Those of you outside the Washington, DC area may not know who Anthony Williams is, and you might be confused by the fact that he doesn’t appear on the ballot in any of the 50 states. Anthony Williams was the mayor of Washington, DC from 1999 to 2007, and he did a heckuva job cleaning up after a heckuva mess.

How? After the disastrous administration of the grandstanding (and coke-snorting) Marion Barry, Tony Williams came into the mayor’s office with his nasally voice and his dorky little bow tie. He didn’t spew forth a lot of bullshit about the audacity of hope and the firmness of character. Williams simply rolled up his sleeves, set the dial for Maximum Wonkiness, and turned out budget surplus after budget surplus. You could see him on TV in press conferences for years, discussing the minutiae of fiscal policy with the authority of someone who stayed up half the night digging through stacks of government reports. Nobody was inspired to write a song about how they had a crush on Tony Williams.

Before Williams, the city was in such dire shape that Congress had to step in and effectively wrest control out of Mayor Barry’s hands, setting up a control board to manage the city’s affairs. Before Williams, a good chunk of DC’s parking meters were permanently busted, because a bunch of punks discovered that you could easily decapitate them with a baseball bat. Seriously. The city was full of smashed-up parking meters that the city didn’t bother to fix, losing out on millions of dollars of revenue.

In my view, Anthony Williams is the model of what a president should be. A sober, staid manager who keeps his head, who knows the facts better than anyone else, who arbitrates disputes by getting people to sit down at a table and discuss things calmly like grown-ups. Presidents do not need to be soaring masters of inspirational rhetoric. They don’t need to promise you the moon. You can have your presidents who promise you get-rich-quick schemes; I want a president who consistently delivers prime plus two.

It’s obvious who I’m taking aim at here. Hint: his name begins with a “B” and ends with “arack Obama.” I’ve been watching the hype surrounding this guy for months now and shaking my head in amazement. It’s amazing how many people fall for this stuff every two years. We’re going to restore civility to Washington, DC! We’re going to cut through the partisan gridlock! We’re going to change the tone! Right, sure. President Howard Dean said that too, as did President Wesley Clarke, President Ross Perot, President Colin Powell, President Gary Hart, and President Jerry Brown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was going to end the partisan bickering in Congress, right before she started threatening other Democrats with retaliation if they didn’t support the fiercely partisan Jack Murtha for House Majority Leader.

Every time I hear the rhetoric about courage and audacity of hope, I roll my eyes. What the hell does that even mean? Courage and audacity to hope for what? It’s meaningless blather. It doesn’t tell you anything. It’s kind of like those people who tell you that they don’t follow any particular religion, but they’re “spiritual.” To quote the late Chris Farley — well, la-dee-frickin’-da!

Memo to Senator Barack Obama: It wasn’t particularly noteworthy that Martin Luther King had a dream, it was noteworthy what he was dreaming about. I mean, Osama bin Laden has a dream too. He’s inspired radical Muslims with the courage and audacity to hope and dream better than any sorry-ass American politician is likely to do in our lifetimes. The problem is that bin Laden’s dream is about a new caliphate slicing off the heads of infidels.

We don’t need new dreams. George Washington, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, et al had a pretty damn good dream (though they could have done better in terms of extending that dream beyond the walls of white male landowners). What we need are good administrators and competent executors of that old dream.

Which is kind of what makes me shake my head at all this disparaging talk of the “Clinton machine.” What’s wrong with machines? I don’t know about you, but I drive a machine to work every day, and I use a machine to wash my clothes. Despite the audacity of hope that using a ballpoint pen and notebook paper to write this blog post would inspire, I think I’m better off typing it on a machine. Machines are efficient. They work. And by definition they have no moral agency of their own; they’re just tools to help achieve the ambitions of human beings.

It’s not that I don’t like Obama. (And I’m not trying to write this in a backhanded attempt to boost Hillary Clinton.) I suspect Obama’d be a pretty good president, and he’d do a decent job of restoring respectability to the United States on the global Whuffie exchange. His rhetoric is good, but his ideas are hardly revolutionary. I think he’s got as good a plan as any candidate for dealing with the Iraq mess. He couldn’t possibly do much worse of a job than our current president — but then again, he shares that distinction with everyone from Al Roker to Bobcat Goldthwaite to, hell, maybe even Marion Barry. I’m sure if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, I’ll vote for him over whichever nut job wins the GOP nod. (Although I’m prepared to listen to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, if either of them get the bid.)

But this “inspiration to change the world” stuff is just a shtick. That’s all it is. It’s a good shtick, and to some extent a president needs to be able to do a good shtick. But in the end, it’s not the capacity to love and heal and embrace change that is going to help this country. It’s the ability to be a boring policy wonk who stays up half the night burying one’s nose in stacks of government reports.

Like Tony Williams.

What do I mean by moral challenges? Well, defining morality is a sticky business even if you’re a full-time philosopher, which I’m not, or a believer in God, which I’m also not. The definition I’m favoring these days goes something like this: morality means making decisions that benefit the most number of people in the long run, and by extension the human race as a whole.

So what, in my opinion, are the greatest moral quandaries currently facing the species? Thinking from the long view, and trying not to get bogged down in short-term issues (e.g. the Iraq War), I’d argue that they are these five:

1. We need a sustainable way to live on the planet. As I’ve written before on my post about Global Warming Skepticism, I don’t particularly care about the Earth, except inasmuch as we can’t live without it. Right now, letting the Earth die means letting us die. So it’s imperative for the species’ survival that we either a) learn to conserve the planet’s natural resources, b) figure out how to keep the species going using renewable resources, or c) invest heavily in survivalism science that will let us live without them. (Or, more likely, a combination of a, b, and c.) Personally, I’d be happy living in a funky sci-fi dome city, but making something like that sustainable is much harder than it looks. Ergo: investing heavily in alternative energy is a moral imperative.

