The Woolwich murderer, says Ian Welsh, is "a bad man," but "not as bad as the men we put in office"

"When Tony Blair and George W. Bush are put in front of war crimes trials, along with Rumsfeld and many others, we can talk. Till then, our 'justice' isn’t, it’s just tribalism dressed up in the name of justice, because it picks and chooses amongst murderers, letting the greatest of them, the ones with the most blood on their hands, walk free."

-- Ian Welsh, in a new post,
"The Moral Calculus of the Woolwich Murder"

by Ken

I don't say that our friend Ian Welsh doesn't mean exactly what he says, that "on the scale of bad, immoral things," the murder of that soldier in London by hacking his head off "ranks very low," in that "the murderer took the time to kill someone in the military" and "did not target civilians," which "makes him superior, morally, to the Boston bombers" also "to Obama, who routinely murders civilians, knowingly, but hitting weddings and funerals," and to Tony Blair and George W. Bush, "who launched a war based on lies against a country which was no threat to Britain or to America."

Ian further suggests:

You should read a transcript of the Woolwich murderer’s reasons. It seems that he was offended by the fact that other Muslim civilians were routinely being murdered. Having been taught, by the state, that murdering is acceptable, he proceeded to do so.

Now, as I say, I don't doubt that Ian means just what he says. But it's also possible to consider his position as intentionally provocative: challenging anyone who disagree to show how it's not the case that the Woolwich murderer "is a bad man, to be sure, but he's not as bad a man as the men we put in office." Or to find some way in which it's not true, despite "all the hysterical hand-wringing and the rush to moral condemnation" (which "bores and tires" Ian) that:

It is a fact that America and Britain killed, deliberately, tens to hundreds of thousands of civilians in a war which was not even pre-emptive. The Iraq war was exactly the same type of war-crime for which Nazis were hung at Nuremburg. Exactly.

I don't see any obvious way to deny this "fact," or the rest of Ian's proposition regarding the people we place in high office. If you think you do, perhaps you should read the whole piece. first.

IAN WELSH

The Moral Calculus of the Woolwich Murder
Posted: 27 May 2013 06:00 AM PDT

So, a man killed a soldier in Woolwich London by hacking his head off.

That’s bad.

But on the scale of bad, immoral things, it ranks very low.

The murderer took the time to kill someone in the military. He did not target civilians.

This makes him superior, morally, to the Boston bombers. It also makes him superior, morally, to Obama, who routinely murders civilians, knowingly, by hitting weddings and funerals. It makes him morally superior to the British ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and to George W. Bush, who launched a war based on lies against a country which was no threat to Britain or to America.

All the hysterical hand-wringing and the rush to moral condemnation bores and tires me. It is a fact that America and Britain killed, deliberately, tens to hundreds of thousands of civilians in a war which was not even pre-emptive. The Iraq war was exactly the same type of war-crime for which Nazis were hung at Nuremburg. Exactly.

You should read a transcript of the Woolwich murderer’s reasons. It seems that he was offended by the fact that other Muslim civilians were routinely being murdered. Having been taught, by the state, that murdering is acceptable, he proceeded to do so.

He, however, proved himself superior to the contemporary American and British States by murder a military man and not a civilian. He took far more care in choosing his victim than Obama does his.

So spare me the hand-wringing and condemnation. He’s a bad man, to be sure, but he’s not as bad a man as the men we put in office.

When Tony Blair and George W. Bush are put in front of war crimes trials, along with Rumsfeld and many others, we can talk. Till then, our 'justice' isn’t, it’s just tribalism dressed up in the name of justice, because it picks and chooses amongst murderers, letting the greatest of them, the ones with the most blood on their hands, walk free.

on edit: oh yes, and there are calls to censor the internet more. The net result of these attacks is to reduce your freedom. And no, censoring the internet more won’t make you more safe.

Which leaves one last question, in the event that we can't contradict the logic: What is the significance of our conclusion?

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Do all the American Krap Kristians share Pope Cardinal Ratguts's bedrock immorality?

Sure, he always looks like he's dressed to party, in outfits like his pretty white dresses and chic little hats, but make no mistake, Pope Cardinal Ratguts is a ruthless enforcer of his primitive authoritarian ideology. Worse, he establishes himself by his own words and deeds as a profoundly and institutionally immoral savage.

