I don’t think people appreciate just want an amazing man Pat Robertson is. Because he is cloistered away at the Christian Broadcasting Network, he has been allowed to simultaneously become a national figure while having the same old crazy beliefs of a regional phenom. There is his Bible approved weight-loss shake. And his claim to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds. And his claim that all good Christians should be in favor of assassinating Hugo Chavez. He’s a colorful guy!

But the big thing with him is faith healing. I find the fiction of faith healing really interesting. It is the most bizarre form of magical thinking. It is useless for broken bones. Just ask the Christian Scientists! And there’s that whole thing about God never re-growing limbs. It seems if the ailment is obvious, God is absent. But when it comes to things like cancer which come and go, God is right on it!

Well, yesterday, Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch noted, Robertson: Mother Who Can’t Heal Son’s Deafness Must Be Doing Something Wrong. A mother named Debbie wrote to him, “My son is hearing impaired and cannot hear at all. I have prayed for his healing; it seems as if God is hearing-impaired. What am I doing wrong?” The title of the article makes it sound like Robertson shames the mother, but that clearly isn’t his intent. But it is a shaming thing to say.

As cultures advance, they tend to move from belief in magic to belief in prayer. There is a clear reason for this. If you have a shaman who can do miracles, he is either successful or he isn’t. If he dances for rain and it doesn’t rain, everyone see him for the useless pretender that he is. But praying to God provides the ultimate out. If you pray for God to heal your son and he isn’t healed, it isn’t God’s fault. God’s there; he hears you; it is just that you aren’t worthy.

But Pat Robertson had some ideas. First he said that she should “rebuke” the “spirit of deafness.” But if that didn’t work, “Try something else.” He and his co-host then laughed. To me that said, “If you try enough things, eventually something will work and you can credit God with it.” And if nothing works, maybe you aren’t worthy, or your son isn’t, but regardless, God works in mysterious ways.

What’s most interesting about this is that Robertson is going back to a very primitive approach to this kind of stuff. It seems very much like a shamanic thing. It’s very much the kind of thing that would have gotten him killed by the church a thousand years ago. Because this is not prayer. This is spell casting. And I think it is very telling of modern American evangelical Christianity. The movement is very confused theologically. And thus nothing is true and everything is permitted. As long as you claim that the power comes from Jesus.

Afterword

To go along with the article, here is the Jim Carroll Band doing “Nothing Is True”:

H/T: Crooks & Liars

BBC’s Louis Theroux had the stomach, once more, to talk with batshit crazy Shirley Phelps, her unfortunate children, and the seriously fucked up Westboro Baptist Church in his documentary, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis.

If only Shirley Phelps could keep her crazy to herself rather than poisoning the minds of her children. Kids at risk can be removed from a physically or emotionally abusive environment, but with families like these all you can do is feel sorry for them and hope they never have children of their own.

As a sentient citizen of the U.S., I am well aware of Westboro Baptist Church and the appalling, vicious hatred of its “ministry.” In this country that they scream God hates because of gay people, they are allowed, by law, to publicly propagate their twisted version of Christianity. That’s the price we pay for having the right of free speech. So, even though the very existence of these heinous people is abhorrent, we can’t shut them up. Or kill them. And that really annoys me. If I were inclined to be a card-carrying AAA (Armed Atheist Activist), this human cancer cluster would be my first — possibly only — target.

I came across this documentary today, The Most Hated Family in America, and it is infuriating. The matriarch of this family cult could be Ann Coulter’s missing fraternal twin — they don’t look alike, but in tone, attitude, ignorance, and density of hate, they are very much the same. Coulter’s only saving grace is that she isn’t breeding. Shirley Phelps-Roper has spawned eleven children whom she vigorously indoctrinates in fanatical dogma of irrational hatred.

I became an atheist based on rational thought. The disturbing and incredibly frustrating fact is that these people think they are being rational too. People like Shirley Phelps contradict themselves without any sense of the bizarre dichotomy of their own arguments. If someone is stunned into silence by the sheer absurdity of her hate-fueled “lines of reasoning” she thinks she’s won the debate. It never is a debate though. She and her herd, for all their smiling and smug self-assuredness, have no interest in hearing someone else’s point of view. There is no room in their minds for ideas that, deep down, they must know make real sense.