2. We need to divorce morality from religion. I don’t think anything good comes from the belief that we should refrain from murder, theft, and rape because someone wrote it down in a book five thousand years ago. Those of us who don’t believe in an all-powerful Being In The Clouds are just as capable of defining principles of morality and sticking to them — in fact, I’d argue that we’re more capable. If you want to continue to believe in God, great; but we can agree on moral principles regardless without the intervention of priests, pastors, rabbis, popes, ayatollahs, imams, or prophets. What I’m saying is that the species needs to be able to think moralistically in a way that’s inclusive of both religious and non-religious people.

3. We need to figure out how to balance personal freedom with equitable division of wealth. Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term.

4. We need to take the nuclear option out of the picture. Once upon a time, two countries were idiotic enough to play a high-stakes game of chess where the stakes were the survival of the human race. You don’t like my way of governing? Fine, then let’s blow the whole place to hell and you can’t govern any of it. Figuring out how to get rid of these weapons so that nobody has the power to scour the planet clean is one heck of a challenge. There’s no Cold War anymore, but the odds of a nuclear war breaking out in either the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent are still much too high for us to ignore. (Personally, I don’t think the threat is going anywhere until some theoretical point in the future when we’re living so much of our lives virtually that physical threats just don’t make sense anymore.)

5. We need to get serious about global human rights. The United States pays a lot of lip service to the idea of global human rights — and compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re willing to do something about it more of the time — but too often we back down from the ideals of democracy when it suits us. The way we’ve helped Israel shunt aside the results of free, democratic elections in Palestine is shameful, and the way we turn a blind eye to similar human rights abuses in our allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia is equally ludicrous. But compared to much of the rest of the world, we’re light-years ahead. We’ve ditched slavery, worked hard to put all races on an equal footing, and we’re in the long, slow process of recognizing alternative sexual orientations. Until the whole planet works the same way, we’re going to have a hard time moving forward as a species.

Okay, so these are my five long-term moral challenges for the species. What did I miss?

Update 1/16/08: Some interesting commentary on this article by S. M. Duke here, here, and here.

You realize, of course, that this is the end of Ann Coulter’s career. She is probably realizing that right about now too. There’s no mea culpa that covers something like this. Even Sean Hannity will be wrapping his defense of Ann Coulter in statements like, “Now, of course what she said about the Jewish people is shameful and anti-Semitic and horrible and wrong, but [insert hapless attempt to change the subject to a criticism of Hillary Clinton].”

I’m going to admit something that you will find shocking: I kinda like Ann Coulter. I agree with very little that she says, but she generally is funny. Left-wingers (and centrists) don’t get that she’s a humorist, just like right-wingers take everything that Al Franken and Bill Maher say as straight-faced screeds of liberal intolerance. Dude, they’re jokes. Sure, Coulter goes too far — sometimes quite a bit too far — but she’s entertaining and she provokes political debate. I thought her calling John Edwards a “faggot” was priceless, even if it’s a somewhat peculiar slur considering the fact that he’s one of the nation’s preeminent devoted husbands (and opposed to gay marriage too). As for using a nasty slur against homosexuals, I’ve made my feelings about such epithets known before.

Coulter’s biggest crime with the thing about “perfecting Jews into Christians” is that it wasn’t funny. There were a couple of amusing quips — asking Donny Deutsch if he wanted to go to church with her made me chuckle — but she quickly fell into the trap of trying to say these things with a straight face.

The funniest thing of all? She’s absolutely right.

Not about Jews needing to be perfected into Christians, of course. That’s silly and absurd. But she’s right that this is what Christians believe essentially what the New Testament says. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t agree about everything that Jesus did while he was alive, but I think they were all pretty clear about a few key points. There’s nothing that I’m aware of in the New Testament that says Jesus is your Lord and Savior, unless you choose to ignore everything he had to say and continue practicing the Old Testament the way you’re used to practicing it, in which case no problem! No, according to the book, God sent his kid down here to tell the whole world that humanity has messed up pretty seriously and we need a reboot, so pay attention. (Of course, Jesus also had a lot to say about being tolerant of others — something about casting stones, I think? — but never mind that.)

(There’s also a lot of modern debate about whether Jesus actually said anything about being the son of God. If I’m correct about this — and someone will need to point me to the right place to back this up — there are only one or two passages in the New Testament where Jesus directly claims he’s the One True Savior, and some scholars believe those passages were misinterpreted or inserted later. Take out a couple of sentences, and the things Jesus was saying become quite different.)

I find it amusing to see public religious figures in the media soft-pedaling the differences between their faiths. As if none of those differences matter as long as we all believe in one all-powerful, omnipotent God. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, we’re all essentially heading in the same direction, aren’t we? So let’s all get along! What’s that? What about the Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, Confucians, Wiccans, and whomever else that don’t believe in one God and aren’t headed in the same direction? No problem! Just agree with our basic precepts of morality, and everything’s hunky-dorey. Wait, some people out there don’t respect those either? Fine, then just don’t hurt anybody. Please.

Someone’s got to explain this to me. Does everybody go to Heaven, provided that they’re following their deeply held faith? Who goes to Hell then? Just the vicious, unrepentant murderers? That’s a pretty low bar to set.

The pundits and scholars on TV dance circles and try to convince us (and themselves) that all the bad, hateful, spiteful, ridiculous things in the holy books were put there by ignorant monks or biased priests back in the Dark Ages. When the Bible says that homosexuality is an “abomination” (Leviticus 18:22), God didn’t really mean it. Either that, or we’re misinterpreting his words. He never actually said those words. He said them to a primitive audience, and so he had to phrase things differently. It’s an artifact of the translation.

But the Ann Coulters of the world blow this lovey-dovey mushiness right out of the (holy) water. They tell us in strident words that the Jews are going to Hell (Jerry Falwell) or that Muslims are justified in taking the lives of innocent infidels (Osama bin Laden) or that the Palestinians should be forcibly ejected from the land of Israel (Meir Kehane). They tell us that these books pretty much say what we think they say, and that there’s no rationalizing your way around it.