"In August, 1984 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger stated that liberation theology has a major flaw in that it attempts to apply Christ's teaching on the sermon on the mount regarding the poor to present social situations. Ratzinger believes that Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor."

-- from the Wikipedia article on liberation theology

by Ken

A listserv colleague, one of the smartest people I know, was providing suggestions for countering the inevitable right-wing appeal to "morality" as a reason for allowing the wealthy elites to stomp the "undeserving" poor into the dust. Right-wingers not only believe that people who find themselves in need of life help are in that situation because of their own failing, but are apt to couch that belief in religious terms -- that it's God's will and doing, so that stomping on the poor is really doing the Lord's work.

No amount of reasoning, my colleague argued, will touch people who think they have God on their side, which is why she gathered a list of citations from that proto-socialist Jesus. I think we're all familiar with the desperate right-wing efforts of late to concoct a "macho Jesus" who magically believes all the anti-human proposition of the Crackpot Right, but as all those people who brandish their bibles like weapons would know if they ever actually read what's inside, Jesus would have been shocked and horrified by everything, all the predation, hatred, and bigotry they fetishize in his name. Jesus, of course, was a people kind of guy, and the god he fronted for was a people kind of god.

And then she wrote something that really warmed my heart:

"There's a reason liberation theology got squashed down so very, very hard. It was both a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist."

The liberation theology movement was the last time the Catholic Church found itself on the side of ordinary people, and even that was an accident, a product of the new spirit of humanity breathed into it by the accidental pope, John XXIII, who was expected to twiddle his thumbs in the short time he had left to live, at which point the cardinals hoped they might be better able to reach agreement on a "serious" candidate. Instead that amazing man -- probably the last truly decent person to rise into the uppermost ranks of the Church -- aligned the institution with the needs and hopes of all its faithful.

Oh, old Pope Paul VI tried to get the toothpaste of liberation theology back in the tube, but he was way too wishy-woshy to do the job that the "sainted" John Paul II would roll up his sleeves and take on with such fanatical zeal. And he would no doubt have been thrilled to know that his tiara would be passed on to a man of whose ruthlessness and savagery and worship of the powerful he had made such generous use in his own papacy.

And Pope Cardinal Ratguts has done nothing to disappoint. Even with the forced diversion of having to deal with the monumental mess of the Church's wretched history of institutionally coddling and even encouraging the pedophile priests (an effort that Ratguts had largely overseen while still a cardinal, in his role as John Paul's designated keeper of the faith), he has been a resolute force for the subjugation of normal human aspirations with the yoke of uncompromising doctrinal orthodoxy, ensuring that there's a Rich Folks' Catholic Church and an Everyone Else's.

And so a surprising amount of common ground has been found between the Church and the non-Catholic Krap Kristian sects that have spread like cancer in this country.

"Pro-life" they call themselves, based solely on the difficult question of abortion, being themselves way too whacked-out to appreciate the difficulty of the question, while remaining resolutely pro-death on all manner of issues that aren't difficult. Even savage old Pope John Paul, after all, took his opposition to the death penalty as seriously as his opposition to abortion -- at least rhetorically. (The hierarchy over which he maintained such tight control seemed always to be on 24/7 guard when it came to standing up to blasphemy on abortion and creepily silent on . . . that other matter.)

And where Jesus seems to have had nothing at all to say on the subject of homosexuality, at least nothing preserved among his teachings or anywhere else in the New Testament, the self-appointed guardians of "morality" of both the Mother Church and the United Krap Kristians ride that famous single citation in Leviticus -- buried among a host of other (sensibly unenforced and indeed unmentioned) prohibitions, of which they appear to be utterly ignorant -- as an excuse to throw the full weight of their orthodoxy at it, pretending as usual to do so in the name of Jesus.

They don't know anything important about Jesus's life, work, beliefs, or teachings, and they're defiantly, militantly proud of their ignorance. They hate Jesus with every fiber of their malignant -- or merely plug-ignorant -- carcasses.

