At ease, Christian soldiers. There is no “war on religion,” no assault on the Catholic Church. A faith that has endured for thousands of years will survive even Nicki Minaj.
It never occurred to me to evaluate the Grammy Awards show on theological rectitude, but apparently we’re supposed to be outraged at the over-the-top “exorcism” Minaj performed Sunday night. The hip-hop diva, who writhed and cavorted amid a riot of religious iconography, is accused of anti-Catholic bigotry — and seen as an enemy combatant in an escalating “war on religion” being waged by “secular elites,” which seems to be used as a synonym for Democrats.
Seriously? Are we really going to pretend that Christianity is somehow under siege? That the Almighty would have been any more offended Sunday than he was, say, in 2006, when Madonna — who could sue Minaj for theft of intellectual property — performed a song during her touring act while being mock-crucified on a mirrored cross? While wearing a crown of thorns? Even at her show in Rome?
The “war on religion” alarmists are just like Minaj and Madonna in one key respect: Lacking a coherent point to make, they go for shock value.
Among the loudest voices, predictably, are those of the Republican presidential candidates. Guess who’s to blame for the attack on all God-fearing Americans who go to church every Sunday to hear sermons about the sacrifice and triumph of Jesus Christ. Hint: He got in trouble four years ago, during his presidential campaign, for going to church every Sunday to hear sermons about the sacrifice and triumph of Jesus Christ.
President Obama is indeed waging a war on religion, Mitt Romney claimed last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Romney promised to rescind every “Obama regulation” that somehow “attacks our religious liberty.”
Newt Gingrich said at CPAC that Obama plans to “wage war” on the Catholic Church if he is reelected. Those who don’t see this coming are not familiar with “who [the president] really is.” Apparently, the real Obama is about to come out of hiding, any day now.
But it is Rick Santorum who wins the award for histrionics. Progressives, he said last week in Texas, are “taking faith and crushing it.” From that ridiculous proposition, he went on in truly hallucinatory fashion:
“When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”
In his speech at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, Obama cited New Testament scripture in arguing for economic and social justice. Conservatives blasted him for, um, quoting the Bible.
This is a war? This is a march to the guillotine?
Romney and Gingrich know better; they’re just cynically pandering to religious conservatives. Santorum, at least, is sincere in his pre-Enlightenment beliefs. But rejection of the intellectual framework that produced not just the French Revolution but the American Revolution as well does not strike me as an appropriate philosophy for a U.S. presidential candidate to espouse, much less a winning platform to run on.
The Founders wisely decided to institutionalize separation of church and state. The references to God, the Creator and Divine Providence in the Declaration of Independence mask the fact that the Founders disagreed on the nature and existence of a Supreme Being. They understood the difference between faith and religiosity.
Within our secular governmental framework, religion has thrived. No other large industrialized nation has nearly as many regular churchgoers as does the United States.
And just as faith somehow survived Nicki Minaj’s burlesque at the Grammys, it will survive the attempt by Republicans to create a religious war out of thin air.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2012
When you think of Mitt Romney, you probably think of a tall, robotic fellow with no discernible strong beliefs or stances (at least, none that can survive longer than a week at a time). That’s terribly unfair, and you should be ashamed for thinking it. He may have started out as an empty husk devoid of strong personal beliefs, but thanks to a crack team of industry insiders, he now is quite filled with opinions. Coincidentally, they happen to be the opinions of an army of top lobbyists in Washington, and the companies they lobby for. Funny how that works.
[Mitt Romney’s] kitchen cabinet includes some of the most prominent Republican lobbyists in Washington, including Charles R. Black Jr., the chairman of Prime Policy Group and a lobbyist for Walmart and AT&T; Wayne L. Berman, who is chairman of Ogilvy Government Relations and represents Pfizer, the drug manufacturer; and Vin Weber, the managing partner for Clark & Weinstock. […]Other lobbyists serve on one of Mr. Romney’s policy advisory teams, have hosted fund-raisers for his campaign or have joined the many influential Republicans whose endorsements Mr. Romney’s campaign has hailed.
Want to know what Mitt Romney’s true policies are? Well, you should have attended Mitt Romney’s $10,000-and-up policy round table, where industry lobbyists led “discussions” on what his policies towards those industries should be:
Mr. Romney’s campaign held an elaborate “policy round table” fund-raiser at a Washington hotel, featuring panel discussions run by lobbyists and former cabinet officials or members of Congress.James Talent, a former senator who runs the lobbying and public affairs firm Mercury Public Affairs, led a panel on infrastructure, according to an invitation. William Hansen, a former deputy secretary of education who is president of the lobbying firm Chartwell Education Group, led the education panel.