Fundamentalists have a right to be worried about the secularization of their traditions and institutions. Once you stop believing in the infallible truth of your holy documents, once you start applying reason to the whole process, you come to realize that there are big incompatibilities between the things we believe to be true today and the things our religions tell us. Once you start questioning the fundamental precepts of a religion, you come to realize that it’s only a matter of faith. And once you start wondering why it is you believe in this particular faith rather than some other completely incompatible faith, you start wondering if there’s any truth to any of them.

I’ve heard Bill Clinton say that whenever you can get people to focus on serious issues, the Democrats win. I’m not sure I agree with that statement, but I think it works when applied to religion. Whenever Ann Coulter shoots her mouth off, she forces people to confront the logical contradictions in their religious beliefs; and whenever you can get the people to focus on logic and reason, those of us who believe in secular morality without religion win.

That’s what I believe, anyway.

• The world is a vile and dangerous place.
• America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
• If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
• Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
• Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

At least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

These assumptions are also the ones that underline 2002′s The Bourne Identity. It’s a nice little popcorn flick with a plot so familiar you can slip into it like an old bathrobe. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon, playing a CIA-funded black ops assassin who has a change of heart because the agency has Gone Too Far. Now after a bout of amnesia, he finds himself on the run from the very organization that funded him. Car chases and dead bodies ensue. Spoiler alert: the heroic Matt Damon gets the girl, and the villainous Chris Cooper gets shot in the head. (Oh, and FYI, there are more spoilers below.)

And then someone had the inspired idea of hiring Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) to take over the franchise. To call The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum better films than their predecessor is kind of like calling a fine aged pinot grigio better than a Zima. They’re among the most intelligent, well-crafted, thoughtful thrillers about American paranoia that I’ve ever seen. (And holy crap, did you realize Matt Damon could act?)

Suddenly our protagonist is no longer just a youthful maverick spy fleeing across Europe with a spunky German chick in tow. Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious. He’s an unstoppable force who never tires, who never gives up, who can never be killed. Imagine a cross between Batman and Patrick Henry who knows how to kill people with a plastic pen.

Richard Corliss clearly noticed the transformation in his Time magazine review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

That’s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs. They are a projection of American power — or a memory of it, and the poignant wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That’s a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order.

Corliss is on to something here, but I think he’s got it exactly backwards. Jason Bourne isn’t just an action stud in the James Bond mold; Bourne is, in fact, a calculated response to James Bond, or more than that, he’s the anti-James Bond. James Bond on the Bizarro planet. Is it an accident that Jason Bourne and James Bond have the same initials? (Well, actually it probably is. But you’d have to ask Robert Ludlum, who created the character, and he’s dead. But apparently Greengrass didn’t read the Ludlum novels anyway.)

James Bond uses an assortment of high-tech gadgets helpfully provided to him by the British government. Sleek guns, high-tech cars, gizmos that are notable mainly for the way they’re camouflaged inside ordinary objects. Over the years, Bond has used:

• A remote-controlled BMW with rocket launcher
• A tricked-out surfboard with a hidden compartment for guns and explosives
• A ballpoint pen grenade
• A wristwatch with a built-in laser cutter
• An escape pod concealed in a ski jacket

Jason Bourne, by contrast, uses such glamorous weapons as:

• A cheap rotating fan
• A rolled-up newspaper
• Laundry pulled from a clothesline
• A beat-up Cooper Mini
• A plastic pen
• A hardback book

But even more interesting than the contrast of weapons is the contrast of attitudes towards government. James Bond is, in many ways, a manifestation of how the British would like to see themselves: debonair and worldly; as technologically adept as the Americans, without sacrificing class and gentility; dangerous when crossed. In the world of James Bond, the British government might be stodgy, but its heart is in the right place.

Jason Bourne, on the other hand, is a maverick who was once broken by his own government and is now on the run from it. In the world of Jason Bourne, the United States government is composed of equal parts corrupt slimeball and impotent douchebag, with a small contingent of do-gooders skulking around the fringes.

We can discuss Great Britain and James Bond another day. As for America: how did we get to this point? When did we get to the point that the assumptions outlined at the top of this article became commonplace?

I imagine it began in the aftermath of World War II as we ramped up to fight the Communists in their quest for world domination. It was fertilized by the suspicious assassination of John F. Kennedy, watered by Nixon’s dirty tricks in Watergate, nurtured by Reagan’s Iran/Contra hijinks, and ripened by George W. Bush’s global war on terror. And no, it wasn’t just the province of Republican administrations; Johnson was as manipulative a son-of-a-bitch as they come, Clinton did very little to stop or reverse the trend, and Carter played right into the paranoids’ hands by letting a bunch of religious maniacs hold Americans hostage in Iran without consequence.

The end result is that we the people don’t believe in the United States anymore.

Oh, sure, we believe in the people of the United States. We believe that our neighbors here in this country are largely honest, decent, hard-working citizens. But all the things the United States is supposed to stand for — the idea that free and open societies work better than closed ones, the idea that we can work out our differences through courts and legislation, the idea that we should live by principles of law and reason rather than mere tribalism — we don’t have faith in those things anymore. The courts are rigged against us, the government is laced with corruption and undue lobbying influence, the police are either too hampered by bureaucracy or too brutal and bloodthirsty to trust.

No, we need maverick heroes like Jason Bourne (and John McClane, and James Bond, and Indiana Jones, and Batman, and Jack Bauer, and every character that Arnold Schwarzeneggar ever played) who can skirt the law, who can actually break the law when they deem fit and not be held accountable for their actions because we know they’re really good, just, honorable people acting in our best interests. And every situation we face is a 24 situation. Al Qaeda has agents infiltrating your living room, they’re going to blow up the Sears Tower at any minute, there’s a ticking bomb about to go off! What, you want to trust the police at a time like this? You want to follow stupid laws hammered out by some ignorant yahoos in Washington who spend all their time in bed with lobbyists? Are you crazy? We’ve got to do anything we can to prevent this! Law and order be damned, we’ve got to act now now now!

It would be one thing if this was just the exaggerated attitude of the movies. But it’s not.