I've mentioned a number of times that, for all the evil that has been done, and all the important work in need of doing that has been left undone, by these Jesus-hating "Christians," there are also a lot of people I've known or known about who have been inspired by their faith to attempt to do those good works. The single most important example in the Catholic realm was the liberation theology movement, spearheaded by all those humane activist priests who believed their calling required them to devote their energies to improving the conditions of the downtrodden among their worshippers. Their actions made, as my colleague put it, "a coherent and popular argument against the characterization of deity, the ultimate implied moral authority, as a bitter sadist." And it was only natural that liberation theology "got squashed down so very, very hard." (I love that phrase!)

And then I stumbled across the pre-papal Cardinal Ratguts's principled position on the subject, that -- as the Wikipedia writer puts it -- "Christ's teaching on the poor means that we will be judged when we die, and at the final judgment, with particular attention to how we personally have treated the poor," and has no bearing on how people lead their lives in the here-and-now? It's just a hurdle to overcome at judgment time!

It occurred to me suddenly that I hadn't felt it necessary to spell out the connection, in my Sunday Classics piece ("Verdi blows the lid off the whole Krap Kristian hypocrisy") focusing on the agonizing unawareness of sinful unworthiness expressed by the mezzo-soprano in the "Liber scriptus" and by the tenor in the "Ingemisco" of the Day of Wrath depicted in Verdi's Requiem. It seemed grotesquely obvious, too much so to even warrant mention, that the only point of such depictions is as a cautionary lesson to influence real-world, real-life behavior.

I hadn't counted, though, on the depth of the ruthless savagery and total immorality of the man who considers himself personally charged with enforcing the morality of his subjects -- who not only doesn't see the connection but insists that there isn't one. In a reasonable, principled world, an argument like this would have caused Cardinal Ratguts to be carted off to the nearest loony bin, or at least voted off the island. Instead his career as a pitiless enforcer of primitive orthodoxy continued to flourish until his fellow cardinals seized the opportunity to promote him to the top job.

What a bunch!

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True or false? "The kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response"

The damaged dogs rescued from Michael Vick's dog-fighting operation were sent to Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Angel Canyon, Utah, for rehabilitation.

by Ken

There are writers with whose work you develop an ongoing relationship. It took me awhile to bond with The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, whom we last talked about when he was pondering the question "Is free the future?" (with a follow-up here). At this point, though, his byline on the contents page is likely to make me pretty much drop everything and read. He has a piece in the new (October 19) issue, called "Offensive Play," and while the subject didn't seem to promise the kind of startling new (to me, anyway) insight into human behavior I've come to expect from him, I nevertheless dropped everything and read.

Gladwell begins with a look at the present-day condition of retired NFL onetime all-pro offensive tackle Kyle Turley, and proceeds to a consideration of the long-term damage increasingly understood to occur in the brains of football players and boxers, athletes exposed to tens of thousands of head blows. What the researchers are finding -- insofar as they've been able to examine brain tissue post mortem -- is that the brain tissue is almost always scarred in a way that's characteristic of not first- but second-stage Alzheimer's. He conducts his usual interviews around the question of whether this can be reduced by rule changes or is inherent in the game, and what can be done about it, 'cause for sure nobody is going to entertain the idea of abolishing football.

But what's really interesting to me is Gladwell's insistence on the moral dimension of the problem, to which end he draws a running parallel with the "sport" of dog-fighting, with particular reference to the spectacular downfall of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick after his dog-fighting operation was uncovered, leading to his suspension from the NFL and his subsequent prosecution, conviction, and incarceration. The blurb under the title of the piece reads: "How different are dogfighting and football?"

Gladwell quotes at some length a gruesome description of an actual dog fight, which ends -- or rather climaxes after the fight has ended with the losing dog, named Black, having its back legs broken, with blood gushing from her throat -- thusly: "A shot rings out barely heard over the noise in the barn. Black's body is wrapped up and carried by her owner to his vehicle." Gladwell continues:

It's the shot ringing out that seals the case against dogfighting. L.G. [Black's owner] willingly submitted his dog to a contest that culminated in her suffering and destruction. And why? For the entertainment of an audience and the chance of a payday. In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport. "I was not aware of dogfighting and the terrible things that happen around dogfighting," [NFL Commissioner Roger] Goodell said, explaining why he responded so sternly in the Vick case.

