Ross Douthat has an interesting item on American religiosity in the Atlantic.
In the United States, the Bush era has summoned up — arguably for the first time in this countryâs history — a mass secularism that looks to Europe and sees a model for America to follow. [â¦]
Americaâs secular turn actually began in the 1990s, though it wasnât until 2002 that two Berkeley sociologists first noticed it. In a paper in the American Sociological Review, Michael Hout and Claude S. Fischer announced the startling fact that the percentage of Americans who said they had âno religious preferenceâ had doubled in less than 10 years, rising from 7 percent to 14 percent of the population.
This unexpected spike wasnât the result of growing atheism, Hout and Fischer argued; rather, more Americans were distancing themselves from organized religion as âa symbolic statementâ against the religious right. If the association of religiosity with political conservatism continued to gain strength, the sociologists suggested, âthen liberalsâ alienation from organized religion [might] become, as it has in many other nations, institutionalized.â (emphasis added)
I havenât reviewed the Hout/Fischer report in any real detail, but a large jump in the rates of those who claim no religious preference is rather unusual, particularly in light of claims, such as those from the president, that weâre in the midst of a âThird Awakeningâ of religious devotion in the United States.
I suspect there are a variety of explanations for the incremental increase. Perhaps itâs geo-political — with Americaâs enemies overseas being religious extremists, maybe more people are becoming secular. Perhaps the increased openness on the part of non-believers (i.e., best-selling books from Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens) makes people more comfortable in acknowledging spiritual doubts.
But if the Hout/Fischer analysis is right, and more people are turning away from organized religion because theyâre just so repulsed by the Dobson/Robertson crowd, well, thatâs just hilarious.
On “Meet the Press” this morning, David Broder, who’s been having a rough year, blamed Democrats for the failures of the immigration reform bill.
“Well, the Democrats have taken the position that they now will do with the nation’s business. And if they’re not doing that business, and clearly the immigration issue is very much on people’s mind, I think they will suffer the same consequences that the Republicans suffered a year ago. People are fed up with seeing Washington bickering, fighting, infighting and never dealing with the issue.”
This strikes me as wrong for two reasons. First is the obvious problem with the observation: blaming Senate Dems for failing to pass the immigration bill is kind of silly. Dems worked with the White House on a compromise, brought the bill to the floor, and about four-in-five Senate Dems voted to support it. In contrast, 85% of the Senate GOP caucus voted against it, and the president apparently couldn’t move a single Republican vote. Broder finds Reid, Durbin, & Co. a convenient scapegoat, but if he’s looking for a party to blame, he’s got the wrong one.
Second is Broder’s notion that Dems are failing to do “the nation’s business” because the immigration bill died (or, at a minimum, is on life support). His analysis is over-simplified to the point of comedy: “people” want Congress to “deal with” immigration, and they’re “fed up” with the “fighting.” Broder’s colleague, Dan Balz, recently offered a similar assessment.
Regrettably, this is congressional analysis at its most vapid. Broder, neither today nor in print, actually explained what he’d like Congress to do about immigration; he just thinks lawmakers should do “something.”
But therein lies the rub: immigration policy is kind of complicated, and different people want it “fixed” in different ways. Broder’s position seems to be, “Fix the problem by passing a new policy.” But which policy? What’s the “problem” that needs fixing? Does Broder blame Senate Dems because they didn’t pass Bush’s bill, or because they didn’t embrace a more conservative approach to the issue?
Broder doesn’t say, but he’s “fed up” anyway.
A couple of weeks ago, E.J. Dionne had a column in which he explained, “There is the unspoken assumption that wisdom always lies in the political middle, no matter how unsavory the recipe served up by a given group of self-proclaimed centrists might be.”
Broder might want to read it.
The article is not explicit, but an underlying theme of the Washington Post’s profile on Dick Cheney is that his unprecedented power is only possible because Bush is anxious to get out of the way.
