Israel, and I mean destroy it. For them there seems to be no end game, there is no two-state solution or Nice Happy Middle East with Camel Rides and Swaying Palm Trees and a Mid-E-Pass where you can ride the trains from country to country on your vacation. They want a big smoking hole where Israel used to be, and how do you negotiate with that?

"In my opinion, this is a proxy war. This is payback time for the 1993 Hezbollah suicide bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut."

I agree that this is a proxy war, although I tend to think of it as one of Iran vs. Israel. (Perhaps Iran & Syria vs. Israel.) Do you think that Israel cares that much that we got bombed 23 years ago (unless you were thinking of something else, that was 1983)? Or are you suggesting that we got Israel to fight in proxy of us? Because I gotta say, we're just not that with it down here south of your border. Other administrations, maybe-- and certainly, this one is the only one recently that's quite evil-genius enough to try it-- but this one really has its hands completely full and is floundering in its own incompetence. So evil yes, genius no. Basically, if it involves getting off their collective ass but doesn't involve anything with direct votes attached to it (like whipping up the base over gay marriage or flag burning), they really don't want to bother.

This reminds me, actually, of a joke I like-- After the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 and the Iraq War, all the crazy people took off their tinfoil hats, realizing that the CIA didn't actually have it together enough to be beaming thought control at them. (There's probably a way to jazz that up so it's funnier, but I'm on my first cup of coffee and my second day on this post, so, well, go find yourself real comedians.)

I'm always rooting for the underdog-- that's a Shakespearean* thing, I think-- and I have always (and I mean since the 1970s when I was a kid and the last era I recall with this much radical Islamic terrorism) respected the Jewish need for a real nation of their own but also the plight of the Palestinians. And maybe I'm just swaying with the breeze here (although I prefer to think of it as a "window into my thought process", haha) but the more I think about this, the more I keep hearing my friend asking, "But what is Israel supposed to do?" And somehow I keep coming around to the idea that this awful tragedy might have been the only way forward. That, to my little peacenik brain, is an anathema, but...

Oh, for God's sake. (Literally.) No wonder no one can work this out. But thanks for reading and writing comments and maybe we'll find some clarity together. Sadly, I have to stop trying to save the world and go back to trying to save my garage from the forces of chaos.



*Shakespeare's plays are often written on the side of the underdog, the outsider, who may get trampled a lot but always at least has their shining moment-- Othello, Shylock, there are more, but remember, first cup of coffee. OK, I can't really use that anymore since it's taken me hours of a line here and a line there in between packing and showing the house, so I'll use that chaos as my Official New Excuse.

They do have nice suits.

I'm a Liberal. This is well known. But I have always respected the conservative movement.

First, I am also a Libra, which if you believe any of that stuff means I'm keen to see both sides of everything. I believe that if you're someone who loves this country and are interested in developing policies to help it, then we have more in common than not. And I can respect a well-thought-out line of reasoning even if I still disagree with it in the end because I believe in different goals. (The fact that you and I are interested in discussing "the role of government in the modern age and the meaning of its social contract with its citizens" has already set us apart from the masses, who are more interested in who's running for American Idol than American President.)

Second, I once worked for the Republican Party, as an open Democrat. Some of them were indeed crazy. But I worked for two men and one woman who were kind, smart, decent, and conservative, and they enjoyed talking to me. (Again, we had more in common simply because we wanted to talk about it.) They patiently explained their point of view without slandering the left, and I learned a lot. I came to really respect the point of view of fiscal conservatives. I kept my own beliefs about the nature of the relationship between government and its people, but I have no trouble seeing the other side.

Third, my high school friend's dad was a conservative state senator in Florida, and he went to our church. I know that a lot of people have a pretty low opinion of politicians, and many on my side would dock points for him being on the right, but he was a nice and honest man, and this formed many of my feelings about politicians at a young age.