Later Gladwell visits the special animal care facility, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Angel Canyon, Utah, where the dogs owned by Michael Vick were sent after his arrest. He describes the extraordinary care these animals, horribly damaged mentally as well as physically, have received, in many cases achieving surprising degrees of rehabilitation. All the while he makes clear that the poor creatures are still unable to live normally. He writes:

What happens at Best Friends represents, by any measure, an extravagant gesture. These are dogs that will never live a normal life. But the kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response.

I've paused here for emphasis only. That last sentence is the one in the piece which continues to engage me, and we'll come back to it. In the piece, however, what follows continues without interruption, not even a paragraph break, from the above:

In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a "cur," and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess 'gameness,' and game dogs are revered.

In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility not to abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march them to the edge of the cliff -- and dogfighting fails this test.

Now Gladwell's inquiry into the parallel cases of football and dogfighting is absorbing in its own right, but what has fascinated me, again, is that excellent sentence, "The kind of crime embodied by dogfighting is so morally repellent that it demands an extravagant response." I think what fascinates me about it is that, while this moral repulsion would undoubtedly be widely acknowledged, even in the 21st century I don't think it's as universally felt as Gladwell seems to assume, as witness the mere survival of the "sport," despite ever-heavier official disapproval and illegalization.

Damned if I didn't find myself thinking of the contrasting models that George Lakoff has described for the political Right vs. Left: the "strict father" model on the one hand vs. the "nurturant parent" family on the other. Now I don't say that all right-wing adherents are dog-fight fans, or that no lefties get a kick out of this spectacle. But it does seem to me that in the "strict father" model, which sees this as (and there's no reason why you should forgive the expression) a dog-eat-dog world, there really isn't anything particularly repellent about dog-fighting.

It occurs to me that in many of our most violent points of political contention, left vs. right, at work quietly in the background is a basic difference in notions of moral acceptability which is well illustrated here.

The difference is not, I should add, that the owners of the dogs don't love them. Gladwell makes a persuasive if stomach-turning case that they surely do, and are deeply hurt when they cart off the carcass of this animal that showed the depths of its love by allowing itself to be ripped apart. Again, though, I may be overly influenced by my ongoing reading of Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party,whose virtual catalog of sociopathologies common to the authoritarian mentality leaves a reader punchy and quite prepared to believe that this could pass for love among the human specimens under scrutiny here. (One frighteningly common thread is how many of these men survived big-time childhod mental and especially physical abuse, and went on to lead movements built on abuse. "Strict father," indeed!)

In case you were wondering, Gladwell isn't especially optimistic about the application of morality to football, where the owners don't pretend to think of the players as more than parts of their money-making machine. "What football must confront, in the end," he writes, "is not just the problem of injuries or scientific findings. It is the fact that there is something profoundly awry in the relationship between the players and the game."

But even if it turns out, as increasingly seems the case, that no changes in the rules could seriously reduce the risk of permanent brain injury to players, he recognizes that nothing can or will be done, because there is no chance of banning football. "We are in love with football players," he writes, "with their courage and grit, and nothing else -- neither considerations of science nor those of morality -- can compete with the destructive power of that love."


VISIT THE BEST FRIENDS WEBSITE

There is (as yet) no sanctuary for battered football players, but if you can visit the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary website without tearing up, well, I have to wonder. (Are you by chance a rabid right-winger?) The good news is that many of the animals are rehabilitated to the point of adoptability, and the sanctuary actively tries to place them -- and visitors are welcome.

Search for an adoptable pet from Best Friends

Best Friends has about 2,000 animals looking for their forever homes. You’ll find many of them on these pages, and we’re adding more every day!

Best Friends began as a special haven for dogs and cats who were deemed "unadoptable."

But these animals are anything but! Some of them have special needs, like medical conditions, shyness or old age. Others overcame their special needs long ago, and are as healthy and happy a pet as you'll find anywhere.

All of them are looking for homes to call their own, and every one of them deserves a chance. Please take your time browsing. On these pages, you’ll find dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, horses, pigs and more, all of them anxious to meet you.