Waxing or waning, Cheney holds his purchase on an unrivaled portfolio across the executive branch. Bush works most naturally, close observers said, at the level of broad objectives, broadly declared. Cheney, they said, inhabits an operational world in which means are matched with ends and some of the most important choices are made. When particulars rise to presidential notice, Cheney often steers the preparation of options and sits with Bush, in side-by-side wing chairs, as he is briefed.
Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.
“Side-by-side wing chairs”? I’m reminded of the embarrassing point in 2004 in which the President agreed to talk to the 9/11 Commission, but only if Cheney could sit with Bush, and help answer questions, during the discussion.
In 2000, when Bush, an inexperienced governor in a state where the governor has limited power, sought the presidency, his supporters insisted the nation need not worry — Bush had assembled a team of capable “advisors” who would help guide his hand.
What the equation didn’t consider is what happens when the advisors disagree and the President has to make a decision. As the Post’s profile makes clear, Bush has spent the better part of the last six years simply going along with Cheney’s demands. Dan Quayle characterized this as Cheney taking on the role of “surrogate chief of staff.” The reality is more disconcerting — Cheney has routinely been the “surrogate President,” with Bush putting his signature on the VP’s ideas (military commissions, domestic warrantless-searches) because the VP told him it was the right thing to do.
Indeed, when it came to ignoring the Geneva Conventions, Cheney made his decision before Bush did.
On Nov. 14, 2001, the day after Bush signed the commissions order, Cheney took the next big step. He told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that terrorists do not “deserve to be treated as prisoners of war.”
The president had not yet made that decision. Ten weeks passed, and the Bush administration fought one of its fiercest internal brawls, before Bush ratified the policy that Cheney had declared: The Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters captured on the battlefield.
Meet George W. Bush, the not-so-innocent bystander of his own presidency.
As part of its cover story on “what you need to know now,” Newsweek conducted a broad poll on a variety of political and cultural affairs. There were plenty of interesting results, but one section was particularly noteworthy.
Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in ten Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right — and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.
For that matter, one in five Americans (20%) believe that we did find chemical/biological weapons “hidden by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”
Perhaps most troubling, the number of people who are confused about Iraq’s non-existent role in the 9/11 attacks has gone up in recent years. When Newsweek asked the same question in the fall of 2004, 36% said Saddam Hussein was “directly involved” with the attacks. Nearly three years later, that number is 41%.
Sure, Bush administration officials have been careless with their rhetoric, leading to some confusion. And sure, there were probably some Fox News viewers included in the poll, skewing the numbers.
But that still doesn’t explain a result like this one.
William Kristol bills himself as a serious, credible person, and is routinely rewarded by the DC establishment. As Kevin Drum recently put it, “The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you.”
But one need not look too far below the surface to find the shameless partisan hack.
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol defended Vice President Cheney’s decision to exempt himself from an executive order designed to safeguard classified national security information.
Kristol said the exemptions for the president and vice president were “reasonable enough.” He called it “a pain in the neck” to have “some bureaucrat” from the National Archives “come and inspect your safe to see whether you’re locking it up properly each night.”
He did not appear to be kidding.
Let’s review: Dick Cheney was bound by a presidential executive order to safeguard classified materials. Cheney ignored the E.O., exempted himself from its instructions, and mishandled secret information. The federal agency responsible for oversight had a few questions about all of this, which Cheney ignored, insisting that he’s not part of the executive branch of government. The Vice President then decided he’d like to resolve the questions by eliminating the oversight agency asking them.
Kristol believes this is “reasonable enough”? If Vice President Al Gore had conducted himself the same way, would Kristol come to the same conclusion? (As for some “bureaucrat” checking to see if the OVP properly locked up its safe, we’re not just talking about oversight; this deals with the willful mishandling of classified secrets in a time of war. That Kristol takes a rather blase attitude about the whole thing speaks poorly to the right’s credibility on national security.)
I’ve been curious about how the right’s leading voices might respond to Cheney’s bizarre and rather dangerous arguments. So far, we haven’t heard much, except Kristol’s ham-fisted nonsense this morning.
The White House’s allies will have to do better than this.
The New York Times responds to our criticism of the paper’s Friday front-page slam of John Edwards.
Report: Dem Presidential candidates tiptoeing around gay rights issues. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.
