Santorum, Gingrich, Romney are wrong about apologizing in Afghanistan

Over at The Philly Post, today I get after the Republican candidates who are criticizing President Obama for apologizing in Afghanistan for the burning of Korans by American troops there.

The mission of U.S. troops in Afghanistan isn’t to trample upon native sensibilities—it’s to hunt terrorists and help the locals build their country so that it never again serves as the base for an attack on the United States. That involves the (tricky) winning of hearts and minds. Treating the Koran with disrespect—even if it’s an accident—actively works against achieving those goals. Apologizing isn’t just the right thing to do, in this case; it’s an act of strategic military necessity.

So the rush by Mitt, Rick, and Newt to condemn the president for apologizing isn’t just contemptible: It’s dangerous and juvenile. It signals that all three men see the world as a series of cartoon caricatures, that they are bullies who demand respect but believe that giving respect means showing weakness. Maybe Republicans won’t ever apologize for America—but all that proves is that they are very sorry, indeed.

Follow the link to read the whole thing.

The trailer for 'Battlefield America' makes me want to burn down Hollywood

No, really:



So, a movie about eight-year-olds competing in a dance competition somehow ends up turning those eight-year-olds into physically violent gang members? And their mentors declare the dance competition to be "war?"

Fuck. That. Shit.

Sorry for the language. But really. I know I'm getting old. But I do pine for the old days when the idea of eight-year-olds as gangsters was treated with as a comic idea, not as something to aspire to. Remember "Bugsy Malone?"

The end of affirmative action

That's what Ben and I talk about in this week's Scripps column, looking at the case that's headed before the Supreme Court. My take:

Should affirmative action go away? Probably not. Will it? Probably.

The Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts seems to have its knives sharpened.

So while liberals should mount a defense of affirmative action in college admissions, they must also prepare for its probable demise.

What comes after? Texas -- where the current case originates -- offers one way forward. The state's public universities offer automatic admission to the top 10 percent of graduating students from every high school in the state.

Because those schools have wildly varying economic and racial compositions, the result is that Lone Star colleges have a fairly diverse student population. That kind of creativity will be needed going forward.

Wait: Why should diversity be a goal? That's easy. America is diverse. Unless you believe that white men possess all the talent and smarts -- and some people really do believe that --it's criminal not to foster the resources and resourcefulness of all our country's citizens.

"Even right-wingers get nervous with racial homogeneity," Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy told the magazine Mother Jones. "If Patrick Buchanan were elected president of the United States, there would have been a person of color in the Cabinet."

For more than 300 years, America's culture and law enforced racial preferences -- whites, of course, were preferred. We still live with the ramifications: A few decades of affirmative action don't make up for the fact that many minority groups weren't allowed to start the 100-yard dash until whites got a 50-yard head start. Critics of affirmative action say they want the law to be colorblind and advancement based on some notion of "merit." That sounds good, but also conveniently preserves the advantages created by 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow.

Those critics appear on the verge of victory, however. But affirmative action is a battleground, not the whole war. So liberals must ask themselves: What's next?

Ben expresses his own desire to end affirmative action in his take, and you'll have to click the link to read it. I'd like to expand on my own take a bit, if I may.

It doesn't surprise me that conservatives don't like affirmative action. I think there are principled non-racist—even anti-racist—reasons for doing so. What bothers me, though, is how little I see my righty friends acknowledge that affirmative action sprung up as a response to an actual problem: That the aforementioned 300 years of slavery and Jim Crow left a lot of folks without sufficient resources—take that word however you like—to achieve and succeed on society's new colorblind terms.

Conservatives like to talk a lot about how "culture matters" and often it sounds like a bit of a dogwhistle to liberal ears, a way of suggesting that bourgeois whites really are superior to pathology-afflicted blacks, but in ways that (maybe) have less to do with genetics than the poor choices that whites as a group and blacks as a group just happened to make. And they also talk quite a bit about the distorting effects that big government can have on culture. Yet you never really hear them put two and two together when it comes to race, and acknowledge again that a longstanding legal-cultural regime enforced both by senators and sheriffs for hundreds of years might've caused damage that still needs repair. Instead—and this is giving my conservative friends the best benefit of the doubt—they seem to have believed that Martin Luther King Jr. came to save everybody, 1968 happened, everything was fair after that, and anybody who can't make it must be to blame for their own problems. This is either stunningly naive or, well, something more pernicious. Among conservatism as a whole, it's probably a bit of both.