If you don’t find your new pet today, please bookmark this page and check back regularly. There are always new animals arriving at the sanctuary.

The pussycat pictured above is Ferrari, a four-year-old female who was rescued from a broken-down shelter, "and something about all the neglect she suffered there makes her wary." However, "Ferrari wants to be a lap cat; she really does. When you come meet her, she'll be the first walk right up to you. She's delighted that you came! She loves it when you pet her, too. But then, she suddenly gets scared." She's "naturally affectionate," her profile says. "She just needs time to overcome."

Of course, your local shelter has a lot of abandoned animals who could use a good home, and would repay a little love with a whole lot of it. With animals, that nurturing stuff works both ways. (Some people think it works with people too, but that's a tougher case to prove.)

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The only thing scarier than wingnuts who think "moral clarity" is "just words"? Wingnuts who think they know what those words mean

On Friday's Countdown, Jonathan Turley insists that we don't have any choice about prosecuting the Bush regimistas responsible for torture -- it's not only morally but legally required, or "the Bush crimes become our crimes."

"Now, it's true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we'll guarantee that they will happen again."

-- Paul Krugman, in his Friday NYT column, "Forgive and Forget?"

"People with 'moral clarity' recognized the ultimate existential evil of Communism, and were constantly on guard against its unceasing efforts to bring down the capitalist world by any means necessary. To these early movement conservatives, having 'moral clarity' meant that you weren't the kind of weakling who would be deceived into negotiation with the Commies, or consent to arms control, or be duped into merely containing their relentless march across the globe. It meant that you had the intestinal fortitude (or pure enough vital bodily fluids, as you wish) to do whatever had to be done to permanently exterminate America's implacable enemies -- whether it was to send in the Marines or drop the bomb."

-- Sara Robinson, in a Campaign for America's Future post,
"Redefining 'Moral Clarity'"

by Ken

I've been trying to write a post that should be ridiculously simple, because it really consists of nothing more than distilling the wisdom of three incredibly wise people. It shouldn't require anything more than this simple 1-2-3:

(1) Read Paul Krugman's Friday NYT column, in which he argues that we have to prosecute the crimes of the Bush regime, because otherwise they're not only likely but certain to be repeated. This is Krugman in top form, which means it doesn't get any better.

(2) Watch the above clip from Friday's Countdown, in which Jonathan Turley (after Keith O actually quotes from Krugman) takes the argument a step further. Confronted with demonstrable war crimes, he says, we don't even have a choice. It doesn't matter that prosecuting the torturers might be inconvenient, as AG-designate Eric Holder seemed to be saying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearings. We are not only morally but legally required to prosecute. Otherwise the Bush crimes become our crimes. This is Turley in top form, which again means it doesn't get any better.

As a bonus, Keith plays the clip of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, apparently campaigning for the title of World's Dumbest Human, haranguing AG-designate Holder with his insistence that he accept Dumb John's 24-style "hypothetical" -- that we have a terrorist in possession of information that can only be extracted via torture, a "hypothetical" that flouts reality in ways that are clearly beyond the understanding of a brain-dead blitherer like the senator.

Really, I think the Senate needs to adopt a rule whereby people like Senator Cornyn be required to wear a dunce cap -- with minimum cone diameter and height specified -- anytime they appear in the Senate or on Senate-related business, like campaigning.

We should talk about the 24 phenomenon someday. I suppose the show, ghastly as it is (being concocted out of the worst writing and acting in, well, the history of writing and acting), is forgivable as mindless escapist entertainment, on the order of the really, really bad James Bond movies. But people like "Dumb John" Cornyn and Bill O'Reilly, not to mention the Fox Noise viewership, think they're watching something of documentary-like accuracy and insight. In reality it's not only bullshit, but bullshit so appallingly stupid that you would have to be truly brain-deficient to accord it the slightest seriousness. Which, as it happens, brings us to --

(3) Read the above-noted Campaign for America's Future post by Sara Robinson, making an important connection regarding the phrase "moral clarity." As Chimpy the Prez demonstrated the other night in his pathetic "farewell address," it falls really clunkily out of the mouth of a bozo like our Chimpy. (Clearly the Senate Dunce Cap Rule, and its presumed corresponding House version, needs to be adopted by the executive branch as well. And for that matter by the judicial branch too, for the use, not only of Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, but also of all those lower-echelon judges stuffed into the court system on Chimpy's watch.)