Matt Yglesias published a really good article yesterday, What Do Conservatives Like About Health Care in Singapore? He’s confused, you see, because he actually knows something about the Singapore healthcare system. And based upon that, conservatives ought to hate it because it is a far more intrusive and “socialistic” system than Obamacare. In fact, like almost all countries outside the third world, Singapore has a healthcare system that liberals would gladly exchange Obamacare for.

This is nothing new. Conservatives are always talking about some other country’s healthcare system. It doesn’t matter what it is. Back in February, Aaron Carroll wrote, I Don’t Think the Swiss Health Care System Is What They Think it Is. That was about how the conservative healthcare wonks (such as they are) were all excited about Switzerland. For example, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy wrote, “While most Americans view their healthcare system as ‘free-market,’ Switzerland actually has the most market-oriented healthcare system in the West.” But alas, no. So I guess the next in line is Singapore.

All this is grasping at straws. As I’ve noted before, the Republicans really screwed up when they decided that their very own healthcare reform idea was too liberal. For some, I’m sure this is a good faith effort to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into. But mostly, it is just yet more cover. “We hate Obamacare. Let’s repeal it and then we’ll get that Swiss system. Or Singaporean. Or…” The weird thing about it is that they really think if they ignore our country’s healthcare problems long enough they will just go away. Eventually they are are going to have to face the problem, but in the meantime people are dying.

In the case of Singapore, the confusion seems to be that conservatives think that it is based upon Health Savings Accounts (HSA). These are the Holy Grail of conservative healthcare reform. The idea is that an individual buys a catastrophic insurance policy with, say, a $2,000 deductible. Then they put money in a special non-taxed savings account for a total of $2,000 per year. Then they pay for their medical treatment out of the account up to the deductible. If they don’t meet the deductible, they get to keep what is left over in the account. Thus, people won’t just run to the doctor, because they have an incentive. It really is the ultimate libertarian policy: perfect in theory, useless in practice.

Well, it turns out that part of Singapore’s healthcare system is called “Medisave, a compulsory individual medical savings account scheme.” But it isn’t really an HSA. It is more like Social Security, “Singaporeans and their employers contribute a part of the monthly wages into the account to save up for their future medical needs.” Yglesias explains, “As best I can tell, these Medisave accounts are deposited into the Central Provident Fund, a government-run investment pool, rather than constituting private savings as we would understand them.” Aaron Carroll sums it all up nicely:

What this means is conservatives will continue to call for anything but. They are willing to consider any healthcare system, as long as it absolutely positively cannot be done here. So even if Singapore had the perfect libertarian Holy Grail of healthcare, it would be abandoned as soon it became an actual bill in Congress. Conservatives only want perfection and that only exists in their minds. From a practical standpoint, that means they want to do nothing. Everything else is bloviating.

Simon Wren-Lewis at Mainly Macro tries to answer the question, What Is Wrong With the USA? He teaches at Oxford, so he sees things from an English point of view. And he’s seen that in the United Kingdom, the conservative press have pushed their far right to act in ways that are similar to the Tea Party here (although the issues are different). He suggests that most of the problems come from the right wing echo chamber.

What I think he misses is that this is not a problem with the far right in the United States. It is a problem with the entire right. I’ve written far too many articles over the last two years that are very much like, Moderate Republicans Really Are Extreme. There really is no distinction in ideology. They are all hardcore anti-choice, anti-entitlement, pro-tax-cut… I could go on for thousands of words, but I doubt there is a reason because you probably could too. The only distinction in the Republican Party is whether such policies need to be enacted today or whether they can wait a year or two.

But Wren-Lewis provided a graph that shows all anyone should need to see about what’s wrong here and there:

US and UK? Pretty bad. Italy and France? Pretty good. Looking at the graph you have to ask: have the rich done something really great the last three decades to justify getting so much more of the nation’s income? That’s a rhetorical question; of course they haven’t. These huge increases are the result of government policy. England had Thatcher. America had Reagan. And Italy and France did not.

Wren-Lewis notes that bad economic times and high levels of inequality bread angry right wing movements. And that’s what we are seeing now. Sure, the Tea Party are a bunch of racists, and let’s be honest, so are most of the other Republicans. But why are they so angry? Things are not going well. And who better to blame than the poor with darker skin.

