Open letter to the White House - the death of Terri Schiavo

Dear Mr. President,

In the midst of my sadness at the death of Terri Schiavo, a woman who was denied the right to die in peace because of your interference and that of your pack of wolves, I read this statement from you: "The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak." Tell me something, sir - were you sleeping all through Sunday school and civics class?

If you had paid attention in civics class, for instance, you would have learned that the "essence of civilization" is not the duty to protect the weak, but life according to the rule of law rather than the caprice of rulers. This is basic conservative doctrine; we know you don't read, but surely someone told you that. It was spelled out clearly by one of conservatism's founders, Thomas Hobbes, who asserted that civilization is better than life in the state of nature not because civilization is inherently superior, but because anything is better than lawlessness, in which life is "nasty, brutish and short." Well, your Republican buddies in Congress have imported the nasty and brutish part into our civilization now; let's hope they don't import the rest. In any case, you and they have now prioritized your own caprice over the rule of law, and thus weakened the civilization you claim to respect. Granted that civilized humans sometimes find it necessary to live by a law higher than human law, that higher law doesn't usually include a statement that human laws can be ignored whenever we don't like the results of court decisions.

As for the duty to protect the weak and your evident inattention in Sunday school, may I ask why you find this duty so compelling now when you have ignored it for the past four years or even longer? Have you ever protected the weak? You did not protect the citizens of Texas from devastating pollution. You did not protect the death row inmates of Texas from the effects of a chief executive (you) who spent a mere 15 minutes on each of their cases. You did not protect the elderly from pharmaceutical corporate greed. You did not protect bankrupt American citizens from the greed of credit card companies. You did not protect the citizens of Iraq from the effects of poor intelligence, poor planning and poor execution when you removed Saddam Hussein from power, nor did you protect them from Hussein himself when you and your cronies found it convenient and profitable to do business with him. You are not now seeking to protect a delicate Alaskan ecosystem from further corporate greed, nor do you seek to protect the worldwide ecosystem from that same corporate greed. You've never even protected a brain-dead person on a feeding tube before now, and your friend Mr. DeLay went so far as to pull the plug on his own father. You have sided with the strong in each and every case, and I could go on, but really I think you have never used your power to protect the weak in your life; what's so special about poor Ms. Schiavo?

And after all this, you get on the national soapbox and grandly proclaim that "the essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak."

Mr. President, you are either a morally hollow man through and through or you are simply delusional. Either way, I have a suggestion: You obviously need some time for rest and reflection, at the very least to improve your rhetoric, so why don't you just go back to your big ranch in Crawford and relax for the next four years and let someone run the country who knows how?

How to get an idea

I'm about a third of the way through my novel, but I haven't written anything in a couple of days and that's no good. I was pumping out a thousand words a day for a while there, not because I was no inspired, but in order to get inspired.

I don't really expect what I'm pumping out right now to stay the way it is, of course. Most writers revise and edit their first drafts, with a few notable exceptions.

No, I'm not going to tell you anything about my novel, except that its title is "Weight". It's not that I don't trust you, it's just that I don't trust the guy next to you.

Anyway, I expect I can catch up again. One thing I've learned, and it's my whole reason for posting this in the first place, is that inspiration comes after we start work, not before.

Benshlomo says, to himself first of all and then to everyone else, Get moving.

Those dirty liberal profs

Todd Zywicki is a professor of law at George Mason University in Virginia and a regular blogger on the excellent Volokh Conspiracy. Like most of the Conspirators, he's pretty conservative in his politics (though not exclusively so), which puts him in the minority in academic circles. In the post I've linked to, he cites some studies to prove this.

What strikes me about the post is that, although he points to statistics suggesting that professors' liberalism doesn't seem to have much effect on their students, he actually thinks that's a bad thing.

So I wrote him this letter:

Dear Professor Zywicki:

I note your Volokh Conspiracy post regarding the - I guess you'd call it political - imbalance on campus, and I'm not the least bit surprised. For whatever reason, it seems evident that most university faculty consider themselves liberal and/or Democratic. As a liberal myself, I might suppose that this is due to the university environment of valuing exploration, new ideas, and so forth, but that's probably wishful thinking, at least in part.