Wow. I can’t imagine why anyone would be cynical about American politics these days, can you?
The entertaining thing about this story is just how many large companies are represented. Among those specifically mentioned (and kudos to the three reporters for linking the lobbyists with actual clients, which is rather important information for readers) are Walmart, AT&T, Pfizer (drugs), Microsoft, Altria (tobacco), General Dynamics, Dominion (power), Barclays (finance), Allegheny (steel) and Peabody Energy (coal). Lobbyists are cutting the checks; lobbyists are bundling other people’s checks; lobbyists are holding the panel discussions about how the candidate can best serve the specific industries they represent; lobbyists make up the inner circle of “policy makers,” advising the candidate as to what his own core positions should be.
As for the candidate himself, he’s almost irrelevant at this point. You might as well nominate a bunny named Mr. Buttons: If you surround it with the exact same lobbyist-advisors, you’ll end up with the exact same policies. Sigh, if only we could teach that bunny to hold a pen—but for now we’ll have to settle for our current crop of Republican candidates, all of whom have near-identical policy prescriptions, all of which favor the exact same subset of people and the exact same handful of industries. Go figure.
I’ve given up on the notion that we can keep lobbyists from capturing our politics. I’ve also given up on the notion that we can prevent interests like the oil sector or our current handful of top financial companies from tailoring the American government specifically to serve their needs. Want more profits? Want less environmental protections? Want to crush some emerging industry that threatens to make yours less profitable? Just buy a few congressman, or a senator, or a president. At a few million here and there, it’s cheaper than advertising, and the results are far more secure.
So I’m in the Bill Maher camp on this one. Lobbyists and industries want to buy our politicians? Fine, I give up, let them. Just pass a law saying the candidate has to wear those corporate logos on their jackets whenever they appear on the campaign trail or when they are in office. The more money is contributed, the bigger the logo has to be. Top presidential candidates will look like military dictators-in-training, with badges and medals and ribbons sticking out from them in every direction, and just from looking at them we’ll be able to tell who they serve, and in what proportions. That would certainly be more educational than any rhetoric coming from the candidates themselves.
Looking back over the last three years, there’s arguably no better example of a policy Republicans got wrong than the rescue of the American auto industry.
When President Obama launched his ambitious policy in 2009, he was taking a major gamble — not only with the backbone of American manufacturing, but with his presidency and its ability to use the power of government to repair a private industry facing collapse. As First Read noted at the time, “As the GM bailout goes, so goes the Obama presidency.”
We now know the gamble paid off. Chrysler has posted its first profit in 15 years; GM is building new American facilities; and plants are operating at a capacity unseen in a long while. General Motors went from the brink of total failure to reclaiming its spot as the world’s top automaker, and as the Wall Street Journalreported earlier this month, “The auto industry hasn’t just turned the corner. It’s starting to accelerate.”
Had it not been for the Obama administration’s policy, these heartening headlines would have been impossible. And yet, Mitt Romney still isn’t happy.
In a new Detroit Newsop-ed, the former Massachusetts governor says he’s glad the industry still exists, but proceeds to complain anyway about the way in which Obama rescued GM and Chrysler from an imminent collapse.
Three years ago, in the midst of an economic crisis, a newly elected President Barack Obama stepped in with a bailout for the auto industry. The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.
Instead of doing the right thing and standing up to union bosses, Obama rewarded them…. By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.
It takes a fair amount of chutzpah to face a crisis, get it wrong, then whine about the way in which the other guy got it right.
This is a subject Romney would be better off ignoring. After all, in 2009, he famously urged policymakers to “let Detroit go bankrupt.” Romney was so certain Obama’s policy would fail, he said Americans could “kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if Obama’s policy moved forward in 2009. Indeed, at the time, Romney called the administration’s plan “tragic” and “a very sad circumstance for this country.” He wrote an April 2009 piece in which he said Obama’s plan “would make GM the living dead.”
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know all of Romney’s warnings were wrong. For him to double down today on the virtues of letting Detroit go bankrupt is just bizarre.
I’m reminded of this clip, which Democrats gleefully put together last summer.
Of particular interest is the last quote in the clip, in which a Chrysler executive responded to a Romney quote by saying, “Whoever told you that is smoking illegal material. That market had become absolutely dysfunctional in 2008 and 2009. There were attempts made by a variety of people to find strategic alliances with other car makers on a global scale and the government stepped in, as the actor of last resort. It had to do it because the consequences would have been just too large to deal with.”
