After Pat's Birthday, by Kevin Tillman

Thought I would share this :

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

RIP, Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

If there's more, it's here.

Know Your Rights - The Military Commissions Act

Our rights are unalienable, and endowed by our creator. It says so in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Here in the US, we have secured our rights by instituting a Republic whose powers and limitations are defined in the Constitution.

The source of our latest controversy in the War on Terror is that the Congress, at the President's urging, has passed a law, the Military Commissions Act, that in the eyes of many Americans exceeds the limits set by the Constitution. Their beef is that the law defines a class of people, alien unlawful enemy combatants, who don't get the safeguards against Government power that we enjoy.

These people can't go to court to challenge their detention (Habeas Corpus), or get a speedy trial. In fact, they can be held without any kind of hearing, for any length of time, at the Government's discretion. They can be questioned using any kind of technique that the President says is OK, and their interrogators have retroactive immunity from prosecution for what they've done.

I can't get too excited about all this, if it's Khalid Shaikh Mohammed we are talking about, but how about Maher Arar? How many innocent people do we lock away without legal recourse to make sure the bad guys don't walk on a technicality?

That's the question from a legal and political perspective, and we can rely on the courts and elected representatives to sort it out, if we want. Or we can read the law, the Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, legal commentaries, and make up our own minds. It's our choice: the liberal position of preserving civil rights, or the conservative stand of protecting us from terrorists.

However, there is another question to which the positions of left or right, Democrat or Republican, don't apply. If we believe the Declaration of Independence, each of us may one day face alone the creator who made all men equal, and have to answer for allowing our Government to deny the rights of innocents.

What will you say?

If there's more, it's here.

Opportunity Cost

is the cost of what you couldn't do because of what you chose to do.

A few weeks ago, I heard the following exchange on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: There has been much discussion in the United States that the U.S. took its eye off of Afghanistan, and distracted by Iraq. Could the $300 billion that we have spent in Iraq have been better spent stabilizing Afghanistan and rebuilding Afghanistan?

PRES. KARZAI: Three hundred billion dollars? You give that to Afghanistan, and we’ll be heaven in less than a year.

The normally unflappable Karzai sounded like a desert dweller seeing a lake for the first time.

We have greatly increased hatred for the US by creating a hell in Iraq. What if we had created "heaven" in Afghanistan instead?

We will never know.

If there's more, it's here.

Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas - The Christian right gets scammed!

I should be unsympathetic, but I'm from the Bible-belt, and have seen the power of true Christian faith first hand. So I have mixed emotions when I read this:

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

Entitled “Tempting Faith,” the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has obtained a copy.

“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state.

In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on religious organizations seeking to serve the public.

Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these examples became a huge priority.… If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.”

In fact, when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on “compassion” social programs, Kuo claims he discovered the amount was $20 million a year less than during the Clinton Administration.

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims, with organizations friendly to the administration often winning grants.

More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications as saying she stopped looking at applications from “those non-Christian groups,” as did many of her colleagues.

“Tempting Faith” contains several other controversial claims about Kuo’s office, the Bush White House and even the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress.

Calls and e-mails to the White House have not been returned.

My first reaction was, "What did you expect? These are politicians!"

It's truly amazing that after all of the disapointments evangelicals have sufferred at the hands of politicians, their leaders still haven't figured it out:

James Dobson, Charles W. Colson and other stalwarts of the conservative Christian movement defended the Bush administration and questioned the timing of the book's publication, a month before the midterm elections. Some suggested that Kuo had betrayed the White House.

Or maybe they have:

As a candidate for Senator in Louisiana, a state legislator named Tony Perkins received about ten percent of the statewide vote. As a Washington lobbyist, Tony Perkins is a celebrity. To the 1,000 or so pastors and activists attending the Family Research Council’s Washington Briefing this weekend, he is responsible for carrying their voice into the inner sanctums of the White House. As such, to leaders of these state groups, he has enhanced their personal brand.

So he received star treatment: rounds of applause, a harried young entourage, and even a walk-and-talk with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, who, with camera crew and producers, were filming a segment on “values voters.”

"Celebrity", "inner sanctums of the White House", "enhanced their personal brand", and "star treatment" aren't exactly what I would call attributes of Christian living, but they are certainly desirable for a politician, which is what these "religious leaders" have become.

Christians need to wake up and realize that salvation doesn't come from the political process. Jesus didn't teach his followers to put their faith in government. Why follow people who believe such things?

Jesus said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's." Saving sinners is not the government's duty, and saving democracy is not the church's.

If there's more, it's here.

The American Way

I was writing something about the presumption of innocence the other day, when these three words slipped out: The American Way.

For a brief, shining moment, the towers stood again, and we were the good guys, basking in the admiration and respect of the rest of the world. From that vantage, I saw us complete, rather than in the dribs and flashes daily life only provides.

We have strayed. Oh, how far we have strayed!

Let's cut the bullshit that permeates our political discourse. The cold facts show the following:

We invded a nation that did nothing to us, and didn't ask for our help. Quibble all you want, but there were no WMD's, no mushroom cloud, and no partnership with Al Qaeda. Saddam was a brutal tyrant, but Iraqis were better off under Saddam.

We debate what torture is and isn't because our leaders tell us they need new "coercive techniques" to get information from captives, but have never proven that the old techniques don't work. Nobody's demanded that proof. In the meantime, we have undeniably tortured people to death.

We pass laws to strip the people we detain of the ability to contest their detention, get a speedy trial, or even see a judge. We argue that they are terrorists and don't deserve such rights. But we have disappeared innocent people, and put them through hell.

We spy on our own people, and equate criticism of the government with aiding the enemy. Citizens are intimidated and the press is cowed when they exercise their First Amendment rights.

It's all justified in the name of defeating evil terrorists, which turns out to be a dubious rationale, though you may buy all the excuses offered. Just get this straight:

It's not the American Way.

Americans don't start wars, we finish them.

Americans don't torture prisoners, we treat them lawfully and win their cooperation.

Americans uphold the Bill of Rights and the rule of law.

Americans may disagree, but we work together.

Tyrants are cowards. Americans are brave.

Our society has always had its problems, 9/11 didn't change that. But we kept in our hearts a vision of America - “Bring us your tired, your weak, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” - that was real for all our faults, and others could see that and responded to it.

Now, we live by the one percent doctrine, "Even if there's just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty."

That's not the American Way. That's cowardice!

If there's more, it's here.