Are You SURE You Want Those Emails?

When I read about this the first time, I was sure it was a story from the Onion.

It wasn’t.

As everyone not living on Mars is aware, the Republicans’ six hundredth Benghazi Investigative Committee (okay, so maybe I exaggerate a bit) forced disclosure of emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. It turned out that some of those emails were from the prior administration, and one of them– from then Secretary of State Colin Powell to President George Bush–confirmed Tony Blair’s promise to sign on to the Iraq conflict a year before the invasion began… a time when Blair and Bush were assuring their respective countrymen that they were taking great care to confirm the presence of weapons of mass destruction and that no definitive decision to invade had been made.

The British press has made much more of this revelation than the American media, but even here, it has been fairly widely reported. If the members of the Benghazi Inquisition were capable of embarrassment, you’d think they’d rethink their approach. But of course, they aren’t.

Then, this week, we had Clinton’s much-anticipated 11 hour testimony, and a whole series of further embarrassments centered on the committee’s obsession with her emails. (For a detailed “take down” of the day’s effort by a Clinton partisan, you can read this diatribe from Kurt Eichenwald, who noted–among many, many other things–the absence of similar expressions of concern over the twenty-two million Bush Administration emails that mysteriously disappeared.)

The continuing revelations about his brother should keep Jeb! quiet, but he weighed in with a tweet to the effect that the security failures at Benghazi were evidence of Clinton’s “incompetent” foreign policy; that prompted a post at Daily Kos “reminding” Jeb! that his brother’s administration had overseen not just 9/11, but deadly attacks on at least thirteen overseas American embassies and consulates as well as numerous other successful attacks against American diplomatic personnel and their staff.

It’s fair to assume that this week’s hearings did little to sway partisans on either side. But I was struck by a Facebook post by a friend who is a well-respected foreign policy expert at another university–someone I know to be a Republican, someone who has previously shared lukewarm-at-best feelings about Clinton, and who reported watching the whole thing.

If there is one truth that has come out of this ridiculous committee hearing for me, it’s that the search for wrongdoing in Benghazi is a tempest in a tea pot. The death of four Americans in a terrorist attack is a tragedy. But I wish the Republicans controlling Congress would have spent 1/10 of the time and energy (and the $4.7 million) investigating the decision to go to war in Iraq and all the decisions made after that that destroyed Iraq, killed over 4,000 American servicemen and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians. Why isn’t that worthy of at least one investigation (let alone eight)?

I think Kevin McCarthy accidentally answered that question.

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The Real Bottom Line

Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog recently considered the impact of recent revelations that Exxon had covered up–lied about– decades of its own research on climate change.

In a move that echoes similar scandals involving the tobacco industry and cancer research, Exxon conducted research into fossil fuels and global warming, discovered it had a major problem that threatened public safety, and quickly decided to start intentionally misleading the public and peddling doubt and uncertainty rather than confront the problem.

Exxon could have chosen to expose the problems with fossil fuels and become the world’s leading investor in and producer of renewable energies. It would have been risky and reduced short-term profits, but it would potentially have set the company up for massive long-term growth. It would also, of course, have been the right thing to do. But that’s not the path Exxon chose. Exxon chose to lie, cheat, cover up, collude with other oil companies, and bring the entire world to the brink of global climate disruption and destruction.

When does a company’s efforts to protect its bottom line become criminal?

When small businesses engage in fraudulent behaviors–the auto mechanic who lies about the work your car requires, the doctor who performs unneeded procedures, the jeweler who sells you a “gold” necklace that isn’t–we prosecute those responsible.

The powers-that-be have deemed certain financial institutions “too big to fail”– and also, evidently, too big to prosecute. Is “big energy” similarly exempt from the laws that govern the rest of us?

Does the sheer magnitude of the harm they’ve done somehow insulate them?

What’s the real bottom line?

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Ben Carson, Joan Gubbins and Identity Politics

People usually use the term “identity politics” to mean blocs of voters who cast their ballots for people with whom they share an identity.

For example, during the last two Presidential elections, opponents of President Obama often attributed his huge advantage among black voters to his skin color. Of course, “they” would vote for one of “their own.”

If that were true, of course, African-Americans would be lining up to support Ben Carson. They clearly aren’t, and a lot of Republicans don’t understand why. The confusion lies in a profound misunderstanding of what we should probably call “communities of interest” rather than “identity politics.”

Most readers of this blog, even those who lived in Indiana at the time, will not remember Joan Gubbins, a particularly unpleasant woman who served in the State Senate in the 1970s. Gubbins was a forerunner of today’s social conservatives–among other things, she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and memorably campaigned against her opponent in one primary by going door-to-door and explaining that the voter’s choice was between “a good conservative Christian and a damn liberal Jew.”

The Women’s Political Caucus (of which I was a member) endorsed her male opponent, who supported a number of women’s rights measures.