When a handful of jihadist fanatics murdered three thousand people in 2001, we didn’t trust that we could resolve this through the international cooperation of law enforcement agencies. No, we needed to lash out, we needed to send a disproportionate response, we needed to punish those states who were sympathetic to our enemies. Osama bin Laden isn’t just some robed lunatic with a gun in a cave; he’s evil incarnate. He’s Adolf Hitler! And when you’re facing Adolf Hitler, you can’t resort to ordinary tactics. Extremism in the defense of liberty tain’t no vice.

When Barack Obama recently suggested that even bin Laden should be given due process and his day in court, the nation scoffed. Due process? Man, due process doesn’t work! If we capture that son-of-a-bitch, we need to string him up but good. If you put him in a courtroom with F. Lee Bailey as his attorney, he’ll argue his way out of a conviction and be walking by sundown! Nope, only a secret military trial and execution will do.

(It’s the same mentality that’s at work with the Bush Administration’s runaround of the FISA limits on wiretapping. This just astounds me. FISA allows secret, anonymous, unaccountable intelligence agents to stretch the bounds of the Constitution by conducting wiretaps on U.S. citizens simply by getting rubber-stamp permission from a secret, anonymous, unaccountable judge — and the Bush Administration doesn’t think that’s enough?)

I just don’t believe this paranoid worldview is sustainable. And director Paul Greengrass doesn’t either. Like Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart or Irving’s Headless Horseman, these things come back to haunt us. And for Greengrass, in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, that Headless Horseman is Jason Bourne.

Notice the look of fear in the eyes of the various intelligence impresarios that Bourne runs across (played ably by Brian Cox, Chris Cooper, Joan Allen, and David Straitharn). Bourne isn’t just a renegade spy; he’s the twitch of conscience that you feel in the middle of the night, he’s the thing that haunts you after you’ve just violated international law in the name of the United States of America. Soil the Constitution, and Jason Bourne will get you.

Interestingly enough, the manifestation of the American subconscious isn’t a bloodthirsty killer. Time and again in these films, we’re subjected to the image of Bourne approaching a target with gun in hand, only to turn away at the last moment and not shoot. Bruce Willis’s John McClane gives a cheerful “Yippeekayay, motherfucker” before he kills; James Bond’s whole signature move is to turn towards the camera, strike a pose, and fire a gun until cartoony blood flows over the lens. I haven’t seen all of the Bond films, but from what I remember every single villain meets some kind of nasty demise in the end. I can think of at least six distinct scenes in the Bourne films where the hero has the villain in his sights, unarmed, gun in hand, and he fails to pull the trigger.

But if Damon’s character isn’t a killer at heart, he isn’t a do-gooder either. He’s not on a righteous crusade to bring America back to lily-white purity. In fact, he’s almost completely self-absorbed; he doesn’t particularly seem to care about America or the government or international law. Sure, he cares for the various mousy white women who get into trouble because of him, but only insomuch as they intersect his path and get in trouble on his behalf.

All of this culminates in what is, to me, one of the most stunning, jaw-dropping, unforgettable scenes in the past decade of film. At the end of Supremacy, Jason Bourne drops in on the teenaged daughter of two of his early assassination targets. And he apologizes.

There’s something incredibly primal about the scene. Bourne is exhausted, gruff, half in shadow; he seems immense alongside the poor girl, who mistakes him at first for a burglar. But Bourne quickly calms her down. He tells her that, contrary to what she’s been told, her parents didn’t die in a murder/suicide. They were gunned down by him, on assignment from the CIA. “It changes things, that knowledge, doesn’t it?” says Bourne. The terrified girl nods. And then Bourne gets up, mumbles “I’m sorry,” and walks out of the room.

It reminded me of that grass-roots campaign that went around the web in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 presidential elections. Remember that? It featured thousands of Americans taking pictures of themselves holding up signs for the world to read expressing how sorry we are that we couldn’t stop George W. Bush from taking office for another four years. (Update 10/4/07: The name of the campaign was “Sorry Everybody,” and you can see the photos at www.sorryeverybody.com.)

When does the American paranoia end? And who will stand up and apologize once it’s over?

Perhaps we can add to that what I’m going to call Edelman’s Corollary: “If you ever forget Bernard Malamud’s statement, a Jew will remind you.”

Way back in January, I posted on this blog a little contest called The Jewish Marxist Werewolves in Bolivia Infoquake Giveaway. The aim of the contest was to write the introductory paragraph to a bad fictitious novel about Jewish Marxist werewolves in Bolivia. I received a number of very amusing entries, topped by a hilariously bad entry by Josh Vogt. (Read the winning entries here.) As a fun little teaser for the entry, I spent fifteen minutes one Friday night Photoshopping a fake werewolf mask onto a picture of a rabbi and then adding in a white knit yarmulke. You can see the image here on the right.

I happen to think the photo is hilarious, but a few commenters on my blog don’t agree with me. Check out the comment thread for this post. Here’s one:

SHAME ON YOU! jew’s are HUMANS just like everybody else

THE ONLY WOLF AROUND HERE IS YOU

And another one:

you fucker bech i am a Jewish and i prove theth you can onli to suck my dick and your mom to fucker my dream is to kech peple like you ..bech

And a third:

We lost more then 6,000,000 people for nothing they said we are beast ,they said we are ugly , they said we are stupid they said every thing to people start hate and murder us i dont know if you realy jew or not but present us (in the picutre) like evil people that their holy book is evil himself and that fucking not funny….

Now finally the latest:

Listen to me carefully you little cock sucker, you will take this picture down I don’t even care if its a joke or not. This is very offensive and you speaking high language saying “I’m sorry if you’re offended by this, and I’m sorry for fucking my grandmother and getting her pregnant” we just don’t give a fuck….This is very disrespectful and I am not asking, I’m demanding you to take this off! Got it, bitch? don’t make me take actions I prefer not to.

I’m unclear whether this is all coming from the same person or not, but I assume it is. I wish this guy would have the courage to put down a consistent name and/or e-mail.

