After the Future

Quote of the Day: Harry Frankfurt

Lies are designed to damage our grasp of reality.  So they are intended, in a very real way, to make us crazy.  To the extent that we believe them, our minds are occupied and governed by fictions, fantasies, and illusions that have been concocted for us by the liar. What we accept as real is a world that others cannot see, touch, or experience in any direct way.  A person who believes  a lie is constrained by it, accordingly, to live "in his own world"--a world that others cannot enter, and in which even the liar himself does not truly reside.  Thus the victim of the lie is, in the degree of is deprivation of truth, shut off from the world of common experience and isolated in an illusory realm which there is no path that others might find or follow.  Harry Frankfurt, On Truth, p. 78

If you're at all attuned to the political reality in this country, you cannot be impressed with how little of what goes on in Washington is really in the interests of the people outside of it.  It's an un-reality bubble constructed of outright lies, delusions of grandeur, and self-justifying fictions.  And yet we have given these people the keys to the car, and we are forced to trust that they won't drive it off the cliff. 

And what is the basis for that trust, exactly?  There is none, and there will be none until the people there start talking in a truthful way we can all relate to.  Until they do we have no reason to listen to them or to believe them or to trust them.  We have to treat them as crazy people who themselves don't know what is real or unreal because they have lived too long in this hall of mirrors constructed and held together by lies upon which layer by layer of new lie is  constructed so that one forgets what truth sounded like.

And these people have become incapable of distinguishing between what is true or false.  All that matter are assertions that serve one's interests.  Everyone does it.  The people most admired are those who lie most convincingly measured by the power and wealth that accrue to them thereby. When a democratic society becomes indifferent to whether their representatives lie for the sake of expediently serving their interests, that society is no longer democratic in any functional sense of the word.

I'd like to think that the huge Lie that is Rudy Giuliani, once it has been exposed, will doom his political career forever.  But, I doubt it will.  I'd like to think that the kind of shoddy journalism perpetrated by the Beltway Media establishment, once it is exposed for what it is will be repudiated and replaced with responsible, truth seeking journalism.  But I doubt it will.  We've crossed a line some where, and now that it has been crossed, the only thing that matters is who comes up with the lies that reinforce what most people want to hear.

Human Flourishing

Taylor makes an important distinction between what he calls older religions and the "higher" or post-Axial Religions. This term comes from what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, that period in the first millennium BCE when various higher forms of religion appeared seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets. 

Taylor talks about how these Axial religions initiated a break from what might be thought of as the kind of human embeddedness in a "given" world of spirits, demons, angels, and gods Barfield talks about as the "original participation" that typifies shamanic or animistic religions. These "early" religions accepted the world as they found it, and religion was simply a tool to help them manage, mainly through propitiation, the spiritual world whose powers determined their fate, and in doing so to obtain their assistance in achieving a level of human flourishing.  The higher religions challenged the idea that the "given" world of ordinary collective experience was all there was:

This what makes the most striking contrast with what we tend to think of as the "higher" religions.  What the people ask for [in the early religions] when they invoke or placate divinities and powers is prosperity, health, long life, fertility; what they ask to be preserved from is disease, dearth, sterility premature death. There is a certain understanding of human flourishing here which we can immediately understand, and which, however much we might want to add to it, seems to us quite "natural". What there isn't, and what seems central to the later "higher" religions,  . . . is the idea that we have to question radically this ordinary understanding, that we are called in some way to go beyond it.

. . . There is a sense in which, for early religions, the Divine is always more than just well-disposed toward us; it may also be in some ways indifferent; or there may also be hostility, or jealousy, or anger, which we have to deflect.  Although benevolence, in principle, may have the upper hand, this process may have to be helped along, by propitiation, or even by the action of "trickster" figures.  But through all this what remains true is that Divinity's benign purposes are defined in terms of ordinary human flourishing. . . .