All of this is to say, after 8 years of "my President" (I think everyone has one, the first one they felt passionate about) and with a pretty bland candidate in Gore, I was willing to let the other side have a shot for a while. I confess I never liked Bush. He reminded me of men I knew, men I knew to stay away from. In fact, he reminded me a lot of a man who came up to me at closing time at the bar I worked-- drunk, vomit on his shirt, knees under his frat-boy cargo shorts skinned and freely bleeding-- who hit on me. Ick. So yes, Bush has always made me queasy.

But the country seemed to be humming along so well, I didn't think anything too bad could happen. And Clinton had championed some fiscally conservative causes, like Welfare Reform and NAFTA, so the parties didn't seem all that different. I thought we'd see a continuing paring down of government services, which can be painful but not necessarily bad. (Like I said, I can see why they would want smaller government, I can see how they could logically justify and execute it, even though I respectfully disagree on many points.)

I knew that they wanted to "bring the grownups back into the White House". I knew that Clinton's administration was seen as an overgrown dorm party. Keep in mind, this was the 1990s, when all over the business community, a radical "youth movement" was changing the face of the workplace. Dress codes went from suits to jeans, foozball tables went into break rooms, and bean bag chairs went into amorphous "team work areas". At the same time, this young band of pols moved into the White House with their backpacks instead of briefcases (an icon of which was on Josh's shoulder through all 8 years of The West Wing), meetings over open pizza boxes in the Oval Office, and a First Lady who dared to actually get involved in policy. The Old Guard, the "suits", were incensed. It didn't help that at the end of a long investigation there was found to be sex too. And so one of the promises of the Bush II Administration was to bring back the suits, literally and figuratively. Surely all of this casual behavior wasn't good for the country, they thought. I think it drove them crazy that despite all of this, the Clinton Administration was actually effective. So they promised, and I don't blame people for wanting this after the scandal, to "restore dignity", or "bring the grownups back". And I was interested to see what the "grownups" would do with it.

I knew they valued secrecy, but with the Freedom of Information Act, I didn't think they could hide that much from us.

I knew that they were oil men, I just thought these energy men would want to be in on the ground floor of the next phase of energy development.

I knew they had co-opted (or were allowing themselves to be co-opted by) the extreme religious right (ERR), but I thought honestly that the joke would be on the ERR (which it's turning out to be).

I knew there were neocons sharpening their knives in think tanks, but I didn't think they'd get the chance to remake the world they way they wanted. Think tanks are not real life, and it's often easier to imagine how you would do something in politics than to actually do it, when you have opposing ideas pressing back against you, and a planet of real nations to deal with.

I knew they were hawks, but I thought that since we had developed and cherished the Powell Doctrine, if we were forced into a war it would be swift and with a clear mission and exit strategy. And they installed Powell himself as the Secretary of State, so I thought that would keep us in check.

And I knew that they desperately wanted to go back into Iraq. For 8 years they listened to their base complain that the one failing of the Bush I years was that they "didn't finish the job" in Iraq by taking out Hussein. (Remember, I worked for them in the first few Clinton years, and I listened to them complain about this.) I knew that they wanted to "right" that "wrong", but I didn't really think they'd get the chance. I mean, the only way they could justify going back was if Hussein attacked someone else (for which he didn't have the capability) or, you know, something crazy like Arabs attacking the US. Oops.

What I'm trying to say is that I was willing to give them a shot, to see what their policies would do. I was even willing to see them get the Congress too-- for decades there had been gridlock blamed on having an Executive of one party and a Legislature of another, what would happen if they got it all and could really show us what kind of country their policies, unhindered, would bring us? What if they could remake the country for the better? That's all I want for my beloved country.

So while part of me, the part that cringed while Clinton slipped the noose around his own neck for his lynching, the part of me that wants to throw rotten tomatoes at the gerry-mandering hack Tom DeLay, is happy to be dancing on the grave of the GOP, there is a much bigger part of me that weeps for the destruction of our country and the collapse of the promise of a new vision.