My first reaction to this was, come on, dude. It’s clearly a joke, and not even a particularly cutting edge one at that. The whole thing has a whiff of that Mel Brooks/Borscht Belt comedy that’s pretty much culturally dead in the water at this point. The photo’s been up on the web for nine months, thousands of people have seen it (including, presumably, many Jews), and nobody’s thought to complain about it being offensive up to this point. In fact, I discovered this morning that someone appropriated the image for this entry on the 92nd Street Y blog — presumably a Jewish organization. Their caption: “Stay the Night for Tikkun Leil Shavuot: All fun, no werewolves!” See screen cap on the left.

But then it occurred to me: There are people around the world who believe that Jews are monsters. There’s a small but very vocal minority who believe that Jews are evil tools of Satan, or vampires out to suck the blood of your children, or — well, I don’t know what exactly they believe, but you know what I’m talking about. And it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some asshole searching the web for “Jewish werewolf” will appropriate this photo without permission for his anti-Semitic propaganda rag. (If you search Google Images for “jewish werewolf,” my image is the top result.)

It would be quite galling, to say the least, if this image ended up propagating around the web to anti-Semitic groups like the cartoon of Calvin pissing has ended up on the back of pickup trucks everywhere. (Incidentally, in case you’re not aware, possession of that Calvin pissing image is grounds for having the windows of your car smashed in by a heavy brick, as far as I’m concerned.)

So the big question is: what kind of responsibility do I have to the Jewish community?

One thing that us Jews are painfully aware of is that not believing in Judaism doesn’t exempt you from the hatred of anti-Semites. This was Bernard Malamud’s point. I don’t believe a word of the Torah, just like I don’t believe that some dude turned water into wine two thousand years ago, just like I don’t believe that there’s a God who wants us to pray towards Mecca five times a day. But the Nazis (just to name one group) didn’t care. They dutifully stuffed the secular Jews and the atheist Jews into their ovens right alongside the orthodox Jews. I’m sure Osama bin Laden wouldn’t bother giving me a Talmudic quiz either before taking my head.

In fact, I think some groups hate Jewish skeptics like me even more. According to their logic, people like me are either sniveling pussies who don’t have the strength to maintain their convictions, or just undercover Zionist agents who are faking their skepticism in order to integrate into society.

My feeling on offensive iconography is that it should be embraced. Why? Because embracing it is the easiest way to deprive it of its sting.

Look at the homosexual community. These people have done a terrific job of advancing their civil liberties over the past thirty years, and to my mind it’s because they haven’t shied away from the so-called offensive stereotypes and slurs. Can you think of an insult you can throw at a gay person that he or she can’t easily shrug off?

BIGOT: You pansy-ass, cocksucking, queer, fairy faggot.

GAY PERSON: Yay! I’m a pansy-ass, cocksucking, queer, fairy faggot!

The words are no longer so shocking and offensive in and of themselves. The problem, of course, is that the words are sometimes backed by a gang of rednecks carrying baseball bats and broken bottles.

Spend five minutes reading Dan Savage’s column, and you’ll see him gleefully refer to people of his sexual orientation with those kinds of terms all the time. Shows like “Will & Grace” embraced the stereotypes of the effeminate, Barbra Streisand-loving, fairy queen rather than avoid them. The result? Well, gays still can’t get married yet in most states and still endure plenty of persecution. The 80% of gay men who are not flirty, effeminate, limp-wristed designer clothing fanatics feel like they’re misunderstood. But in thirty years, they’ve gone from a completely closeted community to a public community of great diversity, strength, and clout. Thirty years ago, TV stars risked ending their careers if they came out of the closet; today, TV stars risk ending their careers if they insult homosexuals. The gay movement has a long way to go — but they’ve already come so far.

(For this same reason, I think the elder statesmen of the black community are making a grave mistake by trying to repress the use of the word “nigger.” I say, embrace it! Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when I can call a black friend a nigger and he can call me a kike, and nobody gets upset. I’ll toss him a piece of fried chicken, he’ll drop a penny on the ground to see if I pick it up, and then we’ll both laugh our asses off and go back to whatever we were doing.)

But back to the Jewish werewolf picture.

I’m not inclined to take the photo down. If another Jewish organization in New York found it amusing and inoffensive enough to repost, why shouldn’t I keep it up? One exception I would make is if the rabbi himself in the photo — a Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider of the Mount Kisco Hebrew Congregation in Mount Kisco, New York — took objection to the photo. I could understand this particular rabbi or congregation having trouble with this photo. There’s no need to throw someone else into the middle of a censorship spat if he doesn’t want to be there. But understand that if this particular rabbi doesn’t want to be involved in this, I’m just going to go find another rabbi photo to doctor up; or hell, I’ll pose for one myself.

Your thoughts?

First off, the dude was railroaded into confessing his impropriety by the police to avoid embarrassment, and that bothers me. As unseemly as it may be that Senator Craig (supposedly) felt compelled to alert the plainclothesman in the next stall that he wanted to get his knob polished, it’s not a crime. Really, it isn’t. Just the same way that talking to a prostitute about her/his services isn’t a crime until you hand over the cash. Theoretically it might be construed as harassment if he just walked up to a stranger in the restroom to solicit sex in plain English — but it seems to me that the case is pretty thin when you have to be familiar with the whole procedure to even know you’re being solicited in the first place.

Now, actually having sex in a public restroom is a crime, and if the senator was paying a stranger to have sex it’s also a crime. But what if the man in the next stall had responded to Craig’s solicitation by slipping him a note saying “I’ve got a condo two blocks away, why don’t we pop over there instead”? That’s not a crime. That’s called a pickup. Sleazy, yes. But not illegal, and I’m not even sure it’s immoral.

And let’s say he did actually get a BJ in a public restroom. Have we really lost all sense of perspective here? Have we become that prude of a society? Breaking news, North America: men love blowjobs. If there’s any man who claims he doesn’t, please stick your name in the comments below so the rest of us can snicker at you. And while quietly having sex in a semi-public place while nobody can see you is crude and crass and unbecoming of a public official, on the scale of moral turpitude it ranks pretty damn low. I’d say it’s somewhere around shoplifting in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t decide if it’s north or south of that line. Lots of people do dumb things like this when they’re young. Hell, I did stuff like that when I was in college almost twenty years ago.