By contrast, with Christianity or Buddhism, for instance, as we saw in the first chapter, there is a notion of our good which goes beyond human flourishing, which we may gain even while failing utterly on the scales of human flourishing, even through such a failing (like dying young on a cross); or which involves leaving the field of flourishing altogether (ending the cycle of rebirth). The paradox of Christianity, in relation to early religion, is that on one hand, it seems to assert the unconditional benevolence of God towards humans; there is none of the ambivalence of early Divinity in this respect; and yet it redefines our ends so as to take us beyond flourishing.

In this respect early religion has something in common with modern exclusive humanism; and this has been felt, and expressed in the sympathy of many modern post-Enlightenment people for "paganism"; "pagan self-assertion", thought John Stuart Mill, was much superior to "Christian self-denial". (This is related to, but not quite the same as the sympathy felt for "polytheism", which I want to discuss later.) What makes modern humanism unprecedented, of course, is the idea that this flourishing involves no relation to anything higher. (ASA, p. 150-51)

In other words, in the older religions, humans are embedded in the given society, society in the given cosmos, and the cosmos holds within it the divine.  The Axial transformations break this chain in several important ways, one of the most critical being the Jewish idea of the world being created from nothing. This is important and original because of the way it takes God out of the cosmos--he is above and beyond it; he transcends it; he cannot be contained by it. Says Taylor, "This meant that potentially God can become the source of demands that we break with 'the way of the world'; and what Brague refers to as 'the wisdom of the world' no longer constrains us."

This is the key to understanding the difference between paganism and the higher religions represented by the Platonic-Judaeo-Christian complex in the west and primarily the Hindu/Buddhist complex in the East.  While there are important differences that distinguish them from one another, the important thing for our purposes here is to understand how they are distinguished from both early pagan and modern humanistic naturalism.

The Weather Gods in a Disenchanted Cosmos (expanded)

I’d like to say that I find [Georgia] Governor Perdue’s emphasis on prayer to address droughts baffling. But I don’t. I understand it completely. Growing up Southern Baptist, I regularly prayed until about midway through college when I turned into a freedom-hating Bolshevik surrender monkey. But even if I understand where he’s coming from, it’s still strange. Although it’s a seemingly harmless practice, it logically implies the existence of a sadistic, cruel and petty God. Indeed, as people like Hitchens point out with characteristic tact, much of Christian doctrine – I now realize – assumes precisely this sort of God.

There are a couple of aspects to this implied petty cruelty (with respect to prayer). The first is simply that God apparently causes these events (drought, coal mine collapse, sick child, etc.) in the first place. Looking specifically at Georgia, praying for rain obviously assumes that God has some sort of control over the weather. Thus, he either caused the drought, or allowed it to happen. And once caused, the act of prayer assumes that God could step in and end it. --Publius at Obsidian Wings.

From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.  A line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to our present time. --Charles Taylor, quoted in my earlier post The Zeitgeist of Unbelief

I'm preparing a longer essay based on further reflections on Taylor's A Secular Age in which I want to convey the complex of elements that contributed to the shift from the enchanted world taken for granted by premoderns to the disenchanted universe we all live in now. But when I read this post by Publius, it struck me that his reaction to the idea of praying for better weather as implying an assumption (unconscious for those who do it) that God is cruel seems quite reasonable. Why would he allow (or cause?) such terrible things to happen in the first place if, as when praying to him, one assumes he has the power to stop them once they happen? 

I don't want to get into some abstract discussion of theodicy; I'm more interested rather to try to understand this urge to pray for deliverance from natural disaster as a lingering element of premodern consciousness. It makes complete sense in an enchanted world, but it's hard to make sense of it in a disenchanted one, even if you are a religious believer in it. I think there is a way, though, that prayer makes perfect sense in a disenchanted world. But one has first to understand the shift in the way the "buffered self" experiences the sacred from the outer world to the inner world. This is a theme I have already explored to a certain extent in a post called From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen.   