Sydney Blumenthal has a new article in Salon ("The GOP Begins to Implode") in which he delineates all the factions that are splintering apart, and how the immigration issue is adding to the quake. The GOP is finding out what it means to have a big tent-- all the circus animals eventually start to eat each other. Here are some of his salient points:

• The nativist Republican base is at the throat of the business community.

• The Republican House of Representatives, in the grip of the far right, is at war with the Republican Senate.

• The evangelical religious right is paralyzed while the Roman Catholic Church has emerged as a mobilizing force behind the mass demonstrations of millions of Hispanic immigrants.

• Bush's neoconservative foreign policy has been discredited, a virulent form of isolationist nationalism, always lurking beneath the surface, has filled the vacuum.

• Fear of the Other is being displaced onto the traditional nativist target: immigrants.

The "grownups" have been terrible stewards of this country. It turns out that the alternative to being young and idealistic is being old and corrupt. They have lied, leaked, evaded, spied on us, and put dangerously under-qualified cronies in critical positions in the government. They have very nice suits, but they won't roll up their sleeves. In this culture of lawlessness, which included the "K Street Project" (forcing all lobbying firms to hire only Republicans), some of them took bribes in cash and goods.

They insisted that conservation was against the national interest (QUE???) and that drilling in Alaska and "buying" our own "gas station" in Iraq would solve our oil problems-- until it didn't, and now they are singing a false note in trying to take back everything they've ever said without sounding like liars.

They even lied to the ERR, making such hay out of the "threat" of gay marriage (rumor has it, this election cycle it will be the spectre of "gay adoption" that looms), taking their "free milk" of votes and walking away without buying the cow. (Ironic, isn't it, since abstinence is their sole sex ed, that they didn't see that one coming?)

Turns out that neoconservativism regarding domestic issues is actually for big government and domestic spending. (Well, duh, it has to financially support its militaristic foreign policy somehow.) I think this was a shock to many fiscal conservatives that didn't know some of their best friends were working to cross purposes. George Will still hasn't gotten that look of shock off his face. Wikipedia in its definition says, neocons "sympathized with a non-traditional foreign policy agenda that was less deferential to traditional conceptions of diplomacy and international law and less inclined to compromise principles even if that meant unilateral action." Turns out, that means pissing everyone off. I would go farther to say that it specifically involved remaking the entire Middle East into "people we could deal with"-- without noticing that the people who lived there didn't want to be remade and would virulently hate us for meddling in the wrong places while not meddling enough in the Palestian/Israeli conflict, making them even more impossible to deal with. (Now even the more rational states can't be seen with us for fear of attracting that hate.)

Making Colin Powell the Secretary of State, it turns out, was an effort to marginalize him. Under a plan in which one is "less deferential to traditional concepts of diplomacy and international law", the Secretary of State is a joke. The real power in a neocon administration is the Secretary of Defense, in which position they installed the neo-est, hawkest member of their cabal, Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is one of those smarmy, arrogant people that make you feel like they are the only ones with the answers, and you're an idiot. (Not just the kind who think you are an idiot, but the kind that really makes you feel like you must be.) And when he's working in the vacuum of not being in power, I'm sure he convinced everyone (and apparently still has the President convinced) that he really did have the answers and they were idiots (because this kind of guy is really persuasive). But reality has borne out that he's just a blowhard. His arrogant, dismissive speaking has devolved into defensive whining, which oddly matches the President's defensive whining ("This is haa-ard!") Cheney has a similar intimidating veneer-- he's the quintessential stoic father, the leader of the "grownups", who makes you feel like he's the adult who understands better than you do but, it turns out, he's just feeling his way through life like anyone else.

Lastly, it's surprising to learn that the hawks are terrible at war! It's like having a group on the school fundraising committee insist on a dance-off with the rival school-- but it turns out they can't dance. We all assumed, including the right, that these men (and women, Ms. Rice) who were planning for years to go back into Iraq, who were planning for years to remake the Middle East without "traditional diplomacy" and with "unilateral [military] action" were good military strategists. It turns out the good military strategists (the best kind being the kind that try to keep us out of military action, and then only with a clear mission and exit strategy) were in the State Department being ignored. So while it's possible that the neocon vision of remaking the Middle East might (and I stress might) have worked with good military planning, we will never know because they bungled it from start to finish.