Of course, nobody wants to walk in on two people having sex in a public restroom. Eww. And you don’t want unattended minors stumbling across something like this either. Which is why you haul these offenders down to the police station, slap them with a fine and community service, and put something in the file that your future employers can dig up if they want to.

But Dave, you sick pervert, I hear you thinking, Larry Craig’s a U.S. Senator! We have to hold him to a higher standard!

Well, sure we do. That higher standard is called “elections.” If this joker decides to run for re-election next year after all, his arrest record, guilty plea, and lame-ass excuses are fair game for his opponent(s). Of course, it’s never going to get to that point. The Idaho Republican Party will wisely decide that supporting Craig is too costly for them, and the national GOP will conclude the same thing. Right now, there are undoubtedly GOP bigwigs calling Senator Craig telling him that stepping down now and allowing a Republican replacement to gain momentum in office for the next 18 months will be a big boon to the party’s chances in 2008.

I’m convinced that 60% of this whole scandal has to do with public disgust at male homosexuality. It’s a quick opportunity to score some political points because most Americans are really queasy about gay male sex. Gut check time: if you walked in on Carmen Electra and Angelina Jolie engaging in hanky-panky in a public bathroom stall, would you storm out of there looking for a cop and demand that they be publicly humiliated and dragged through the mud?

In case you’ve forgotten, this is Carmen Electra:

And this is Angelina Jolie:

No, if you saw these two (or two women who look just like them) going at it in a public place and you’re like most people in this country, you’d probably back out of there very slowly, make lots of conspicuous coughing noises, and state in a loud voice that you hope nobody in this restroom is doing anything that the approaching police officers might take offense at.

If 60% of this scandal is motivated by public disgust with male homosexuality, then what’s the other 40%? I’ll allow that 20% of the impetus for pushing this story is purely morality. The remaining 20%? Why, a witch hunt against conservative Republicans who have supported the war and President Bush’s über-conservative policies. And I say this as someone who opposed the war from the start and who has vocally opposed Bush’s agenda for years now. I’ve still got a John Kerry 2004 sticker on my car, fer Chrissake.

Here’s an idea: let’s vote Republicans like Larry Craig out of office because they support the war and because they support discrimination against gays. Are the Democrats really proud of the fact that they’re holding a majority in both houses of Congress because of silly sex scandals, because George Allen once said the word “macaca,” and because Joe Lieberman refuses to officially join the GOP?

What makes me think this is partisan? If we’re so concerned with official corruption, we’d be seeing a daily drumbeat of Congressional leaders standing up and demanding the resignation of Democratic Representative William Jefferson, he of the $90,000 worth of bribe money stashed in his freezer. If it wasn’t partisan, then it wouldn’t be mostly the Republicans who are bum-rushing the airwaves to denounce Senator Craig’s moral unfitness. (Don’t you just love how Republicans always rush to loudly denounce anti-family values talk, while Democrats always rush to loudly denounce perceived weakness on national defense? This is how you get Barack Obama pushing for a big increase in military size and Hillary Clinton cozying up to the idea of threatening other countries with nuclear weaponry.)

Putting aside the sexual aspect of this case, what do we have? Not much. We have the potential intimidation factor of Craig throwing his Senatorial business card on the table and saying “What do you think of that?” Okay, this bothers me. But one statement is a pretty thin reed to hang an entire ethics case on, and you know that no sane jury would convict someone based on that evidence alone.

We have the hypocrisy factor. Definitely worthy of consideration that a senator who’s supported so many anti-gay policies over the years is himself gay. But again, I don’t think hypocrisy is all that great of a sin.

We have the supposed other instances of homosexual behavior. If you read the accusations, they’re all pretty flimsy. Craig followed some dude around in a store for half an hour? Some random guy claims he had sex with someone that looked like Larry Craig, but didn’t even get his name? Involvement in the page scandal would be a big deal if there was any evidence out there to support it. But all these things added up to so little that the Idaho Statesman wisely decided to kill the story until the guilty plea for disorderly conduct came up.

None of these accusations hold a candle to the fact that, you know, Senator Larry Craig supported anti-gay policies in the first place. Whether he’s straight, gay, bi, dom, sub, switch, decaffeinated, or unleaded is pretty irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. I’d just as soon not know.

I’m not suggesting we nominate Larry Craig for Senator of the Year or give him the Congressional Medal of Honor. I’m just saying, please America, stop it with the silly sex scandals. Larry Craig’s guilty plea for disorderly conduct should be a page 3 story at best, and the guy should be allowed to quietly step down from his committee leadership posts and then just not run for re-election.

The cause of this all, of course, was Senator David Vitter’s confession that he had once partaken of the services of a D.C. prostitution service, helpfully provided to us by Grand Inquisitor Larry Flynt. You know, Larry Flynt, the canny investigative journalist behind Hustler who forced that rabid mass murderer Bob Livingston to resign from leadership of the House in 1998 because he strayed from his marriage.

I really get hopping mad at revelations like this. Why? Because I firmly believe that it’s none of our fucking business what our politicians do with their personal lives.