This is why Democrats need to push actual liberal policy. We need things that will make the country better. As it is, with the 25 year New Democratic “we’re not quite as bad as the Republicans” approach to governance, we have at best slowed the growth of bad conservative policy. The people should get a clear choice. When another 2008 comes around, it is time for the Democrats to be bold. Because that is what the people will have voted for. If they want Republicans-Lite, they can look elsewhere. A vote for Obama was not a vote to end Entitlements as we know them.

Mike Konczal has written the most insightful thing I’ve read this month about the problems with the Obamacare exchanges, What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism? He argues that the failure of the exchanges is not the result of liberalism; it is the result of neoliberalism. Or to put it more clearly: New Democratic ideology. We could have had an old fashioned approach to healthcare reform: a single payer health insurance system. That would have been simple. And I have had many frustrating conversations over the last two years with conservatives who complain about Obamacare and ask why we couldn’t just have a single payer system. The answer, of course, is that after Fox News started shouting about “socialized medicine” these same conservatives would be absolutely positively against single payer. But I digress.

Obamacare is so annoyingly complicated because it is designed to be a kind of public-private partnership and that no one thinks will be as good at reducing costs as a single payer system would be. If we had the simple government insurance system, the exchanges would be trivial. You would log on, enter your information, and the program would spit out how much it was going to cost you. Or even better: there would be no exchanges; the correct amount of money would just be taken out of your paycheck. Instead, we have a system that interacts with multiple private insurance systems and then these have to communicate with the government to figure out how much it will pay. And in the end, you have a totally messed up system that tells you to try back later.

The issue now is as it has been since Obama first became president: why do the Democrats make their laws more conservative when the Republicans block everything? The Democrats in Congress never even considered a single payer system. We were on track to get the conservative Heritage Foundation plan long before Kennedy died and the Democrats lost their super majority in the Senate. But as a result of the Democrats big rush to make the law more conservative ends right here with an over-complicated law that the Republicans can point at and say, “See! Liberalism doesn’t work!”

Well, in fact, we haven’t tried liberalism. For the last 35 years, Democrats have tried to “get along” with Republicans by moving more and more and more to the right. And the response? The Republicans just move more and more and more to the right. In fact, as the entire political system has moved rightward, the ideological divide between the parties has grown. For each step the Democrats have taken to the right, the Republicans have taken two steps to the right. Nice going guys!

Konczal pointed out something else that I really like because I’ve been saying it for a long time. Let me quote myself, because I think I put it better:

This is a very big problem for conservatives. The mess that our previous healthcare system was will not go away if Obamacare fails. The remaining conservative healthcare “reform” ideas either nibble around the edges or actually make things worse. The people will not stand for this—not for long anyway. So the only alternative to Obamacare is some kind of single payer system. This is yet another example of conservatives demanding everything and as a result, actually losing ground.

Like most liberals who have been paying attention, I’ve never liked Obamacare. The idea that the government would require people to buy into a broken health insurance market strikes me as an authoritarian overreach. But such theoretical considerations are not that important to me. What is important is getting a system that works. I’m sure the government will make Obamacare work. But it is a conservative policy, and I have always wanted a liberal policy: a single payer system, which would have worked far better.

Doublethink again. As Frank pointed out in his post Police Oversight and Dead Children, “Our society is all about guns; men are supposed to like them; boys are supposed to play with fake ones. I wish it weren’t so. But it is wrong for a society to tell a boy in a million ways that guns are cool and then blame him for getting killed.”

I was looking for an incendiary image that I could use for my last post. I wanted a picture of a woman looking afraid while holding a gun, so I typed “woman holding a gun” into Google search. The images that popped up were disturbing, but not in the way I was expecting.

I understand the phallic nature of guns, the sense of control and power that holding one apparently exudes, but I still think it’s a stupid and dangerous fetish. I presume that’s the reasoning behind making paintball and other types of “toy” guns look so realistic, so boys can play men (and by “boys” I mean grown men who don’t want their toys to look like toys). Actually, I understand that too.

Unfortunately, there are too many real guns in the world and therein lies the real problem.

In yet another accidental shooting here in the U.S., a child is dead simply because someone who had no business having a gun in the first place, left it lying within easy reach of a child. So today, a 5-year-old boy is dead in a tragedy that was, as a chief deputy astutely observed, “avoidable.” Of course it was.