In other words, Romney wasn’t just wrong; he was drug-addled wrong.
To be sure, the former governor wasn’t the only Obama critic whose predictions now look foolish, but Romney is the one who still likes to pretend he was right.
Even the complaints themselves are strange. As Marcy Wheeler explained, Romney’s “basically complaining that the bailout preserved the healthcare a bunch of 55+ year old blue collar workers were promised. He’s pissed they got to keep their healthcare. He’s also complaining that banks took a haircut.”
I haven’t talked to the White House about this, but I suspect if 2012 comes down to a debate over who was right about the auto-industry rescue, Obama likes his chances.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 14, 2012
Each time presidential candidate Rick Santorum rears his righteous head, it is to exploit a social issue that is of no import in a national election. But he knows that the way to keep the cameras pointed at him one more day is to manufacture a new bit of hysteria.
Last Thursday, Joan Walsh reported on Santorum as he clamored to punish non-Catholics by limiting their access to contraceptives if their workplace was in the hands of the Catholic Church. She rightly pointed out that he “absolutely mangles” what the founders said about religion. Raising the specter of the atheistic French Revolution and its notorious use of the guillotine, the former Pennsylvania senator planted a seed in the minds of his hearers: A left-driven tyranny was where the anti-Christian Obama administration would be heading next.
The fear-monger tosses out familial metaphors with devilish glee. At once subverting patriarchy within the home and turning the federal government into Big Brother, the sitting president stands in moral opposition to all that is good. And only the moral policeman Rick can stop him.
“They are taking faith and crushing it,” Santorum howls at the political left. “When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what’s left is the French Revolution…. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”
This is a combination of really bad history and undisciplined demagoguery. What we’d like to focus on is not the fractured logic of the demagogue so much as the perversion of history by the two-term senator. We consider it quite sad that a presidential candidate in 2012 should be resurrecting the same dirty campaign tactic that accompanied the charge that Thomas Jefferson, for five years U.S. minister to France, would, if elected president, shut down churches and burn bibles.
Start with the fact that in his superficial evocation of the 1790s, Santorum was referring not to the French so much as he was unconsciously reviving the propaganda used by New England Federalists against the “atheist” Thomas Jefferson, who championed freedom of conscience and refused to wear his religion on his sleeve. From 1793 on, conservative Yankees predicted that the social chaos of Paris would wash ashore in America. Indeed, conservative academics of our own time view the French Revolution as the first step toward the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union–all of which fits neatly with the crack-brained Tea Party narrative in which President Obama is a sworn socialist and enemy of capitalism.
Mitt Romney is not beyond indulging in the same polemical game, associating Obama with European social programs. Yet Santorum does what the Mormon cannot, by playing the “Catholic card” in his effort to “other” the president. It is an especially bizarre move in historical relief, because the Federalist critics who most loudly warned of the French-tainted Jefferson were New England Calvinists who feared Catholics as much as they feared French anarchy.
Federalists termed the French Revolution a “contagion,” a violent, sickening, uncivilizing process. If Santorum sees the metaphorical blade of the guillotine hanging over the heads of the Catholic bishops, it is well worth noting that eighteenth-century conservatives were so carried away by their own outlandish predictions that their panicky congressional majority passed a series of repressive laws, the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which first targeted French émigrés and then U.S. citizens who needed to be silenced. The Sedition Act authorized the imprisonment of journalists and politicians who criticized the president. The main purpose of the legislation was, as James Madison observed, to shut down free and open political debate–to derail democracy. Cleverly drafted, the Sedition Act allowed the government to punish critics of the president, but not the vice president. Why the omission? Because in 1798, John Adams’s vice president was the unAmerican Thomas Jefferson.
It certainly seems that Rick Santorum reads the First Amendment just as the Federalist Congress of 1798 did. As we all know, though, the First Amendment was intended to uphold religious freedom, protect speech, and ensure liberty of conscience. Madison, who conceived the First Amendment, defended the last of these three principles as a deeply private, individual right shielding citizens from the coercive, invasive force of a church or state government.
It is Santorum, not President Obama, who is waging a war against religion. It is the fear-mongers who endanger religious freedom. Why should the Catholic Church impose its doctrines on employees who are not Catholic? Why should any who are not Catholic be deprived of access to a health insurance benefit solely because they are employed by a Catholic hospital or university? Why should the Church be permitted to impose its doctrines on an individual who not a member? The First Amendment does not grant any church the power to deprive individuals of rights.