Guess what? I don’t care that Senator David Vitter is hanging around with prostitutes on his spare time. I really don’t. Also:

• I don’t care if he’s cheating on his wife
• I don’t care if he’s gay or bisexual
• I don’t care if he litters
• I don’t care if he’s getting audited on his taxes
• I don’t care if he cheats at cards or golf
• I don’t care if he got bad grades in college
• I don’t care if he’s got a gambling problem
• I don’t care if he smoked marijuana in college
• I don’t care if he still smokes marijuana on his own time
• I don’t care if he uses the “f” word or tells someone to “go f— yourself”
• I don’t care if he did cocaine or heroin a long time ago
• I don’t care if he uses the “n” word from time to time in private conversation
• I don’t care if he calls somebody by an obscure French ethnic slur in the heat of a campaign event
• I don’t care if he drives an SUV or a Prius
• I don’t care how big his house is or how much electricity it uses
• I don’t care how much he spends on haircuts he pays for out of his own pocket
• I don’t care what his wife does for a living
• I don’t care what religion he is
• I don’t care if he’s friends with lobbyists
• I don’t care if he’s a hypocrite
• I don’t care if he flirts with the wrong people
• I don’t care if he watches or downloads pornography
• I don’t care if he owns a Confederate flag
• I don’t care if he’s a closet racist
• I don’t care if he’s a closet sexist
• I don’t care if he’s a closet homophobe
• I don’t care if he smokes
• I don’t care if he has a drinking problem
• I don’t care if he makes an egregious statement or two, as long as he promptly apologizes

Now here are the things I do care about as regards Senator David Vitter:

• I care about the policies he advocates
• I care about the votes he casts in the U.S. Senate
• I care if he’s charged with a crime that’s not a misdemeanor

Let’s make up a new rule. When our politicians step out of the office at the end of the day, they’re private citizens. Which means that just like you won’t splash it all over the newspaper that your next-door neighbor is having an affair, you won’t do the same about a politician. You shouldn’t follow a politician around or snoop on his personal life or try to dig up dirt on him. Now if he kills someone or actively cheats on his taxes or stashes bribe money in his freezer, then I want to hear about it. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Larry Flynt tries to cover his exposés of public officials with the paltry fig leaf of claiming that it’s all about hypocrisy. Well, guess what? I don’t care if politicians are hypocrites. Public discourse is cheapened by making it a clash of personalities. All that should matter is the content of the bills Senator Vitter proposes and the speeches he makes and the articles he writes, not the quality of the messenger. Even if the bills he champions specifically clash with his own personal behavior, I don’t care. In all but the rarest of cases, it doesn’t matter if a politician secretly disagrees with a policy he’s promoting. Larry Flynt’s lame excuse that David Vitter should be exposed because he campaigned on the sanctity of marriage (i.e. anti-gay marriage) is just that — lame.

This means that we desperately need to stop this idiotic parade of third-rate Freudian analyses of our politicians’ every utterance. I find it disgraceful that Trent Lott was forced to resign his leadership position in the Senate because of a single slip of the tongue. I find it disgraceful that Bill Clinton was dragged before the Congress for evasively answering a personal question he should have never been asked in the first place. I find it disgraceful that John Ashcroft was branded a racist because of his tenuous association with someone who favored segregation. I find it disgraceful that every time Ted Kennedy opens his mouth, right-wing talk radio has to call him a drunkard.

Why isn’t it possible to respectfully disagree with someone and not start piling on about their perceived personal flaws? Why do we have to morally judge these people’s activities at all? Why can’t we just concentrate on the policy?

• I read Cho Seung-Hui’s play Richard McBeef. Yes, it sucks, but it’s not as sucky as I had been led to believe. It’s also quite disturbing, but honestly, the play in itself isn’t the stinking, fetid hatebomb of a warning sign that the media thinks it is. I wrote some disturbing shit myself in college — there was one story I wrote in the form of an elaborate suicide note, wherein the protagonist vows to kill himself with a Rube Goldberg device he’s rigged up in his apartment to save everyone the trouble of dealing with his remains. Lots of young men vent their frustrations on the printed page, I don’t see why a fucked-up murderer should be any different.
• The shooting has reinforced the right’s belief that guns should be more readily available, and that in a more gun-tolerant society some citizen do-gooder would have taken this kid down. The left, meanwhile, believes that this is an excuse to enact stricter gun control legislation. To me, the irony is that either much stricter gun control or much looser gun control could have helped prevent this tragedy. Waffling in the middle helps no one.
• Another ironic thing about the brewing gun control debate is that the killer did not use weapons that would have been prohibited by the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He used a Glock 19 and a Walther P22, and I believe both of these would have been legal had the Assault Weapons Ban been extended. (Someone please let me know if I’m wrong about this.) The extended gun clips Cho is believed to have used are another issue, but not having those wouldn’t have stopped his rampage.
• Blaming the Virginia Tech administration for failing to send timely warning e-mails to the students is absolutely, totally, completely, offensively ridiculous. If we tried to lock down the 2,600 acres surrounding each one of the 30,000 gun deaths in the U.S. every year, society would come to a screeching halt. Two hours is a perfectly reasonable period of time for the police to respond and get a mass e-mail communication out to the campus, and the e-mail they did send struck exactly the right tone under the circumstances. Besides which, even if everyone had hunkered down inside their dorms at 7:30 A.M. and not gone to class, Cho Seung-Hui was in one of those dorm rooms. He would have just gone on his massacre in a different building.
• The frightening thing is that, ultimately there’s nothing you can do to prevent this sort of thing from happening 100% of the time. There are a thousand different ways to kill large groups of people. Probably the best solution we have is counseling — which makes it so ironic that college counseling centers are so understaffed and underfunded throughout the country. The Scientologists better not try to ram any more of their anti-psychiatry crap down our throats after this.
• This dude was from Centreville, Virginia. I live about 10 minutes away from Centreville. I may very well have driven by this guy or passed him in the mall half a dozen times.
• One of the victims of Cho Seung-Hui’s massacre was Jamie Bishop, son of the science fiction writer Michael Bishop. This sucks on too many levels to even recount here.

——

I’m going to be cutting back on the blogging for the next couple weeks so I can concentrate on getting MultiReal finished and polished by May 1. There are a few pivotal scenes that have to be done just right, and they’re not quite there yet.

Meanwhile, I’ll be attending this weekend’s Penguicon science fiction/open source software convention in Troy, Michigan. What will I be doing there? I really don’t know, because I couldn’t keep up with the con-related e-mail traffic and so I stopped reading it entirely. But if you’re looking to find me, the bar’s always a good place to check.