Women’s organizations like the (now defunct) Political Caucus and Emily’s List usually support women candidates–but not those with positions inimical to women’s rights. In the 2008 Presidential race, no self-respecting advocate for women’s equality was persuaded to vote Republican because Sarah Palin was on the ticket.

Latinos support candidates with reasonable positions on immigration and other policies relevant to that community. Whatever Ted Cruz’ ethnicity, he’s not going to get the Latino vote.

Women don’t disproportionately support Hillary Clinton because she’s female; they do so because she has championed women’s issues. (Sorry, Carly. As Sara Palin’s candidacy should have demonstrated, female plumbing isn’t enough.)

In 2016, African-Americans aren’t going to vote for a monumentally unqualified Ben Carson, whose positions suggest that he suffers from something akin to Stockholm Syndrome.

Anyone who thinks that “identity politics” means voting for someone who “looks like me” just doesn’t get it.

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What’s It All About?

Forgive the personal nature of this post. I’m not in a very “political” or “policy” mood right now.

A couple of days ago, a close friend died unexpectedly.

A couple of months before that, my best friend in the world–someone I talked to almost every day for fifty years, someone who shared my life so thoroughly that it’s hard to know who I would be if she hadn’t been part of it–died after a brief battle with cancer.

Even with months to prepare for the inevitable, I couldn’t write about that first death until now, couldn’t talk about it much, couldn’t come to terms with it. (I still haven’t.) The second one was a shock–a single male friend who we had semi-“adopted” into our family, who shared Thanksgivings and birthdays and weddings with our “clan,” and was only 62.

It’s times like these when you confront your own mortality, and wonder once again what it all means. Are there lessons in life’s fragility, and if so, what are they?

Like my best friend, who was a student of philosophy–and like my mother, who wasn’t–I don’t believe in an afterlife. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and to the extent our lives have meaning, it’s meaning we create. So we are responsible for thinking carefully about what it means to be a human being with free will (or something that feels like free will), and about the nature of morality, of good and evil, and our responsibilities to our fellow humans and the planet we share with them.

My friends each left a legacy of kindness. Neither was petty or self-aggrandizing. They both had a passion for justice, and an aversion to the sort of self-righteous judgmentalism that is all too common among less thoughtful and/or reflective people. They both lived full and authentic lives, and they both left their corners of the world better than they found it.

At the end of the day, I suppose that’s really all that anyone can hope for or aspire to.

The size of the holes left in our lives when wonderful, loyal people die is a testament to the value they added to ours. But those holes are really, really painful. We can walk around them, but they can’t be filled.

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The Real Problem with Trolls

In a response to a prior post–made in the middle of a somewhat heated discussion generated by that post–a commenter complained that his contributions to the debate had simply been ignored by others, even though they’d been accompanied by links to what he described as “liberal” references.

As regular readers of this blog know, I rarely participate in the conversations triggered by my daily posts/rants. (I do read most of the comments.) There are two reasons for that, one practical and one more-or-less philosophical: the practical reason is that I have a day job, and I can’t afford the additional time thoughtful engagement would take; the “philosophical” reason is that the blog is intended to generate responses and in a very real sense, to allow readers to educate me–which many of you, especially my “regulars” regularly do.

But the complaint was that no one was responding to points made by this particular individual, and that such non-responsiveness–at least in the eye of the commenter–was characteristics of the disinclination of “liberals” to engage with those who disagreed.

To the extent that complaint is justified, I don’t think it’s a consequence of political orientation, conservative or liberal. I think the problem is trolls.

I firmly believe that trolls–and this blog has a couple of persistent ones–want nothing more than to stir the pot. They present themselves as angry and troubled individuals whose goals are limited to insulting and “bomb throwing.”  For whatever reason (I’m no psychiatrist) they are uninterested in genuine dialogue, so responding to them is a waste of time.

Given the amount of time they spend spewing, it’s a good guess that they don’t have what the rest of us call “lives.”

I firmly believe that responding to such people is counterproductive; it simply draws otherwise reasonable people into whatever game they are playing.

The problem occurs when people who aren’t trolls, but who may have made their points in fairly antagonistic ways, enter the conversation. Readers lump those folks in with the trolls, assume that they are uninterested in real conversation, and thus don’t take what they perceive to be the bait.

This is precisely why civility is so important in this context. When dissenting opinions are offered in a civil fashion, it invites dialogue and engagement. Civility is especially important online, because online discussion doesn’t allow us to see body language or hear tone of voice–the cues that we get in other contexts that flesh out the sender’s intended message and help to prevent miscommunication. It’s really easy to be misunderstood on line (especially for people like me, who tend to be rather snarky), which is why it’s so important to frame our online communications with care, and to avoid sharing our passions in a manner that comes across as offensive or insulting.

If the perfectly appropriate response to trolls–ignoring them–puts a damper on the exchange of ideas between people genuinely interested in engaging in conversation, it may be understandable, but it’s a shame.

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