Bill O’Reilly, mouthpiece of the Great White Male, recently came out, not from the closet silly, but almost pretty much in favor of gay marriage. Apparently he’s okay with civil unions and really doesn’t care either way. I don’t know how old his kids are, so he might end up pulling a Portman someday. According to Politco, O’Reilly said the following:

What’s next, Rush Limbaugh saying he supports women’s rights? I know that’s a pipe dream. He’s more likely to suffer an on-air aneurism (which could happen and would be truly inspirational).

As Debra Milke continues to rot in prison, the Arizona “justice” system continues to try to avoid admitting to their wrongdoing. I’ve previously written about Milke’s outrageous conviction for murder 22 years ago as well as the current efforts of the Arizona Attorney General to appeal the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to overturn the verdict. But I can’t get enough of this case. I check every day. Naively, I continue to hope that there will be a quick resolution to this and that this poor woman will at long last be set free. I don’t think I will lose interest until she finally is released.

There have been two interesting articles about Milke in the last week or so. Over at OpEd News Barry Graham wrote, U.S. Media Helped Keep Debra Milke on Death Row for 20 Years. He learned about the case 13 years ago and tried to get some of his editors interested in the story. None were. To some extent you can understand this. Even now, after the conviction has been overturned, Milke’s story is entirely “dog bites man.” Unfortunately, what has happened to her is only too common. What makes it exceptional at this point is that she may at long last get some modicum of justice.

In Graham’s article, he fills in a couple of details about the case:

I knew that Saldate didn’t record the interview; if he had, we wouldn’t be here today. But the fact that his supervisor specifically told him to record it and he didn’t is almost unbelievable. It seems certain that his history of lying on the stand had something to do with that request. But even the recording mightn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t decided to do the interrogation alone. Everything I’ve learned about Saldate makes him seem like a very unreliable, even actively dishonest guy. But I wonder: why did the police force retain such an officer on the force? And didn’t his superiors have a duty to call all these problems to the attention of the court—especially when they learned that Saldate was the entire case against Milke?

Over at Above the Law, David Lat reported on the circus environment surrounding Milke’s trial. He reprinted an article from the time that appeared in the Arizona Republic by Brent Whiting. This is taken from the Debra Milke website:

I can’t even imagine. It is totally inappropriate, but even more: it is heartless. Judge Hendrix was about to sentence Milke to death but she turned her courtroom into a concert venue because “she wanted to hear him” and that it was “intended to relieve stress”? This story convinces me that Graham was right when he wrote that the judge was “hostile.” I might add incompetent.

Meanwhile, the wait continues.

Afterword

I found a great overview of the case up to 2009, Debbie Milke Was Convicted of Murdering Her Own Child, Now She May Win Her Freedom (or, At Least, a New Trial). Check it out if you are interested at all in this case.

I don’t know how much you’ve read about yesterday’s hearing on the Prop. 8 gay rights case. I’m trying not to read much, because it just infuriates me. But with the little that I’ve read, one thing really stands out to me: Antonin Scalia’s very un-judicial temperament. Time and again, he seemed to be leading Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Prop. 8, around by the nose. Here is a particularly telling moment:

Mr. Cooper, let me—let me give you one—one concrete thing. I don’t know why you don’t mention some concrete things. If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you must—you must permit adoption by same-sex couples, and there’s—there’s considerable disagreement among—among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a—in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not. Some States do not—do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason… I don’t think we know the answer to that. Do you know the answer to that, whether it—whether it harms or helps the child?

Basically, Scalia is saying that the Prop. 8 proponents should be saying that same-sex marriage is really bad because we don’t know if same-sex couples adopting children is bad or not. First, of course, Scalia is wrong that there is disagreement among sociologists about this matter: same-sex couples are just as good as opposite-sex couples. But just as we saw in the Obamacare hearings, Scalia seems to get all of his information from listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

Apart from this, I don’t see any other justices trying to lead the attorneys along, “I think you forgot to mention…” And this isn’t the only occurrence of this. At least two other times, Scalia attempted to bail out Cooper when he was crumbling under the questioning of another judge. It was very disturbing.