The pertinent points in Joel’s rather brief piece are these:

• There’s a big difference between a global warming skeptic and a global warming denier
• Many environmentalists are trying to stifle argument about global warming by stating that skepticism is dangerous
• Skepticism is a much more valuable tool in uncovering truth than belief
• The truth about global warming might be inconvenient, but it’s by no means obvious and almost certainly not settled

In the comments, Joel further points out:

• Global warming skeptics are in the unenviable position of trying to prove a negative, which is pretty much impossible
• There are a gajillion factlets out there that don’t quite square up with the theory that human beings are the sole (or overwhelming) cause of climate change
• Even if the climate is changing, most of the ideas for combating it (e.g. driving Toyotas, turning down your AC, signing on to Kyoto) are pretty lame and ineffectual

For another lucid and brief article along the same lines, see this Straight Dope column on global warming from last April. And also read SF author Charles Stross’ take on “Why I Am [Not] an Environmentalist.”

My personal belief about what’s happening with the planet? If I had to put money on it, I’d say that a) the Earth is warming, perhaps dangerously so; b) we contribute to the warming effect, but on a much smaller scale than the alarmists are stating; and c) there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it anyway, especially not by limiting consumption, because developing nations in Asia will soon swamp any efforts we make at conservation with their own increasing consumption.

That doesn’t mean I think we should sit around and do nothing. But I think clearly we need more skepticism in the debate and more scientific research. Research into whether the climate is changing and how much and why; but also research into what homo sapiens can do to survive this whole mess if the worst turns out to be true and conservation efforts prove useless. If Al Gore’s right about what’s happening, our best bet might be to invest in some hard-core survivalism science.

Here’s something else that’s going to sound incredibly caustic but I need to get off my chest anyway: I don’t really give a shit about the Earth. I only care about whether we can continue to live on it. If we could accomplish that by setting up big climate-controlled science fiction domes and letting the rest of the globe rot, on an emotional level I’d be just fine with that. (On a more practical level, of course, I’m guessing that the rainforests and the wildlife and the amoebuses and all the rest make it a lot easier for us to live here, and there’s really no point trying to invent a livable human environment from scratch when we have one already.)

Can you tell I’m cranky today?

(Oh, hey, and before I forget, Joel’s got a new book out — in the States at least — called Breakaway, the sequel to Crossover. Go buy it.)

We have a constitutional amendment that separates church and state, but we need one that separates state and military.

Regardless of the guilt or innocence of Lance Cpl. Sharratt, his father does indeed raise an interesting point. Congressman Jack Murtha, who brought the Haditha incident to the public spotlight, also chairs the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Which means that there’s something of a conflict of interest in him pushing for the prosecution of these Marines. The military could conceivably be prosecuting Sharratt & Co. simply because they’re afraid to piss Murtha off and have their budgets slashed or redirected. “Are you going to bite the hand that feeds you?” Sharratt asks NewsMax. “They may say it’s not political, but there’s your first step in the political process — you have to go to this man to get your next M-16 rifle.”

Which leads me to one of the things that’s so distressing about the whole Iraq War in the first place. Most of the men and women in our government seem to have forgotten what the Constitution says about the separation of powers. Worse yet, the public’s bought in to it.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work, according to the Constitution.

Islamic fundamentalists execute a direct attack on the United States. The public is outraged. The U.S. intelligence agencies figure out who’s behind the attack and hand this information off to Congress. Congress jumps into emergency sessions and, after some speechifying, decides to declare war on Afghanistan. The president salutes smartly, says “will do,” and orders up the attack on Afghanistan. The war progresses, Congress declares a victory or a treaty or even a retreat, and the president complies.

This is something every American kid learns in school. The president of the United States cannot declare war. Only the Congress can do that. Let’s take a look at the tape. (Or, rather, let’s take a look at Article One, Section 8 of a certain yellowed historic document sitting in the National Archives.)

The Congress shall have the power… To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years; To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

Meanwhile, the president? Here’s what aforementioned yellowed document says about his/her role:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States…. He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.

There’s been a lot of guff in the media about George W. Bush proclaiming that he’s the sole “decider” when it comes to the Iraq War and how long the U.S. military will stay there. But the simple fact of the matter is that he’s not. He’s the commander of chief of our armed forces, and reserves the right to make the decisions on how the war is to be prosecuted (although, even there Congress is given the power to “make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces”).

Yes, the president has some pretty broad latitude. But final authority over whether we stay or go resides with the Congress.

All too often, we seem to forget that the president only represents a third of the United States government, the executive branch. He doesn’t have the authority to make laws, or declare war. According to the Constitution, in fact, he’s something of a figurehead; he’s the guy that’s supposed to serve as a check to the power of the legislative branch. He’s kind of supposed to be the public face to the policies that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are spearheading in the House and Senate.

But somehow we’ve gotten away from that. One of the great, unnoticed stories of the twentieth century was the huge power grab undertaken by the executive branch of government. When you think of “untrammeled executive power,” you might think of Republicans Bush, Nixon, or Reagan; but the groundwork was really laid by Democrats Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, with a big ol’ bloody star for Lyndon Johnson and his Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. (For a great overview of that subject, look no further than David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, which mostly chronicles the rise of big media, but also explores the slippery slope that led from Roosevelt’s Depression-era manipulating down to Nixon’s Watergate.)

Why do we elevate the president on such a pedestal? Why don’t schoolchildren memorize the names of past speakers of the House or presidents of the Senate? How many of them can you actually name?

Coming back to the original topic of this article: we have a separation of state and military. It’s inscribed in the U.S. Constitution, and it goes like this. Congress makes the war policy, the president carries it out. Plain and simple.

So U.S. senators and congresspeople: you don’t have to muck around with non-binding resolutions. You can make a binding resolution ending the war in Iraq anytime you want to. You can cut off funding and bring the troops home. And if the president chooses to ignore you, you can ITMFA. I’m not claiming that I’m in favor of this — I go back and forth on the wisdom of initiating impeachment proceedings during a time of war, regardless of how dubious the cause of said war is — but Congress, it’s your right.

The Constitution of the United States says so.