It shouldn't be a surprise for Christians that things should have developed in this outer-to-inner pattern, since we are told repeatedly in the gospels that the coming of the Christ meant the inauguration of the Kingdom within. And so when the experience of the gods (by which I mean the spiritual dimension of reality) moves gradually from out-there to in-here, there is a corresponding shift from an experience of being the puppets or playthings of the gods, to being a new kind human who has autonomy, dignity, and freedom. And this experience requires as a precondition that humans become detached or disembedded from the world out-there which contrasts with the enmeshment with out-there that characterizes the experience of normal premoderns.

Slow Institutional Degradation

"Process" is now considered a bad word by political consultants. After writing Worse than Watergate in 2004, which was about the secrecy of the Bush administration, I learned that the Kerry campaign did not use the subject of secrecy because they thought it was a "process" issue. It seemed almost standard policy of Democrats to avoid process issues, with the Congressional leadership telling candidates not to use process issues because they're wimpy. Well, the name of the game played in Washington is process.

Republicans are manipulating the process to their advantage. --John Dean

My argument has not been that George Bush and Dick Cheney are singularly wicked people who have been seized by some aberrational impulse to hijack our democracy.  Rather I see their project as normative, and it's precisely for that reason that the media and everyone in the mainstream political class see no urgency in doing anything to stop it. Issues like signing statements and the unitary executive, the politicization of DOJ, torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, suspension of habeas corpus are framed as if these were issues about which reasonable people can disagree. There's the GOP take on them, and the Dem take. Ho Hum.  If you accepted the mainstream media framing of these issues, it's only the cranky, hardcore extremist left think that gets really upset about what's happening around these issues.  But every American with any common sense should be outraged. 

It's so discouraging. Because the real story is about the underlyiing structural changes in process. These changes make us now more than ever structurally disposed toward increasing levels of  authoritarianism, and if it were not Bush/Cheney pushing these changes, it would be and will be someone else.  We will see at a certain point down the road, that Bush/Cheney's role was to have laid the groundwork for the future.  We will see that with the institutional checks they have systematically dismantled, the only thing that stands in the way of a future executive with near dictatorial powers will be the will of the other branches of government to stop such a development.  And we've seen time and time again, that they are not disposed to do it.

In my more hopeful moments, I think that surely some counter movement toward reversal of these process changes is taking shape out of the media spotlight and behind the scenes. Surely there are people in positions of influence that are as alarmed about what's happening as people like me are. But there has been very little sign of it.  The Beltway political class is either ok with these process changes or they are resigned to it.

We all tend to think of the American system as so solid and impregnable, but it is a house of cards with no more substance than the will of the people who work within its institutions to resist its gradual degradation. We have seen there is no will to resist on the level of process changes, and the structural integrity has been severely undermined. As a result we are witnessing this house of cards collapsing right in front of our eyes in slow motion. It's surreal.  It's as if we're in a dream watching some absurdist concatenation of events that we are incapable of comprehending.  We slap ourselves a couple of times in the face, and decide to think about something more pleasant.  Fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.

Beyond Liberal & Conservative (Updated)

From Frank Rich, "The Coup at Home:

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon. 

Anybody who is still stuck in the liberal/conservative dichotomy is hopelessly incapable of understanding what's happening to us. We're now into the American/unAmerican dichotomy, in which 'American' stands for honor, decency, and the rule of law, while unAmerican stands for the kind of corruption and brutality in the name of national security that has overtaken the GOP.  As Rich says earlier in this column:

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

Democracies are certainly capable of electing governments that will do away with democracy.  It's happened elsewhere, and while most Americans don't want to face up to it, it's happening here. Lots of people understand this, but it has been troubling to me that it has taken those Americans who think of themselves as moderates and principled conservatives so long to catch on. There are a few like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole, both GOP cheerleaders earlier on, who have publicly and repentantly repudiated their earlier administration support. They both understand that the Republican Party no longer stands for what they thought it did, even remotely. Why they ever thought this particular group was trustworthy is another question, but both have become ardent critics, and they should be credited for not allowing their good sense and decency from being obscured by their ideology.