None of this comes as a surprise, of course. As I wrote yesterday, Scalia always manages to twist the law to go along with his own prejudices that ossified a few decades ago. This is in keeping with a short interview that Francis Wilkinson did with Yale Constitutional Law Professor Jack Balkin. He is an expert on “originalism,” the judicial philosophy that Scalia claims to follow that says that laws only mean what people thought they meant when they were enacted. Although Balkin goes out of his way (much too far, if you ask me) to be fair to all of the originalist thinkers, he is blunt in his appraisal of the Associate Justice:

In fact, he goes on to say that originalism doesn’t really constrain constitutional argument. This is, of course, what I’ve long thought: originalism is just a convenient way to justify the conservative outcomes that most of its proponents seek.[1] But at least Thomas applies it with a bit of rigor. Scalia, like the conservative hack he is, abandons it when it interferes the least bit with what he wants to “prove.”

Antonin Scalia has gotten through most of his career with a combination of brilliance along with his reputation as a colorful character. I think this is coming to an end. His brilliance is somewhat faded and it is increasingly clear that it was never used for anything but partisan parlor tricks. Meanwhile, his “color” is more and more just the angry ravings of an old man the culture is leaving behind. Even in his own lifetime, I think he will likely see his reputation disintegrate.

Afterword

After writing this article, I came upon the following clip from Politics Nation with Al Sharpton. At the 3:00 mark, Sharpton presents a number of clips that show that right wing talkers were saying exactly the same things that Scalia was saying on the bench. In each case, the Scalia statements were after they became right wing talking point. How is it that this guy is taken as anything other than a conservative hack?

[1] Originalism is primarily a conservative doctrine, but there is increasing liberal use of it. I gather that they think a little deeper about it. Balkin provides a contrast of sorts. He says, “A conservative like Scalia might argue that the Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment weren’t designed to say anything about marriage.” This is to say he’s talking about very concrete things: they weren’t thinking about marriage so they didn’t mean for the law to apply to same-sex marriage. But then he says, “A liberal originalist might argue that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to guarantee equal basic rights.” In other words, the liberal would look at what the general purpose was.

I know I’m biased, but the conservative take on this is ridiculous. It reminds me of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian where the crowd gets in an argument about Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the cheese makers.” If Congress made a law in the 18th century that gave worker rights to those in the farm and manufacturing industries, the conservative would claim the law does not apply to computer programmers because the writers didn’t know what computers were. But the liberal would note that farming and manufacturing were the only industries at that time and thus the law was meant to apply to all workers. The conservative reading of the law is either stupid or designed to limit individual rights as much as possible. Take you pick: it all means the same thing.

Americans are muddled thinkers. People are constantly pointing out how in polls, Americans contradict themselves. I do it myself. But it’s not the worst thing that as a nation we are confused. Americans are at their most dangerous when they are certain of things that just aren’t so.

Generally, I would not say that polls don’t matter. If you give people binary choices, polls are pretty reliable. Are you going to vote for Obama or Romney? People can make a decision. But most of life cannot be phrased this way and that is where we get into trouble.

The Terrorist

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald wrote an article where he noted America’s contradictory thoughts on extrajudicial killing of American citizens on foreign soil. Americans are very much against this: Democrats and Republicans alike. Only 41% said we should do that kind of thing. But when it came to the specific case of killing US citizen and suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, 69% of Americans were in favor of it.

Think about that for second: it is really horrible. I can see it the other way: people think it is okay in the abstract, but when it is done to a real person, they are horrified. But this is seriously screwed up: people think it is wrong in the abstract, but when the government does it, they just accept the government’s word that it was a really bad guy they killed. Greenwald thinks it is just good old fashioned American racism. I don’t doubt that he’s right. But I think there is something even deeper going on.

The Deficit

Also yesterday, Kevin Drum reported on a Democracy Corps poll that asked people to name their two most important political concerns. Their answers: increasing spending and decreased spending. In particular, the top 5 things were: (1) protecting retirement benefits; (2) reducing the federal deficit; (3) cutting ineffective programs; (4) making sure education is affordable; and (5) fixing infrastructure to create jobs. You know: increase; decrease; decrease; increase; increase. Now, we know that Americans define waste as “programs I don’t like.” But in general, Americans want to spend as much as we have been (and in many cases more) on all programs except “foreign aid.” (Because politicians long ago demonized such aid, Americans think it takes up to a half of all our spending when it is usually less than 1% and most of that goes to the hugely popular state of Israel.)