My friend (I'll make the presumption) and sometimes vigorous critic William Voegeli has written an entire book about how liberalism doesn't have a limiting principle that makes it possible for conservatives to do welfare-state business. (That would make liberals conservatives, but that's another conversation.) But taking conservatives at their word that all they want to do is maximize liberty and opportunity for all Americans, then this issue is a huge blind spot for them: Simply put, conservatives don't seem to have an animating principle that moves them to address problems of this sort.

Maybe their answer is simply: Study hard and get married. (Or, in the case of the occasional black conservative like Thomas Sowell: Leave us alone, government.) And I'm sure there are smart folks who do see a problem here and have come up with conservative-minded solutions. But conservatism, broadly, seems to treat affirmative action as a government program meant to oppress whites—and not as a well-meaning-but-misguided attempt to offer opportunities to those who otherwise have none. I can see that, theoretically, there might be two problems: That racism made opportunity hard, but that affirmative action compounds the problem. Listening to conservatives, I get the impression that only the latter problem exists. And that, I think, is also a problem.

In which I talk about sex and try not to sound stupid

At National Review today, a pair of writers argue that contraception is bad for women—and what would be good for women is a return to "natural" family planning. That is: If you don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex when you're at you're most fertile.

The authors try to offer a "feminist" reason for doing so:

Authentic sexual equality requires that men understand with their bodies (as women do) the procreative potential of the sexual act. And this is exactly what natural methods of family planning do. By frequenting sex only during infertile times when a child is unwanted, men learn to coordinate their desires for intimacy with the natural rhythms of the female body. Feminist scholar and theologian Angela Franks notes that “[this] is unheard of in a society in which male desire appears to set the guidelines — especially in the ‘hook-up’ culture. Indeed, such a reorientation ofdesire is more revolutionary than any secular feminist project.” Those who practice this approach to family planning report that its use tends to make husbands more sensitive to the sexual and emotional needs of their wives — a sensitivity that many women have long found wanting.

I'm going to admit here that my sexual experience isn't widespread: My bachelor years weren't all that swingin'. So maybe I'm going to sound stupid here. I'll risk it.

But my limited experience tells me that a woman's desire for sex often (but not always) peaks around that time of month that they're most fertile. (Evolutionarily, this makes sense, no?) And my limited experience also suggests to me that desire for sex and enjoyment of sex are somewhat related. If you're not in the mood, you're not in the mood.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying: National Review's writers apparently believe that men can best practice birth control and respect women by having sex during those periods in which women will desire and enjoy it least. "Be attentive to the sexual and emotional needs of your wife, men: And then do the opposite!"

Put aside the questions of whether the rhythm method is all that effective. A big problem here is that National Review's authors essentially remove a woman's sex drive from this equation. No surprise there, I guess. If you believe that a big problem with contraception is that it enables women to act on their own sexual desires (and the authors clearly do) this proposed solution makes a lot of sense.

Contraception and religious liberty

That's what Ben and I talk about this week in the Scripps column. My take:

Religious liberty is a paramount American value; it's even written into our Constitution. A woman's right to make her own health choices doesn't explicitly appear in the document, it's merely a common-sense human right no less deserving of protection and consideration.

So the Obama administration is right to mandate that employers include contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance programs. And the administration is also right -- if a little late -- to offer an accommodation that ensures access to birth control while permitting religious institutions to adhere to their own teachings.

If only that were the end of the debate.

Unwilling, it seems, to ever take "yes" for an answer from President Barack Obama, Republicans are now pressing ahead with proposals to exempt any employer from having to pay for contraceptive coverage. GOP leaders say this is about "religious freedom" -- but, as other commentators have noted, they're not pushing to exempt, say, employers who are Jehovah's Witnesses from having to pay for blood transfusions.