Craven, Cavin' Dems II (Updated)

Greenwald:

The so-called "60-vote requirement" applies only when it is time to do something to limit the Bush administration. It is merely the excuse Senate Democrats use to explain away their chronic failure/unwillingness to limit the President, and it is what the media uses to depict the GOP filibuster as something normal and benign. There obviously is no "60-vote requirement" when it comes to having the Senate comply with the President's demands, as the 53-vote confirmation of Michael Mukasey amply demonstrates. But as Mukasey is sworn in as the highest law enforcement officer in America, the Democrats want you to know that they most certainly did stand firm and "register their displeasure."

The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . "

Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue -- the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill -- and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.

But hey, they passed the water bill.  That took guts, didn't it?

UPDATE: Greg Sargent at TPM explains the dealmaking that led to Reid's allowing the Mukasey vote.  Has to do with the defense appropriations bill.  Read here for more on that and judge for yourself if the maneuver was worth it.  But here are the key grafs about Reid's not allowing a filibuster:

What of the talk that Reid might allow a filibuster of the Mukasey confirmation vote? Asked why this didn't happen, a leadership source claimed that it was because Dem leaders were convinced that Repubs would be able to break off enough Dems to reach the 60 vote threshold and defeat the filibuster.

"They would have gotten 60," the leadership source says, adding: "Some on the Democratic side honestly fundamentally don't believe in filibustering cabinet secretaries. We are on the cusp of a new administration, and we think it will be a Democratic one. Filibustering here would have set a bad precedent."

Of course, this argument will ring hollow to some. Good behavior by Dems now is hardly likely to produce the same on the part of Republicans; indeed, they've already been filibustering like nothing else. And it also seems likely that the Dem leadership preferred to avoid the filibuster because it really wanted to get the defense approps bill passed as a shield against GOP criticism (though it can also be argued that there's pressure on Dems to get defense approps passed for other reasons) and so leaped at the chance to do this. That seems to be the reason that Dems rushed the vote through last night. Critics will point out that Dem worry about GOP attacks was hardly a good enough reason to wave the Mukasey vote through.

"It's important for us to say that we gave money to the military," the source said. "Because when Bush starts coming at us and saying that the troops are running out of money [when the Iraq funding battle fight starts], we'll be able to say, `We just gave you $450 billion.' It kind of gives us a cushion here."

Sure it does, and that's what you need--a cushion--because you Dems have that killer instinct to find the path that leads to the safe and soft.  How marveolously apt.

The Dems play soft and mostly on their heels because the GOP isn't reticent to play aggressively, and when the Dems have the advantage, they play not to lose. The result is that they lose. Anybody really believe that this maneuver to protect themselves from GOP attack about being weak on defense is going to work?  Why should it?  There are other agendas at work here, and they have little to do with what is good for the country.

Anybody still have questions why the wingnut right like Coulter and Limbaugh have nothing but contempt for Democrats?  Maybe it's because they are, in fact, contemptible.  You don't have to be a wingnut to see that.  Unfortunately they know how to use Dem weakness to their advantage even when every advantage should be with the Dems.

Zombie Traditionalism

Ed: I'm reposting this piece from 2005 which newer readers may not have ever read because of its congruence with the last post about The Zeitgeist of Unbelief:

To me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In the former people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in the latter in a chosen world--or at least in a world where choices are available in a way they are not in a typical premodern society.

The zombie traditionalist who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in an earlier era when the world would have been delivered to him as an indisputable given with a universally accepted cosmic order. No choices, no confusion, no fuss, no muss.  In a genuinely premodern traditional society, there are no alternative cultures or "value systems" recognized as valid--we in our tribe are the "human beings"; everyone else is the "barbarian" Other. Authority lies only in that which has been given by the ancestors.