Leaving a child and a 6-month-old infant unattended is a negligent thing to do. Leaving those same children alone with a loaded gun is reprehensible. People make stupid choices every day, but stupid choices involving guns are pretty much guaranteed to go badly.

Even if she weren’t armed and afraid of being alone, children should never be left in the hands of someone who won’t actually be looking after them. What sensible person would leave a loaded weapon on a coffee table and then take a nap? If you’re afraid of being alone and the gun makes you feel better, nap with it! Better you should accidentally shoot yourself than lose a child left in your care.

This image and accompanying text are from a multi-forwarded email that I received this morning.

This Guy Had The Guts To Put This On The Internet

There are people in my life whom I love in spite of our vast political and religious differences. (I feel a little like Diana Nyad dealing with Oprah — Oprah only sees what she wants to see.) So rather than respond to this rhetorical bile and risk offending someone whom I would rather leave in blissful ignorance, I’ll vent here.

[Editor’s note: I have not altered the unique grammatical structure or punctuation of this proud American’s defiant, unapologetic and God-fearing expression of patriotism, however I have omitted the variety of typefaces, American flags, eagles, photos of kittens appearing to pray, and so on.]

Is this apoplectic outpouring of patriotism from a real person or is it just a Conservative variation of the ancient Chain Letter? Is MSgt Arthur R Mason USAF a real person? The only indication that he might be a walking, breathing (if not thinking) human being is on a restricted (and I’m pretty sure I know why) Yahoo! Group: “Army Security Agency Vets – A club for the top ten percent.” Verifying his existence isn’t really important. What’s important is that MSgt Arthur R. Mason USAF (Ret.) had THE GUTS to maybe have posted this rant on the internet himself!

Regardless of the original writer of this offensive, ignorant tirade, it is being passed around like a note in a 7th grade classroom. There is much to correct, mock or easily disprove, but what’s the point? People either agree with it or they don’t. I don’t, but obviously there are many people like MSgt Arthur R. Mason USAF (Ret.) who are filled with rage at imaginary wrongs and feel compelled to spew their impotent and misguided opinions at anyone with an email address.

UPDATE

This is a screenshot of page that I can’t get to now without joining the group.

[1] Unless you’re in another country, you will be sold a Big Mac in English.

[2] God helping me not to fear

Yesterday, two sheriff’s deputies killed a 13-year-old kid here in my home town of Santa Rosa. Thus far there aren’t many details of the case. According to the Press Democrat, the kid was walking down the street with what looked like an assault rifle but which was in fact a “replica.” According to the article, “The deputies stopped and told him to put down the weapon and within seconds several shots were fired.” It goes on to say that the boy, Andy Lopez, was hit repeatedly and died on the scene.

I know that a lot of people will wonder why the kid was carrying the fake gun. But I have a problem with this kind of second guessing. Our society is all about guns; men are supposed to like them; boys are supposed to play with fake ones. I wish it weren’t so. But it is wrong for a society to tell a boy in a million ways that guns are cool and then blame him for getting killed.

I’m sure that the deputies feel very bad. It has to be awful. Just the same, I don’t like what I’ve read. They told him to put down the weapon and within seconds they started firing? More information will come out and we’ll see what it all means.

A few weeks ago, I was at a family function and an old family friend was there who just retired from the very same sheriff’s department. He was complaining about recording devices and how administrators were always judging the actions of officers after the fact and how it wasn’t fair. I do get that. On the other hand, this is Santa Rosa, not north Richmond.

Most though, I don’t buy the whole “Monday morning quarterback” complaint. I’ve never had a job where someone above me wasn’t second guessing things I had done under stressful and time sensitive conditions. The big problem with this complaint is that it implies that police work is so much more dangerous than other jobs. It isn’t. What is different is that while fisherman are far more likely to die on the job, police officers are far more likely to kill on the job.

What’s more, police have enormous power that they abuse with abandon. So I think the real complaint about management second guessing them is that they think that no one should have power over them. Because that’s what they’re used to. On the street, no one can even question them. If one does, he risk at least a night in jail.

Meanwhile, in this case, a boy is dead for no good reason. And these things happen all the time. Not far away, a woman was killed by police because she had a vegetable peeler in her hand. Oversight is important. Police officers may think there is too much of it, but they are wrong. A child is dead.