While I was reading your post, I wondered why this imbalance seems to be so horrifying to most conservatives who comment on it. I theorized that the imbalance would only be damaging if it had an impact on the education provided by the universities in question; otherwise it would seem to be a simple statistical fact, of no more or less interest than any other. Lo and behold, a few paragraphs down, you addressed that very issue, citing polls suggesting that professorial liberalism does not have an impact on student beliefs.

I would have thought this would be a relief to conservatives, but then I read your comment that this lack of influence seems depressing to you. You lament the fact that professorial liberalism has led to a circumstance where, perhaps, students tune out their professors altogether, except presumably to absorb whatever factual information the class requires them to know. (This seems to imply a belief on your part that professors have an obligation to do more than simply transmit information to their students, an opinion that most conservatives of my acquaintance do not share in the least, but never mind that for now.) In other words, if other conservatives react as you do, they are neither more nor less disturbed if professorial liberalism influences students or does not influence students.

I therefore have a few questions:

If the influence of professorial liberalism on students has, as it seems to, no influence on your deploring of same, what exactly is your objection to the majority status of professorial liberalism?

Given that the liberal political opinions of university professors do not seem to increase the liberalism of future generations, I might suppose that you object to the majority status of liberalism among professors as a possible indication of some sort of unfair hiring practice. That is, you may assume, because most university professors are liberal, that qualified conservatives don't have a fair chance at employment. If this is so, would you have the same objections if the majority of university professors agreed with you politically, rather than disagreeing?

And finally, assuming that the majority status of professorial liberalism is a bad thing for whatever reason, what are your suggestions as to how it might be remedied?

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

Benshlomo says, If there's anyone out there who can point out the illogic in his own emotional appeals, he's probably the Messiah.

DeLay DeWimp

That does it - the Republican leadership in Congress has officially lost its mind.

Let's review. Every doctor who has examined Terri Schiavo in person says that she is in a persistent vegetative state and cannot possibly recover. Every court that has ever considered her case has sided with her husband, who is her legal guardian and heard her say, in the presence of witnesses, that she did not want to be kept alive by mechanical means. Despite the fact that he's moved on with his life and found someone new to love, he remains so devoted to his wife that he's turned down a fortune for the sake of obeying her wishes. Every poll ever taken has shown that the American people are on his side.

Her poor parents - they've been holding onto a hopeless dream of watching their daughter wake up for ten years, people. They're so deluded by hope that they've spent ten years and God knows how much money convincing a bunch of politicians to interfere with the American legal system for the sake of their broken hearts.

Politicians. They're relying on politicians. I'm so devastated by their desperation I'm nearly in tears.

So now that the Supreme Court has turned them down again, and the President's brother has had his bid to grab custody of Terri Schiavo from her husband has been slapped down, and all the various Republican political power grabs have been cut off, Tom DeLay - one of the most powerful men in the world, who is about to get his head handed to him because, at best, his political hatchet men broke the law - Tom DeLay, who has done his best for years to destroy any opposition to his policies - Tom DeLay wants us all to think that he's as much a victim as Terri Schiavo.

Understand this, folks. Terri Schiavo, whether she ever recovers or not, has been lying in bed for ten years while a horde of strangers and her own parents have used her dying body as a political, religious and spiritual punching bag. Tom DeLay has used his political power to let a bunch of crooks circumvent campaign finance laws, making themselves and him more rich and powerful every day. And DeLay is drawing comparisons between them.

Yep, it's official, the Republican Congressional leadership has lost it. Lost whatever pittance was left of its dignity, its credence. This country is in the hands of a bunch of thugs.

Benshlomo says, There's nothing so disgusting as a pool of rot with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

Open letter to the White House - Decision-Making

Dear Mr. President:

I'm a little confused these days. You have made pronouncements on several issues in the past week, pronouncements based on clearly stated principles upon which you purport to stand. At the same time, within recent memory, you have made decisions based on principles directly contrary to those you now adhere to so faithfully. Could you please inform us exactly what it is you believe?

