More Obama and Wright

Thanks for the nice thoughts yesterday. Perhaps I am a bit of a moody personality, but I am doing fine today. I finished planting the garden yesterday and have been relatively productive today. Still avoiding grading, but that is no sign of depression!

I was just about to post another rant about the ridiculous media event that keeps playing the Wright "God Damn America" clip when the former pastor went to the National Press Club. The media response is still ridiculous, especially when you compare the criticism or analysis of Hagee and Parsley. For example, while there has been at least some questioning of Hagee's ridiculous theology, there has been nearly none on Parsley.

And when Wright went on Bill Moyers, as we have discussed several times, his responses were thoughtful and even prophetic. But on Monday it became clear that he had no concern about how his views or beliefs were hurting Obama. In fact, it appears there is some resentment or something there where the Reverend may not even support Obama. I don't know. But his defense of Louis Farakhan and other statements about Zionism were clearly over the line. And on purpose. He has to know that this will cause Obama problems.

Or perhaps he did it to give Obama another chance to repudiate him. I don't know. But repudiate him he did:

"Sen. Barack Obama Tuesday said he was outraged by comments made by his former Pastor Jeremiah Wright.

'I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday,' Obama told reporters at a news conference."

I always thought that Obama was right to not attack the man before. But now, he had to do something.

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Another example of how far we have fallen and how quickly, came in this story about a former Prosecutor who just testified for Hamdan at Gitmo:

Davis told Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, who presided over the hearing, that top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have "strategic political value."

Davis said he wants to wait until the cases -- and the military commissions system -- have a more solid legal footing. He also said that Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

"He said, 'We can't have acquittals,' " Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. " 'We've been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.' "

Davis also decried as unethical a decision by top military officials to allow the use of evidence obtained by coercive interrogation techniques. He said Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. "To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind," Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that "everything was fair game -- let the judge sort it out."

The triple play here. Using the justice system exclusively for political leverage, gaming the system to insure convictions, and then using evidence obtained through torture. If you had told me Americans would do this with the full support of the President and Vice President, I would have thought you were crazy just a few years ago. Now, I believe this man.

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Speaking of bad trends:

One of the darkest developments of many dark developments in the Bush years has been the slow ascent of Christianism as a core value of the military. The promotion of Christianists throughout the armed services, the insistence by the president that no public institution be regarded as a place where religion should be silent, clear discrimination against Jews and atheists in military educational institutions: the possibility of a secular military dedicated to defending all Americans regardless of their faith or lack of it has been called into question under the current administration. The resilience of the ban on gays - while the military has granted a record number of waivers to criminals - can only be understood if one sees the US military as an increasingly religious institution at this point, and not a rational secular one. The latest story of an atheist soldier being threatened by superiors is believable in this context.

The story is a chilling one--if true--where a superior officer threatens to bar soldiers from re-enlistment or even bring charges against them for discussing atheism. They were further told by the officer that they were betraying their country and the founding fathers.

Sully finds a commenter at Volokh's blog who defends this attack on atheism and refers to the American military as a "Christian army." We can hope that this commenter is an outlier, but with the administration in power, who the hell knows. Historical ignorance is rampant.

Ok, back to work.