I should point out that I am referring only to the civilian military planners. The military strategists within the military are quite good at their jobs and have done an amazing job on the day-to-day planning (the small picture) while being hobbled by civilian idiots on major planning (the big picture).

You might notice that I haven't mentioned the bungling of the Katrina disaster. While this is the most blatant example of incompetence on the most basic governmental level (we might argue about health care or public education, but this is the kind of thing we all expect a government to handle for us), and it stems directly from failures in the Administration-- namely cronyism and the dismantling of Clinton's shiny revamped FEMA into a shell of its former glory, just in time for the worst disaster in 50 years or more)-- I never dreamed this could happen. The point of this essay is to say, "I was willing to give them a shot, but it turns out their ideas and the execution of those ideas were really, really bad." But I never in my life gave one thought to an organization like FEMA as a political football, or even a topic of reasoned debate. I thought that at least, our government would protect and serve in the time of a natural disaster. Turns out I was wrong.

I was wrong about a lot of things. I was a young adult not that much younger than most of the Clinton Administration. While the pizza boxes in the Oval Office didn't bother me, the sex scandal did. While I wanted another Democrat administration, I was willing to let the "grownups" back in, because if the "kids" could do this well, maybe the "grownups" could do even better. I was wrong. We all were.

One thing you can say about them, though, they do have very nice suits.

American Values

I got really disgusted in the last presidential election over this issue of "values voting". Here's what I wanted the Democrats to say:

Whatever happened to "American Values"? Honesty, integrity, nonconformity, tolerance, freedom, etc., etc. Whatever happened to "I cannot tell a lie" and "The buck stops here"? Whatever happened to transparency, dissent, debate, and keeping your religious ideas to yourself, respecting that others have different ideas? Whatever happened to the lessons of Vietnam, the Powell Doctrine, and the USA being the good guys? When did the freedom of speech mean that if you say something against the administration you'd have your life torn apart?

I feel like the answer to "our values" is "Our Values"-- American Values. The lessons that we learned when we studied George Washington and Patrick Henry. The values of honesty and standing up for human decency and what is right. The values of hard work, sacrifice, and taking care of our fellow man so that we all live better.

Speaking of which, why can't the conservative corporate world realize that if they support public transportation, their employees can get to work on time? (Here in Austin the conservatives tried to kill light rail, saying that the rich would pay with their taxes but only the poor would use the system.) That if there is a good public school system, they will have educated people to hire? That if the health care system is repaired, their employees won't be out sick all the time? That if they pay a decent wage, people can afford to buy their crap?

There is an answer to the values issue. Hit them with the idea of American Values. I may not be fleshing the idea out enough here, but in essence, I believe that AV would appeal to more voters. The social conservatives might or might not get on board, but it would give them an alternative, we might get some of them. And it would attract the rest of us who don't share their views but also don't want to be labelled as amoral or lacking any kind of value system. We have a value system-- and it includes everyone. It includes the "values voters" because it provides for them to have their own beliefs, while not excluding those who have different ones.

Furthermore, when measured against these American Values, this administration falls on its face. I don't need to delineate all their horrible mistakes, you can read CNN for that. But just taking "I cannot tell a lie" from the first George W.-- Washington-- and there is every reason in the world to fire them. The secrecy, lies, and spin-- combined with the incompetence-- is un-American. Let's hang them with that. Not that they aren't patriotic, I'm sure they love America as much as anyone else, but like a bad boyfriend, they love us and fail us at the same time. We are all human and none of us can perfectly live up to an ideal, but it's still worth having an ideal. Let's measure them against our American Heroes of yore. Let's hold them to a standard-- not the standard of evangelical Christians or fundamentalists of any religion, but to the standard of American values and tradition.