Santorum is waging a war not only on religion but on all Americans who do not share his faith. The Catholic Church has every right to impart its doctrines; its members can accept or reject them. The majority of Catholic men and women have rejected the particular doctrine prohibiting the use of contraception. Employees possess the right to insurance and the right to adhere to their own religious beliefs.
As Madison argued in a 1788 letter to Jefferson, religious fanaticism was as serious a danger to religious liberty as excessive state authority. In his words, “rights of conscience” were undermined by “overbearing majorities” who were intent on advancing the interests of a particular “religious establishment.” In plain and simple terms, the founders meant to protect individuals against excessive encroachments by church as well as state.
We might all wish to heed Madison’s further warning: “It is a melancholy reflection that liberty should be equally exposed to danger whether the Government has too much or too little power.” Religious liberty required the protection of state authority, in creating a barrier around the individual and guarding against intrusions from religious institutions.
The fact remains that President Obama is no more a French Revolutionary Jacobin than Jefferson or Madison. It appears, in fact, that the president has a very clear understanding of religious liberty, appreciating the boundaries between church and state just as Madison intended. His promptly conceived compromise solution, respecting religion without restricting rights, fits the balanced, reasonable approach our founders prescribed when they fought, state by state, to eliminate state funding and sanctioning (i.e., disestablishment) of privileged sects.
If the last three years tell us anything, 2012 will not usher in a new Age of Reason. Fanaticism will continue to seize the news cycle. Rick Santorum has learned (perhaps from Donald Trump and birther mania) that the best way to grab the headlines is to ramp up the epithets, bark the loudest, and fantasize a history that never was.
By: Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Salon, February 14, 2012
One of Mitt Romney’s problems is that he lays it on too thick. He’s not just a conservative, he’s a “severe conservative”. He feels your pain because he too is “unemployed”. And he understands America’s car industry because he’s a Tigers-cheering motorhead, a true “son of Detroit”.
That last assertion comes in an op-ed Mr Romney wrote for the Detroit News today. And it’s not untrue, per se. The candidate was born in Detroit, though he grew up in Bloomfield Hills, one of America’s wealthiest cities. He probably cheered for the Tigers as a kid, but his position has since evolved. And cars may really be “in my bones”, as he claims, but he advocated letting Detroit go bankrupt in 2008.
The purpose of Mr Romney’s op-ed is to clarify his position on the auto bail-out ahead of Michigan’s primary on February 28th. And the piece rivals Cirque du Soleil in its display of contortions. Mr Romney seems loth to gush about the success of the bail-out, noting only the good news that “Chrysler and General Motors are still in business”. He certainly doesn’t mention that 2011 was the best year for America’s carmakers since the financial crisis, with each of the big three turning a solid profit. But he does imply that this achievement is a result of his own advice. “The course I recommended was eventually followed”, Mr Romney writes.
As with much of Mr Romney’s excessive rhetoric, there is some truth to this statement. Following the bail-outs, the president eventually forced Chrysler and GM into bankruptcy, a step Mr Romney thought should occur naturally. And the government oversaw painful restructurings at both companies, which were largely in line with Mr Romney’s broad suggestions. But the course Mr Romney recommended in 2008 began with the government stepping back, and it is unlikely things would’ve turned out so well had this happened.
Free-marketeers that we are, The Economist agreed with Mr Romney at the time. But we later apologised for that position. “Had the government not stepped in, GM might have restructured under normal bankruptcy procedures, without putting public money at risk”, we said. But “given the panic that gripped private purse-strings…it is more likely that GM would have been liquidated, sending a cascade of destruction through the supply chain on which its rivals, too, depended.” Even Ford, which avoided bankruptcy, feared the industry would collapse if GM went down. At the time that seemed like a real possibility. The credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history in claiming to have been right all along.
In other areas of his op-ed Mr Romney is more accurate. Unions did win some special favours in the bail-out deals, though they are not as egregious as the candidate claims. For example, a health fund for retired workers was unfairly favoured over secured bondholders at Chrysler. But an issue like that is unlikely to resonate in Detroit. So Mr Romney must find a way to re-write history, lest he fall further behind Rick Santorum in his state of birth. Mr Santorum didn’t support the auto bail-out either, but he evinces a genuine compassion for blue-collar workers. And he didn’t pen an op-ed predicting, “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” That’s a difficult statement to walk back.
By: The Economist, Democracy in America, February 14, 2012
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