It's no longer possible or appropriate to live in such a world. There is no going back to it. But this kind of nostalgia for something that once was alive is the ghostly spirit than animates zombie traditionalism.  This kind of traditionalism clings to the dead form of the old thing thinking that it preserves something valuable.  It's like propping up the corpse of the heirless king in his throne for fear of the chaos that will ensue when it becomes known that the old regime has ended and no clear successor has emerged.

This plays out in dozens of different ways.  For instance, I believe the objection of the zombie traditionalist to homosexual marriage/civil unions is not primarily a religious or spiritual issue. It has more to do with propping up the dead king.  It's about their fear of moral and cultural chaos if the old order is no longer something they can rely on. The issue for them is not whether these "sodomites" are all going to hell, but whether the society is going to hell. Because if society goes to hell, then evrybody goes to hell. For them the social order has to mirror the cosmic moral order. That's how it is in premodern socieities. So the zombie traditionalist sees gays and lesbians as the latest agents of modernity’s campaign to destroy what remains of the social/cosmic order given to them by the ancestors. (more at the jump)

The Zeitgeist of Unbelief (Updated)

From Taylor's A Secular Age:

We saw how for Providential Deism the principal claim to God's benevolence is precisely the nature of his unchanging order in creation. . . For those who take this view, the noblest, highest truth must have this general form.  Personal interventions, even those of a God, would introduce something arbitrary, some element of subjective desire, into the picture, and the highest truths about reality must be beyond this element.  From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.  A line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to our present time.

Now I think that an important part of the force which drove many people to see science and religion as incompatible, and to opt for the former, comes from this crucial difference in form.  In other words, the success of science built on and helped to entrench in them the sense that the Christian religion they were familiar with belonged to an earlier, more primitive or less mature form of understanding.

Now this bent to impersonality was greatly reinforced by the new cosmic imaginary.  The vast universe, in which one could easily feel no sense of a personal God or benign purpose, seemed to be impersonal in the most forbidding sense, blind and indifferent to our fate.  An account in terms of impersonal causal law seemed called for by the new depth sense of reality in the universe.

This inference was the stronger in that the stance of disengaged reason, construing the world as it does a devoid of human meaning, fits better with the impersonal picture.  But this stance is part of the modern identity of the buffered self, which thus finds a natural affinity for the impersonal order. . . .

But other things too, tend to make us align materialism with adulthood.  A religious outlook may easily be painted as one which offers greater comfort, which shields us from the truth of an indifferent universe, which is now felt as a strong possibility with the modern cosmic imaginary.  Religion is afraid to face the fact that we are alone in the universe and without cosmic support.  As children, we do indeed, find this hard to face, but growing up is becoming ready to look reality in the face.

Of course this story will probably make little sense to someone who is deeply engaged in a life of prayer or meditation, or other serious spiritual discipline, because this involves in its own way growing beyond and letting go of more childish images of God.  But if our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible.  And if in addition, one has been convinced that manliness is the key virtue, then the appeal to go over can appear irresistible. (pp. 362-64)

A couple of points:  First, the impersonal Deism of the eighteenth-century philosophes, after a few decades of Romantic protest, easily slid into the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. This change in the social imaginary of the culture's elites had an enormous influence in shaping the Western zeitgeist and changed the imagination of reality wherever Western ideas were influential. While this is a story that many found compelling, many then and now for good reason did and do not. But the dominant social imaginary for even Christian fundamentalists changed dramatically. Whatever their beliefs may be, even religious believers live in an experientially disenchanted world. 

Mukasey: Just Say No (Updates I, II, III, IV)

The Dems are like permissive parents who don't know how to deal with an ill-tempered, willful child. So unless the Dems behave completely counter to type, they'll just give in again do what the petulant Bush tells them to do. With palms turned upward pleadingly look around to the rest of us who, eyes glaring say with barely controlled rage, "Can you please control your child?"  But the Dems with hunched shoulders shuffle off muttering, "What can we do--he's just uncontrollable?"