In the clip intro, Keith O in fact makes specific reference to Chimpy's use of the phrase "moral clarity." I think we can see him wince involuntarily at the association of the phrase with a person so utterly devoid of any kind of purposeful morality. And I think most of us hear the phrase the way Keith did, as just some words that wingnuts as just part of their clueless delusion. It sounds like "just words" to them -- and as with so many other words, they have no clue what they mean. They just like the sound of them.

But here comes Sara, picking up on something very different, and very important. She notes that conservatives use the phrase "moral clarity" a lot.

And it always sounds absurd to progressive ears, coming as it does from members of an administration that shredded the Constitution, deprived people of due process, committed horrific acts of torture, and lied the country into the worst military debacle in its history. It's always bewildering to listen to such people lecture the rest of us on "moral clarity." What in the hell are they talking about?

They keep using those words. It turns out that they don't mean what we think they mean.

Over the holidays, Sara reports, she "devoured" U.S. Vs. Them, in which J. Peter Scoblic
"looks at the way the conservative penchant for 'othering' (a word I coined to describe their perpetual need for someone to project their own demons onto, and then hate on) has shaped US foreign policy from the beginning of the Cold War through the current administration."
From this she has gleaned the definition I've quoted above.

This definition of "moral clarity" has been a major factor in U.S. foreign policy ever since. From that day unto this, the conservative movement has never been without a demonized Other to focus its vaunted "moral clarity' on. "Moral clarity" is why conservatives hate summit meetings; why they've scuttled every attempt at arms control and non-proliferation; why every problem in the world can only yield to a military solution; and why defense is the only valid government expense. To people with "moral clarity," these choices are obvious. Those who disagree (like those progressive pantywaists who refuse to acknowledge the threat, or are willing and eager to coddle Pure Evil by parleying with it) are, perforce, inherently weaker and less morally serious. If you've ever marveled at the depths of conservative moral self-righteousness, now you know the deep well from which it springs.

It is, in a word, Cheneyism. I've written before, a number of times, about the "higher truth" Big Dick clearly thinks he's in possession of, which justifies the campaign of atrocities to which he has devoted the portion of his life that isn't devoted to enriching beyond measuring his pals the greedy Repulicronies.

Of course the collapse of the global Communist menace was an existential nightmare for these people, whose thinking (for want of a better word) was based so overwhelmingly on death-sworn opposition to that "other." Of course they tried other "others," like the homos and liberals (same thing, no?), but even they realized that, fun as we are to demonize, we really aren't up to the job of being the required Other. And make no mistake, it's a big job. It remains to be seen whether the Islamofascists are up to it.

Whenever you hear a conservative go on about "moral clarity" . . . there is always an enemy. They are always out to get us. They will stop at nothing. You cannot coddle them or negotiate with them; you can only survive by annihilating them. And people who see the moral world clearly will not waste time or breath questioning these essential truths.

It's pretty stunning stuff when you read it that way. It really makes you realize that conservatives live in a world of paranoia, xenophobia, and seething aggression that most progressives can't even fathom. And their entire moral universe has been twisted to serve their externalized fears; to take that will to project their own demons onto someone else and then destroy them, and elevate it as the highest possible moral good. It's a definition of "morality" that renders the rule of law meaningless, but readily justifies genocide and torture as moral acts of self-preservation.

Is it any wonder that the Bush regime has done everything in its power to prop Osama up? It's as if the regimistas' entire foreign policy -- and most of its authoritarian domestic policy too, come to think of it -- came straight from Al Qaeda HQ.

"Once we understand what they're really saying," Sara writes, "it becomes pretty obvious that one of the first things we're going to need to do in this new era is challenge this horrific definition of 'moral clarity' and overwrite it with one of our own."

We believe moral clarity is defined by the Constitution, embodied in the rule of law, and on display wherever the dignity of other people -- including those whose interests oppose ours -- is upheld. And, in case there's any question about where the real moral clarity lies here: Ours is the morality America was founded on. Theirs is one that almost put that light out forever.

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