In addition to these two examples, we have the polls that come out each election cycle that tell us that the voters just hate negative advertising. Pity the foolish politician who actually uses these polling results to run his campaign. People may hate negative advertising, but it effects them all the same.

The Secret Sauce

It isn’t that these polls are wrong. What is really going on is that Americans don’t think seriously about any of these issues. They don’t like the idea of the government just up and killing people—unless they are bad guys. They hate the idea of the government spending too much money—unless it causes any programs to have less money. And of course negative advertising is a terrible thing. But they want to know if a politician is fucking around on his wife. As you can see, all of this is not explained by ignorance and poor thinking alone. It requires the Secret Sauce!

The Secret Sauce is the propaganda machine that the combined media and government systems provide. Americans really do have a natural abhorrence to unjustified killing. But we are complete suckers for the public vilification of our alleged enemies. We did it to Saddam Hussein to justify war—twice! And we’ve done it to Anwar al-Awlaki. We never even question it unless there is some powerful source pushing back on the propaganda campaign. And there very really is.

Americans would never even think about the budget deficit if there weren’t a constant drumbeat from the media telling us that it is important. And even then, the only way we contextualize the federal debt is by analogy to our own budgets—which, of course, is invalid and leads to misunderstanding the issue. As for negative ads: we don’t like them but that doesn’t stop us from believing them. It must be true; it’s on the TV machine!

Naive America

This is one of the most terrifying things about modern America. We are a surprisingly naive people. In fact, we are so naive that most of us have no idea we are naive. We think we have a good bead on what’s really going on. I thought the Cold War was a great illustration of this. Most Americans couldn’t believe that people in the USSR accepted the obvious lies told to them by their government. (I hear the same things today regarding North Korea.) But the truth was that most of the people in the USSR were far more skeptical than the people of the USA. Among the people I knew, almost no one even questioned that the government or media would lie to us. And when these institutions were caught lying, it was always justified as a special case.

Now we have a whole network, Fox News, dedicated to pushing the idea that you can’t trust the regular news. That’s great. But what they provide instead is straight Republican Party propaganda. And again, their viewers are certain they are getting the Truth™. Of course, any news source is going to be biased. The problem is not the bias; the problem is the belief of the viewer that it isn’t biased. I’ve long said that the issue between Fox News and MSNBC is not that one is more biased than the other; the issue is that MSNBC viewers know that the news is biased; the Fox News viewers do not.

Too often, I find people either accept everything they hear uncritically, or they refuse to believe anything. This second group is even more problematic. You see, they aren’t as cynical as they claim to be. They use their cynicism as a filter to dismiss anything they don’t want to believe. In my experience, a large fraction of Fox News viewers fall into this latter category. And the worlds that they allow their filters to paint are often troubling indeed: bigoted, reactionary, simple-minded.

Polls provide a snapshot of what we as a people believe. And sadly, it is heavily skewed toward what we have been told to believe. I remember back at the end of Reagan’s administration when the Drug War was really gearing up. I read about a poll of CEOs of major corporations. They were asked what the most important issue facing their companies were. Less than 10% said “drugs in the workplace.” Six months later, the same poll found over 50% of the CEOs saying “drugs in the workplace” was the most important issue facing their companies. The only thing that had changed was six months of constant Drug War propaganda. Now if CEOs are this malleable about the issues facing their very own businesses, what can we expect from regular people asked about items on the federal budget or America’s enemies abroad?

The Danger of Certainty

Our biggest problem as a nation is how information flows to the people. With the right (wrong) flow of information the people will gratefully change our constitutional republic into a Job Creator Dictatorship. We could easily look back 20 years from now and think that these were the glory days. Confusion is not the worst thing. It is our certainty—like the certainty that Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to our nation—that gets us (and the rest of the world) into the most trouble.