And the rest of us shout: "So Chuck and Dianne. Just say No. For once.  Why?  Because you're the parents, and you 'say so'. Be real grownups. Assert your constitutional authority.  Maybe the Nanny Party has to hire one of TV nannies to do the job it seems too weak and muddleheaded to do.

This one is easy: Saying No to Mukasey is saying No to Bush's policy on torture.  It's not about Mukasey personally; it's about making a statement about what Americans affirm as morally acceptable policy. Good parents set limits.

UPDATE I: As I thought, looks like Chuck and Dianne need a tough-love parenting class.  Either that or to call in the Nanny Squad to do wht they cannot.  It's nauseating.

UPDATE II: Greenwald addresses the culture of permissiveness to which I allude  above.  His point is that even if the Dems were to say No this time, they have let things get so out of hand with their permissive codependency, it hardly matters:

If Mukasey's nomination were rejected (and the likelihood that Democrats will actually take this or any other stand seems very low), it seems as though the most significant impact would be to allow Senate Democrats to claim that they took a stand for critical principles -- principles that they have permitted to be eroded and assaulted for years, when they weren't doing the eroding and assaulting themselves. And while a late defense of these principles is certainly better than none at all, it is far from clear that rejecting Mukasey's nomination would really amount to a restoration of any of these principles.

Anyone selected by Bush to replace him, or a decision to leave in place the current Acting Attorney General, would mean that DOJ is run by someone who shares most if not all of Mukasey's extremist views. That's because those views have become normalized over the last six years. Congress had all sorts of remedies which it chose not to invoke in order to ensure that the administration's lawlessness and torture regimen ceased and that there were real consequences for that conduct -- from lawmaking to investigations and even impeachment. They chose instead to allow it all to proceed.

Nevertheless, their saying No would be a start, a sign to the rest of us that they are at least capable of taking a stand on this relatively unambiguous issue. It starts with taking baby steps. That they are unable even to do that is unspeakably pathetic. It may not have made that much of a difference if the Dems said No, but it seems to be hugely significant that in a rare black and white issue like this they were not able to.

UPDATE III: Here's Sullivan's take:

Every time the Democrats fold on these matters, Cheney tucks a precedent under his belt. Every time they cave into their cowardice and fear, another critical part of our liberty disappears. These precedents are designed to destroy the rule of law and replace it with the rule of a Decider. And they will last for ever, as will the right to torture, because this war is for ever. This is how democracies perish. The rule of law no longer has any party to defend it. The Republicans want no check on the powers of our de facto protectorate. And the Democrats have no spine. We live under the lawless protectorate we deserve. And such lawlessness is always the result when cowards refuse to confront bullies.

When even someone as moderate as Sullivan gets it, how is it possible that it's being allowed to happen.

UPDATE IV: Publius at Obsidian Wings:

But turning back to Schumer, the more troubling issue is that he let himself get backed into this corner at all. In fact, his excuse -- “this is the best we can hope for” -- completely vindicates the administration’s extreme tactics. Essentially, the administration’s lawbreaking and DOJ-politicization have been so extreme that a candidate who refuses to call waterboarding torture is transformed into a “compromise” nomination. After all, says Feinstein, “he’s no Alberto Gonzales.” Boy, that’s a ringing endorsement. And sound logic too. Here’s a warm plate of tuberculosis for ya. Say what you will, it ain’t the bubonic plague.

Given our low expectations and mangled baselines, refusing to call Spanish Inquisition-era torture “torture” is now something a “compromise” candidate can do and still get through a Democratically-controlled Senate committee. But that’s the point. The Bush administration -- and the GOP more generally -- goes long. They push hard so that yesterday’s “extreme” becomes tomorrow’s “compromise.” And in this case (like so many others), the tactics have proven successful.

And as Sullivan rightly says above, "This is how democracies perish."  Still any doubters out there?