Reading notes

Culture wars threaten to divide churches in ways that make worship wars pale in comparison. …

“Fighting over what songs we sing pales beside the clash of kingdoms, and this is a kingdom clash,” he said. …

That’s indeed my view after soaking for several years in seminary study: Extolling the state-as-kingdom, which is what Christendom is, causes us to miss the whole point of the “kingdom of God” metaphor.

Many Christians who reject the nationalistic approach to worship are fiercely patriotic, said York, an ex-Marine who grew up in a military family.

“If a military officer came in the room, I would stand up. But if Jesus walked in, I would fall down on my face,” he said. “It’s all about knowing the difference between what we stand up for and what we bow down to.”

Boldface mine. This is the lesson of a lifetime.

[via Jules]

The full truth about Abu Ghraib torture and alleged child abuse must come out. We may not like what we see, and we may not like its repercussions. Indeed its repercussions may be horrendous. But we cannot live in darkness forever. The repercussions of further coverup will be worse, and worse still the longer we leave this unlanced boil to fester.

For 15 months now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. … For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known facts. In the past few days, those facts have grown harder to ignore. …

The only good news in this shameful story is that … six GOP senators led by John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) have backed an amendment to the defense operations bill that would exclude exceptional interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay and ban the use of “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment for all prisoners held by the United States. The administration contends that detainees held abroad may be subject to such abuse. Attempts by the White House and Mr. Warner to block or gut the legislation failed, and on Tuesday the GOP leadership pulled the defense bill from the floor rather than allow a vote. The administration probably will spend the next month trying to quell this rebellion of conscience and good sense.

Would that the administration itself be overcome with conscience and good sense.

[via muledriver]

Might this unfold into something as big as I think it might?

Seymour Hersh, the trustworthy-for-decades investigative reporter who’s never at a loss for stones with which to challenge Goliath, writes in today’s New Yorker:

The January 30th election in Iraq was publicly perceived as a political triumph for George W. Bush and a vindication of his decision to overturn the regime of Saddam Hussein. … The fact that very few Sunnis, who were dominant under Saddam Hussein, chose to vote was seen within the Administration as a temporary setback. The sense of victory faded, however, amid a continued political stalemate, increased violence, and a hardening of religious divides. …

Whether the election could sustain its promise had been in question from the beginning. The Administration was confronted with a basic dilemma: The likely winner of a direct and open election would be a Shiite religious party. … As the election neared, the Administration repeatedly sought ways — including covert action — to manipulate the outcome and reduce the religious Shiite influence. Not everything went as planned.

Extensive reporting follows.

[via hoffmania]

James Wolcott wields words with intelligent skill that leaves adamant dumb-doers virtually sliced into Julienne fries. I usually engage his work with both admiration and laughter. In this Vanity Fair piece, though, it’s only admiration, because even James can’t make this topic funny:

It doesn’t seem to dawn on our pundits and leaders that when two dozen Iraqi police recruits are murdered by a car bomb it sends a shock wave through entire communities, leaving untold grieving widows, parents, siblings, children, friends, and co-workers behind to nurse their pain and rage. Imagine the impact it would have if 50 police or army recruits were wiped out over the course of a week in this country. Now imagine 50 dying every single week with no relief in sight and tell me the U.S. wouldn’t be suffering a national nervous breakdown. But the Iraqi dead are discounted as the Price of Democracy. …

When someone addresses the war with candor and outrage, it seems to violate the Geneva Conventions of the mind of which George Orwell wrote. On May 17, George Galloway, British member of Parliament and a ferocious opponent of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, used the witness chair at Senator Norm Coleman’s subcommittee investigating the oil-for-food scandal to turn the tables and hold in contempt Coleman, Rumsfeld, and the Beltway’s war-hawk lobby. He railed with such eloquent, unrelenting, unwavering, concentrated, righteous magnum force that the senators were reduced to ashen figures by his flesh-and-blood intensity. So unprepared and unaccustomed were they to hearing a hot serving of unadulterated disrespect and mocking irony that they didn’t know how to respond other than to sit there and hope their heads didn’t fall off.

(Links to video of Galloway’s “righteous magnum force” available here.)

Frank Rich wows me again with his take on the Treasongate scandal, reading between the lines that it’s even bigger than it appears:

This scandal is not about [Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or … Robert Novak] in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. …

This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit — the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes — is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That’s why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.

For many days now I’ve had this odd feeling I can’t decide whether is foreboding or the inchoate precognition that a tidal wave is comin’.

[via Armando]

Further: Fascinating backstory on the special prosecutor, subtitled “whether probing a leak or trying terrorists, Patrick Fitzgerald is relentless.” Against those who would wage war based on lies, slaughter 10,000s of innocents, and bankrupt the U.S. for personal gain, we need relentless.

Still further: Josh summarizes Frank’s piece as

This is about a president who knowingly took his country to war on the basis of lies and the war on the homefront against anyone and everyone who’s tried to peel back the lies and expose the truth.

I think it’s the second situation in particular (my boldface) for which history will accord this presidency the blackest marks. In its wake all forward motion in the U.S. has stopped. Our humanity has been anaesthetized.

The theological depiction of the situation is as Jesus describes to Nicodemus:

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.

“For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

“But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”

Are enough of us struggling in the harness to begin moving again, to shake off the numbness, to finally come back into the light of truth-telling, honesty, transparency, understanding, and the unfettered discourse necessary to actually solve problems?

Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. and U.S. State Dept. intelligence analyst — along with other byline colleagues — lays on the line what this “White House-sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character” means to the United States, its intelligence officers, and its security.

Powerful stuff:

We trained and worked at the CIA with Valerie Plame. We presented the following statement at a hearing on Capitol Hill in October 2003. In light of the latest White House sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character, our testimony remains relevant and accurate. All of us were undercover. … We’ve got each other’s back. …

Clearly some in the Bush Administration do not understand the requirement to protect and shield national security assets. Based on published information we can only conclude that partisan politics by people in the Bush Administration overrode the moral and legal obligations to protect clandestine officers and security assets. …

Not only have the Bush Administration leakers damaged the career of our friend but they have put many other people potentially in harm's way. If left unpunished this outing has lowered the bar for official behavior. Further, who in their right mind would ever agree to become a spy for the United States? …

[via SusanHu]