In the matter of Terri Schiavo, for instance, you signed legislation overpowering the jurisdiction of the Florida state courts, saying "In cases like this one,where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life. This presumption is especially critical for those like Terri Schiavo, who live at the mercy of others." Very well, we understand the principle. What I don't understand is where the principle came from or how long it has been operative. It certainly wasn't operative three years ago, where your presumption regarding Iraq was decidedly in favor of death for American soldiers and many thousands of Iraqi citizens. The circumstances were very similar indeed - there were "serious questions and substantial doubts" regarding your professed reasons for going to war, and you must have known that once we invaded Iraq, many millions of Iraqis would be living "at the mercy of others," whether American troops, Shiite insurgents, Islamic fundamentalists or any of a number of others. Clearly, then, you have now made a decision based on a principle - the presumption in favor of life - which you obviously did not adhere to in the past. Can we expect you to adhere to this principle in the future? If so, what are your plans for promoting the presumption in favor of life in Iraq? Your policies are now helping to kill people there every day, so under this new principle you must certainly be getting ready to change them. Unless, of course, you don't really believe in this new principle.

Similarly, a few days ago, you announced your belief that developments toward democracy in the Middle East are a direct result of America's intervention in Iraq, that "The victory of freedom in Iraq is...inspiring democratic reformers from Beirut to Tehran. Today, women can vote in Afghanistan, Palestinians are breaking the old patterns of violence, and hundreds of thousands of Lebanese are rising up to demand their sovereignty and democratic rights." Never mind that most of these developments were either in process long before American troops showed up in Iraq or were touched off by incidents that had nothing to do with our invasion. Never mind that the Palestinian election arose because Yasser Arafat died, which had nothing to do with the American invasion; never mind that the Lebanese uprising was brought on by the assassination of a Lebanese statesman, which had nothing to do with the American invasion; never mind that "hundreds of thousands of Lebanese" are also rising up to demand that their "sovereignty and democratic rights" be ignored in favor of Syrian control; never mind that it's taken three years for Afghanistan to get around to giving women the vote, or that the women's vote in Afghanistan is as ineffective as the men's vote, both due to the chaos left in the wake of the American invasion. Never mind all that, the principle behind your pronouncement is clear; if something happens after an action of yours, in approximately the same place and using some of the same terminology, the responsibility is to be given to you. It's another change of direction, though. Only a few days ago you invoked an entirely different principle regarding advocacy videos disguised as straight news, clearly intended to fool viewers into thinking that they presented facts rather than opinion. These advocacy pieces came out of your office and used terminology from your pronouncements, so we might expect you to take responsibility for them as you did for democratic developments in the Middle East. Instead, you announced that the responsibility for informing the public as to the source of those advocacy pieces rests with local television, not with you. So I must ask - do you now plan to adhere to the new principle of taking responsibility for developments around you, as you did regarding the Middle East? Or do you plan to adhere to this principle only when things are going well?

I would not be so concerned, Mr. President, if it weren't for the fact that you ran for re-election on a platform of standing your ground and operating with moral clarity. You accused your opponent of flip-flopping for far lesser shifts in emphasis than the ones you are exhibiting now. Indeed, your flopping around on the bases for your decisions would seem little short of psychopathic in any average citizen. Perhaps you expect us to cut you some slack given the enormity of your job, but isn't that why you keep people like Jeff Gannon around? Do you really expect the American people to forgive your moral relativism because you are the President of the United States? Are you quite well, sir?

Here We Go

I'm too old for this shit, but I'll learn as I go.

I'm a Jewish liberal Californian. I'm overqualified for my job. I'm no smarter than you are. Make of that whatever you like, it's okay with me.

I sometimes write letters to President Bush and send copies to the newspaper, but I doubt anyone reads them, so I'll post them here.

Thanks to all the usual suspects; now let's see what happens.