I knew the GOP was hard up. But I had no idea it was this bad.
According to this quite hilarious article in the San Francisco Chronicle, the California GOP has hired as its chief operating officer, an Australian national who the Department of Homeland Security has been trying to deport for repeated immigration violations. As recently as Februrary, Michael Kamburowski, was working, rather haplessly, as a real estate agent in the Domincan Republic until he “ran away without mentioning anything to us,” according to his one-time boss, Rico Pester, the owner of Re/Max Island Realty, in the resort town of Punta Cana. (Said his Re/Max bio: “With his attention to detail, laid-back yet professional approach, and sense of humor, Michael will smoothen the road to your dream property in Punta Cana.”)
Perhaps it is somehow implicitly redundant to note that in the second half of the 1990s Kamburowski was working for Grover Norquist on immigration policy, tort reform and ‘paycheck protection’ before becoming the executive director of Norquist’s Reagan Legacy Project.
Along the way there were a couple of hasty marriages leading shortly to his new brides submitting “Petition for Alien Relative” forms to get him citizenship, various stints as an “aspiring actor” and even a stay at the Wackenhut Correctional Facility in Jamaica, New York courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security.
In addition to his work running the California Republican party he is also suing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for “significant financial hardship” and “severe emotional stress and embarrassment” for trying to have him deported.
Apparently, this wasn’t the last of the CA GOP’s overseas outreach.
Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring, who hired the afore-mocked Kamburowski, claimed he was not able to find a qualified political director for the California party among the three-hundred-odd million citizens of the United States. Nehring used a H1B visa (the type commonly used by high-tech companies when say they need to hire a foreigner with a skill not possessed by any American) to Christopher Matthews, a Canadian citizen, with no experience in California politics.
Ever the enabler of criminals and dangerous men, Alberto Gonzales has apparently been helping VP Cheney sustain his claim that he’s not part of the executive branch.
On Friday I published an email by TPM Reader SM which noted how the most major media outlets now appear to be referring to nearly everyone fighting US troops in Iraq as ‘al Qaeda’. I want to point your attention to a follow-up to that post by Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald provides a nice detailed analysis of recent reporting on Iraq that strongly points to what most of us probably assumed: namely, that there’s no reason to believe that the folks now dubbed ‘al Qaeda’ are any other than the folks formerly called ‘insurgents’. Particularly look at the second half of Glenn’s post, including the update, where he notes how reporters with a good track record of not being bamboozled by administration claptrap appear to be resisting the rhetorical al Qaidization of the Iraqi insurgency.
Now there is one more detail I’d like to add to this discussion. On Saturday morning, TPM Reader AK sent in an email calling attention to this passage in an article in the Times, whose Michael Gordon appears to be one of the top Qaedization offenders …
Jalal Jaff, a Sunni Kurd, who lives just behind the street where the bomb exploded and raced to the scene to pull people from burning cars, turned his head away on Tuesday as he passed the parking lot with more than a dozen destroyed cars, only their charred frames left, the rubber completely burned off their tires.
âHe is a paid terrorist, not a human being,â he said. âThe families will never know which body belongs to their relatives. They were mutilated. They had no faces.â
Like most of the people in the neighborhood, Mr. Jaff blamed Al Qaeda, a term used by Iraqis to refer generally to terrorists. The group operating in Iraq known as Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia includes many Iraqis but has some foreign leadership.
It’s an interesting passage in that it essentially confirms the point made above — that the only change here is one of labels, that the ‘Sunni insurgents’ and ‘Baathist dead-enders’ are now ‘al Qaeda’ merely by dint of blowing things up. But it also suggests that the change of labels isn’t simply a matter of the US military and American journalists but also appears to be the norm among ordinary Iraqis themselves.
I’m skeptical of that claim. But it is also worth noting that it has long been claimed that the Iraqi government, like the US government, has systematically overstated the role of ‘foreign fighters’ and ‘al Qaeda’ since they too do not wish to see the insurgency as Iraqi and either inter-sectarian or anti-occupation in nature.
Keep watching the press reports on this. Tell us what you find.