Let it bleed

By Capt. Fogg

"What about the Jewish heart and Jewish compassion and Jewish morality?"

asks Elie Wiesel. Perhaps those are no different from anyone elses heart, compassion and morality: just ornaments to wear on parade and to mock when it's not profitable or when we're not comfortable. People who are troubled by plans by the State of Israel to deport people born and educated there; sometimes minors, who speak the language and often no other language because their parents, brought in as 'guest workers,' have overstayed their visas.

In a country offering automatic right of citizenship to any Jew, born there or not, it seems inconsistent, unless we consider that universal human tendency to surround one's self with one's ilk. These native residents are not, of course, Jews and apparently the official design of Israel as a "Jewish State" is threatened by religious diversity -- and who or what country remains moral when threatened? Not the US, not Israel.

Eli Yishai, Minister of the Interior and the man who oversees immigration policy invokes the "bleeding heart Liberal" straw man so well used by right wingers everywhere as though compassion, mercy and indeed, morality had no place in that questionable construct: the Judeo-Christian ethos.

The US doesn't seem to be in a position to offer criticism or guidance, of course. We have our own problems reconciling our facade with what goes on, and like Israel, we cling to the word illegal as though it were a solid refuge against moral condemnation. People; small children who are illegal as a result of no action of their own and who have had no ability to comply with immigration laws rightly make one's heart bleed if one has a heart with blood in it. Indeed it can be said of both nations, that they make a big issue of alleging Biblical origins for their laws while using the law as though morality were too expensive, too inconvenient and too frightening.

It's ethnic cleansing and it's always a dirty business and these days our tendency to continue to make such noble statements as one finds on the Statue of Liberty reek of hypocrisy concerns me more than the admittedly real problems with uncontrolled immigration. Perhaps we should come clean and put an "If you're white, you're all right" in Lady Liberty's hand or at least stop pretending our laws are a salute to Jesus. If we follow through on the assault on the 14th amendment, making people born and raised as Americans, who pay taxes, have jobs and businesses but never knew there parent's weren't citizens, we're going to inherit the same moral dilemma. I have to wonder in fact, as to whether, having had a grandfather who was never a citizen, my mother would retroactively be an alien, making me, after 65 years as a citizen, subject to deportation and constant fear lest there be a midnight knock on the door by a black gloved fist.

If there's no moral problem with sending a kid who speaks only English back "home" to Azerbaijan or Guatemala with no chance of appeal, then it's time we stopped pretending we're any different from anybody else.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Forgive and forget

By Mustang Bobby

When the news broke that Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and then Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) had confessed to having extramarital affairs (and in the case of Mr. Vitter, engaged the services of a prostitute), the knee-jerk reaction among the conservatives was to respond with "Spitzer-Edwards-Clinton did it too!" even if no one had brought up the former Governor of New York, the former Senator from North Carolina and presidential candidate, or the former president. It was a preemptive attempt to inoculate them from accusations of hypocrisy by distraction. It's a juvenile response and it really doesn't work because a) it's irrelevant, and b) why would conservatives, who make a living bashing liberals or anyone who doesn't toe their line of granular morality, want to compare themselves to people they view as moral degenerates?

There are a couple of reasons I can think of. For one thing, the Republicans have branded themselves as the party of morality and personal responsibility and held up the Democrats as advocates of "divorce, illegitimacy, adultery, homosexuality, bestiality and pornography." And yet the Republicans have supplied us with ample examples of their own "moral degeneracy," as Joe Conason delineates in Salon.com:

The supposed depravity of the Democratic Party has long been a favorite theme of conservatives, dating back to the rise of Newt Gingrich, who distributed an official campaign lexicon to Republican congressional candidates that featured such defining insults as "decadent," "permissive," "sick," "selfish" and, of course, "liberal." Back then the Georgia Republican was on his second marriage and carrying on a clandestine affair with the young Capitol Hill clerk who would eventually become his third wife (after he converted to Catholicism and had his union with wife No. 2 annulled). In 2007, he admitted on James Dobson's radio show that he was cheating on wife No. 2 with future wife No. 3 while he was publicly chastising President Clinton for consorting with Monica Lewinsky. Gingrich has remained a consistent favorite among his pious comrades.

Today, in fact, Gingrich is fully rehabilitated as a party spokesman, still nurturing presidential ambitions. So why should any other Republican fear the wrath of the righteous? The disappointment in Sanford and Ensign among the devout must be particularly keen, since they have so rigorously aligned themselves with the most fervent elements of the religious right.

For more than a decade, Ensign lent his name to Promise Keepers, the all-male Christian prayer movement run by a former Colorado football coach, whose mass rallies highlighted men's integrity, purity and uncompromising domination of family life. Both he and Sanford have worked closely with the Family, a secretive Christian fellowship on Capitol Hill that maintains a brick townhouse where Ensign and other members of Congress have resided. Over the years both men have won the highest marks from the Family Research Council, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association -- and until the other day, Sanford was featured as an invited speaker at the Family Research Council's upcoming Values Voters Summit 2009. (As Pam Spaulding and Think Progress noted, however, the FRC removed his photo from the summit Web site immediately following his confessional press conference.)