Sunday, John Hayward over at Breitbart wrote, Consumer Reports Recommends Staying Away From ObamaCare for at Least a Month. Of course, that isn’t what he’s really talking about. This is the usual conservative media echo chamber crap that any problem with Obamacare means it is a failure; and any success with Obamacare will simply not be reported.

After lambasting the exchanges—which liberals complain about too, in one of many stunning examples of a lack of equivalence—Hayward gets on to to his main point. “The problem, as we’ve been discussing here at The Conversation lately, is that if the young chumps wait a month or longer to get fleeced by their sky-high ObamaCare premiums, the whole rotten scheme will collapse into a death spiral that begins devouring insurance companies.” The point about sky-high premiums is exactly the opposite of what’s going on. It is true that young and healthy people will pay a bit more for their insurance. This isn’t “sky-high.” And regardless, this is just the same thing that goes on with Social Security. Young people pay into it and get nothing back right away. Those young people will eventually get old and be able to afford health insurance. It’s a good deal.

But then Hayward claims that liberals want Obamacare to be destroyed. It is all part of our cunning plan to get a single payer system. Well, the cat is out of the bag! I didn’t think the conservatives would figure out what we were doing: first implement a terrible conservative approach to healthcare reform; make sure it fails, which isn’t hard because it is a conservative policy; and then the people will just be clambering for yet another government attempt at healthcare reform. Like most cunning plans, it absolutely wouldn’t work. That’s why it took a conservative to figure it out!

Most of those who do research don’t like it when people in the conservative media echo chamber quote their work. The thing is that most researchers try to be honest. And when a conservative latches on to some work, they do it only for propaganda’s sake. So Consumer Reports was none too happy with Breitbart and others who misused their research. It’s really quite simple: they were talking about the exchanges, not Obamacare itself. But it’s more than even that:

There is a big difference between Consumer Reports and conservatives like John Hayward: CR wants to help people make the best use of the tools available; Hayward wants to harm people so that he can push his ideological agenda. That also happens to be the difference between liberals and conservatives. Modern liberals really aren’t very ideological. Conservatives are nothing but.

After mistakenly believing that George Bush Jr had created prettified versions of the Abu Ghraib torture photos, I have reflected on why I could believe that he would do such things. Part of it is that I have a very low opinion of Bush. He’s a trust fund kid who skated through life into the White House. And the world is a far worse place for it. But that’s not really the main issue. I wouldn’t, for example, think the same thing of Dick Cheney who I dislike even more.

In my mind, if not in reality, Bush is still the cheerleader at Yale—a deeply unserious guy. Look at his paintings: he signs them “43.” To me this says that being president wasn’t about much other than the title. It reminds me of Primary Colors where Jack Stanton says, “You know as well as I do, that plenty of people playing this game, they don’t think that way. They’re willing to sell their souls, crawl through sewers, lie to people, divide them, play on their worst fears for nothing! Just for the prize.” That’s Bush. But of course, he didn’t have to crawl through the sewers.

Throughout the time that he was in office, he seemed to think it was all a joke. When he was serious, it was more like he was playing the part of the serious president—although maybe that’s all that any of them do. There was his response to the famous presidential daily briefing, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” There was his golf course moment, “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” There was, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” But most of all, he was cavalier about the job generally.

So it wasn’t (and really still isn’t) that hard to imagine him approaching the history of his presidency with what he would think of as a rye sense of humor. The pictures from Abu Ghraib really are beyond the pale. At least in retrospect. But sad clown faces on Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? That’s entirely in keeping with what we know about George Bush’s sense of humor. And I think that’s the core of why I found the fakes believable.

The whole thing started with a gallery of a dozen or so George Bush paintings. (I can’t find the link.) It contained a number of authentic Bush paintings, and most or even all of these fake ones. None of them were distinguished. I eventually traced the source back to the original Vanity Fair article. And I found many other references to the paintings, none of which clearly indicated parody. In fact, the Vanity Fair article was completely straight except for the final paragraph. Of course, I should have noticed the headline, “Fauxsclusive…” But alas, I am clueless at times.

There you have it. In the end, embarrassment aside, I’m glad that George Bush has not taken to apologetics in his paintings. And on a more fundamental level, maybe thinking that he would was giving him more credit than than was due. He’s still more a cheerleader than a sad clown. Go team!

Thanks to Andrea for doing the image!