It's easy to conclude, then, that Republicans are mostly interested in hindering women's access to birth control.

"Obamacare" is one of the administration's great achievements. But as recent developments have shown, it is imperfect and leaves most Americans at the mercy of their employers when it comes to health coverage.

That's not the system that most liberals desired. We wanted to see either a fully government-run "single-payer" health insurance system -- or, failing that, a "public option" government insurance plan to stand alongside private insurance, both to drive down costs and to give individuals a wider range of health choices.

Such a system would've allowed American women to choose (or not to choose) birth control with little hindrance. A woman's health decisions should be between her and her doctor, not her and her church, nor her and her employer. That important concept -- and not religious liberty -- is what faces the greatest threat today.

Ben says: "The argument isn't about a woman's 'access' to contraception. ... No, this is all about who pays and why it matters." But we've decided—in a law that was modeled on legislation that Republicans originally crafted, and which was passed into law by a Republican governor now running for president—that for the most part, employers will pay for employee health insurance. If that's the route we're taking, then it really does become a denial of access if the person with the wallet gets to decide you don't get birth control. Conservatives don't want the government making your health decisions—remember death panels? It's beyond me why they'd grant that power to private employers instead.

Thomas Frank got punk'd

A few years back, Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?" made a big splash nationally. His basic thesis was this: Republicans won votes by promising to concentrate on issues, like abortion, dear to social conservatives—but once in office focused mostly on an economic agenda of helping big corporations and giving the poor the shaft.

Maybe that was true a decade ago, but now? Republicans won a lot of elections at the state and Congressional elections in 2010 largely because people were so frustrated with the economy and wanted something done. Instead of economic turnarounds, though, we've been given...action on abortion.

That certainly seems to be the case in Pennsylvania, where the Legislature is working on a bill that would compel doctors to show women ultrasounds of their fetuses before performing an abortion. What has the Legislature—or Gov. Tom Corbett—done to advance the economy here? Beats me.

I'm not one to belittle culture war issues. But I can't help think we got bait-and-switched. I remember Tom Corbett talking (somewhat stupdly) jobs during the 2010 campaign, not abortion. And certainly exit polls in 2010 indicated that the economy was a big reason voters were turning to Republicans.

Don't get me wrong: Pennsylvania Republicans have also been hot on the trail of helping big corporations and giving the poor the shaft. Overall, though, it sure seems like we were voting for an economic agenda—and the social agenda snuck in under that cover. Time for Thomas Frank to revise his thesis.

The ACLU: Not just a bunch of liberal hacks

Clive Crook, National Review, Monday:

The ACLU’s stated mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Given its record, however, one would be forgiven for concluding that its copy of our charter is incomplete. Unfortunately, the ACLU appears to base its actions on the text of a tattered and torn document, from which the Second and Tenth Amendments are missing entirely, the Fourth was re-written in 1973, and the words “more or less” are appended to each paragraph along with an explicit invitation to interpret the document as broadly as humanly possible.

Emphasis added.

Randy LoBasso, Philadelphia Weekly, today:

Here’s something you weren’t expecting: The ACLU, along with the law firm of McCausland Keen and Buckman have filed a federal lawsuit today against the City of Philadelphia on behalf of Mark Fiorino, a Lansdale resident who was allegedly harassed by Philly cops for carrying a gun, despite his license to carry. Last time Philadelphia Weekly wrote about Fiorino and his ordeals with Philadelphia Police, he noted he was most offended by the officers’ not understanding their own city and state’s gun laws, which state one can obtain an unconcealed weapon license.

The lawsuit alleges Fiorino’s rights were violated when he was repeatedly detained longer than necessary to make sure he had a license to carry. His weapon was also confiscated and not returned for five months; it’s also alleged the police used excessive force against him.

Hey, the ACLU's interpretation of the Constitution is obviously to the left of National Review's. I think that's a good thing. But the ACLU also goes to work on behalf of gun-loving Second Amendment advocates. I think that's also a good thing, frankly. The ACLU frequently advocates for folks who don't necessarily line up ideologically on the left. I wonder: Would the righty ACLJ stick up for anti-gun activists using their First Amendment rights? I'm skeptical.