Certainly there is considerable pressure for Sanford to resign in South Carolina, and perhaps he will surrender. But he might well ask whether that is fair when Ensign is hanging on and Vitter appears to be in the clear. For a while, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins had threatened to challenge Vitter in the Republican primary next year, but last March he announced that he won't run after all -- and instead endorsed Vitter for reelection. Amazingly, Perkins then hosted a radio broadcast with Vitter as his guest, where they tut-tutted over the alleged ethical problems of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Nobody had the poor taste to mention the infamous black books in which Vitter's friendly madams in Washington and New Orleans had inscribed his name and phone number.

That brings up another element in the equation. The conservatives are remarkably forgiving of their own transgressors. Mr. Vitter, Mr. Ensign, and Mr. Sanford still have their jobs, and the idea of quitting -- at least voluntarily -- doesn't get much traction with them or with their party. (The one exception was Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), who, when caught e-mailing sexually explicit messages to teenage boys, was out of a job and out of town before sundown. The difference, of course, was that he is gay. Gov. Mark Sanford's e-mails to his mistress are the stuff of bad romance novels, but he still has a job. There are even double standards in incriminating evidence.) Democrats are not so lenient. Mr. Spitzer resigned his office (as did Gov. Jim McGreevy (D-NJ) when he came out of the closet and admitted to an affair with his driver) and Mr. Edwards will never hold political office again.

Why is that? You could probably chalk the Republicans' ability to forgive and forget up to their Christian charity, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just big old hypocrites who hold everyone else up to a higher standard than they are willing to hold themselves up to. (Either that or if they ran out everyone in the party who was divorced or had a fling, there would be even fewer of them than there are now.) And you can also assume that they will find someone else to blame for their own failings; back when Newt Gingrich was going through his divorce, his allies blamed it on Bill Clinton's culture of permissiveness, and now Rush Limbaugh is blaming Mr. Sanford's fling on Barack Obama and the struggle he had with the South Carolina state legislature accepting federal stimulus funds (bringing a whole other meaning to the term "stimulus package," I guess). So much for the "personal responsibility" party.

Moral failings and human frailties are oblivious to party allegiance. We all have them. So trying to exploit someone else's while holding yourself up as the paragon of virtue is destined for epic failure. That's harder to forgive and forget.

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

The humanity and hypocrisy of Mark Sanford

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Mark Sanford is no longer missing, but he's obviously lost." So writes Slate's John Dickerson to open an article on the Mark Sanford saga that, in light of what we learned yesterday, adds some much-needed humanity, largely out of respect to Sanford's own humanity, to what has been, in some circles, a case of gleeful Schadenfreude.

It's an article that really got me thinking last night. Hopefully this makes sense.

I and many other bloggers and political commentators were making a big deal out of the Sanford saga. At first, though, it was rather easy to. The man upped and disappeared, ditching his security detail and not even telling his family where he was going over Father's Day weekend. Plus, it seemed like his office was lying, or that he'd been lying to his staff. (His wife said he was off writing. His staff said he was hiking. Surely there was inconsistency there.) And then there was the not-so-small matter of a sitting governor just leaving. It all seemed rather weird, and I think it was only proper to ask questions.

Which is the point that many observers were making, myself included: There were more questions than answers. What was needed was answers.

Well, the answers came yesterday, in an awkward and uncomfortable press conference, a confession in front of the press, and, yes, Sanford revealed himself to be... a human being -- deeply flawed, perhaps, or perhaps even broken, but much like the rest of us all-too-human human beings.

And, yes, I do feel sorry for him. (He and his wife, Jenny, have separated. Read her statement here. I have been through too many personal difficulties of my own over the years not to be sympathetic. I do not envy them.)

Here at The Reaction, there was a difference of opinion with respect to whether even to cover the saga in the first place (with me writing extensively on it, prior to Sanford's return, and Carl arguing yesterday that Sanford's philandering is simply not "within bounds").

The saga remains a huge story, though, and so we continue to cover it, but, now that we know what happened, more or less, we can acknowledge that it's really none of our business. Sanford's personal troubles, I mean. He will have to live with what he has done, and his family will have to try to recover. It doesn't seem quite as funny, though it remains rather disturbing, that he took off for Argentina while his staff, clueless or covering up, put him somewhere on the Appalachian Trail.

Where there is an issue, though, is with the hypocrisy of conservative Republicans who talk family values but don't live up to the talk. It's an old story, yes, and there are many of them: Vitter, Foley, Ensign, Gingrich, etc.

To me, that is the story, or a big part of it, and it is what separates liberals from conservatives. Liberals and Democrats have, to be sure, found themselves at the center of media storms over their philandering: Clinton, Edwards, etc. But neither Clinton nor Edwards was a moralist or a theocrat. They revealed themselves to be flawed human beings, but they didn't promote conservative "family values." There was no hypocrisy.

"The State has no place in the bedroom of the nation," said Pierre Trudeau, one of Canada's greatest prime ministers, and, to me, that applies to all of us. The nation -- the people -- has no place in anyone's bedroom, unless there is harm being done, unless there is just cause to intervene.

In this case, we have no place in Sanford's bedroom, or in the middle of his family. What he did in private, in Argentina or elsewhere, is his business -- and his family's. But what he did in public -- the executive of a state using state property, and temporarily leaving the state on personal business without, it would seem, informing all those who needed to know, as well as what he has said and the policies he has supported as an elected official, namely, the moralism of the right -- well, that's the people's business, too, especially so in a democracy.

Liberals, in particular, should respect the public/private divide and give Sanford space. It makes no sense, and it is just plain ugly, to gloat over the very human failings of another human being. But I think we are right to point to the hypocrisy, and to marvel at the arrogance of one who forces his morality on everyone but himself.