Patterns in the White Noise:

Hubris?

    By Jack Grant

Time to take a step back and breathe.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks, emotionally charged occurrences that do not lend themselves to the vital necessity of connecting events to extract the order underlying the chaos, to seeing patterns in the white noise.

Please bear with me. This is long, but I do have a point.

Via the desk of Jane Galt at Asymetrical Information, I start with this from The Buck Stops Here (NOTE-emphasis and links that of the original author):

One of the odd things about the Schiavo affair is the argument that "if you care about federalism, you wouldn't favor Congress's involvement in granting federal jurisdiction for Schiavo's parents to have one more day in federal court." One sees this argument in many contexts: "If you really opposed abortion, you'd support the death penalty for women who have abortions," or "if you really wanted to clean up the environment, you'd agree to ban all automobiles," or "if you really supported bringing democracy to Iraq, you'd support war in about 100 other countries," or "if you really supported free speech, you wouldn't be in favor of hate crimes laws." In short, "If you really believed in Principle X, you'd follow that principle to all extremes without ever letting another principle override it."

But that sort of reasoning is often wrong. People often accuse their opponents of being hypocrites when, in fact, they may simply have been balancing competing principles. We all do this constantly. And the mere fact that someone reaches a different balance than you, or that they decline to treat one principle alone as being absolute, does not prove that they are being hypocritical.

In other words, those who don't think exactly the same as you do are not evil (this emphasis is mine, since I have said this many times before...).

Next is from a commentary from the Los Angeles Times:

I once worked in a philosophy department in which one of the professors was active in NAMBLA, the controversial North American Man/Boy Love Assn. The secretary, a deeply religious woman named Judy, was assigned the task of typing up his man-boy love book manuscript and sending it off to the publishers.

She came close to quitting, but she was the sole provider for three children. Finally, she held her nose and typed one-handed.

I think of Judy when I think about the issue of whether pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to fill prescriptions at which their conscience balks. The conscience of some pharmacists balks at birth control and morning-after pills.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on April 1 issued a 150-day emergency order requiring pharmacists to fill contraceptive prescriptions after a Chicago druggist refused to dispense birth control pills. Elsewhere, reproductive-rights groups are pressuring lawmakers to establish professional-duty laws for pharmacists.

I personally am no opponent of birth control of any sort or, for that matter, of abortion rights. But people whose jobs require them to violate their own deeply held convictions ought to refuse to do the job, and any politician who upholds freedom or dignity must uphold their right to do so.

What you should ask yourself in this case is not whether you think people should have access to birth control, but whether you should be required to do things that violate your deepest convictions. Should a soldier be required to torture prisoners, for example? Should he refuse to do so if ordered? Should a liberal corporate peon be required to contribute to the Republican Party? Should a Christian secretary have to assist in the advocacy of man-boy love?

Sadly, these sorts of questions cannot be answered according to whether the act involved is objectively right or wrong because, in every case, that's the heart of the dispute and irresolvable by organizational policy, legislation or court proceeding. They are questions that are answerable only for you as you face the decision, as you face yourself.

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If you claim the right to behave in accordance with your conscience, then you also must accord that right to all others, even pharmacists.

Nothing else is compatible with human dignity, decency, individuality and truth.

The key statement: If you claim the right to behave in accordance with your conscience, then you also must accord that right to all others...

Think upon that concept for a moment.

Then, think about this series of events.

First, from The Washington Times asked, before certain information became available, "Was the Schiavo memo a fake?":

All 55 Republican senators say they have never seen the Terri Schiavo political talking-points memo that Democrats say was circulated among Republicans during the floor debate over whether the federal government should intervene to prolong her life.

A survey by The Washington Times found that every Republican said the memo was not crafted or distributed by him or her. Every one of them said he or she had not seen it until the memo was the subject of speculation in major news organs, particularly ABC News and The Washington Post.

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Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, who is up for re-election next year, is specified in the memo as someone who could suffer political damage if he opposed saving Mrs. Schiavo.

Asked whether he'd seen the memo, Mr. Nelson said to talk to Mr. Harkin.

"Ask Senator Harkin. He saw it, and he told me about it because my name was on it," Mr. Nelson said.

Mr. Nelson's fellow Florida senator, Mel Martinez, a Republican, also has been the focus of some scrutiny in press accounts because passages of the disputed memo appear to have been lifted from a press release posted on his Senate Web site.

He denied any involvement.

"Senator Martinez has never seen the memo and condemns its sentiments," spokeswoman Kerry Feehery said. "No one in our office has seen it, nor had anything to do with its creation."

In the furor, one of the most honorable conservative-leaning bloggers chided a liberal blogger on jumping to conclusions about the infamous piece of paper. IMPORTANT NOTE-The Commissar has been more than open with admitting he was mistaken in his original, chiding post, and in a later post to his fellow travelers on the conservative side he urges them to face the facts. I would like to repeat here I have a lot of respect for The Commissar, even before his most recent admission to making a mistake in this particular instance. His honesty and forthrightness gives me hope that I often lose sight of.

However, his original post was made and is a part of the white noise. From the original post by The Commissar:

I have a neologism, "sollience," which is defined as "the silence of Oliver Willis when one of his favorite topics has blown up in his face."

Remember how hard he was pushing the so-called "GOP Schiavo Talking Points Memo?" As the story has started to unravel, nothing but silence from the "original liberal bomb thrower."

Then, the story unravelled in a fashion not pleasing to the far-right-wing. From Yahoo News:

The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

I don't need to insult your intelligence and explicitly do the math here.

Apparently though, because The Commissar felt the need for his second post, some bloggers do need help with the math:

"You got to know when to hold 'em; know when to fold 'em,
"Know when to walk away; know when to run."

C'mon guys. The infamous memo came from GOP Senator Mel Martinez' legal counsel, now 'discredited' and fired.

The deal is done.

Trying the desperate rear-guard action of "Mel Martinez is a freshman, not a party leader." is just embarrassing. The operative words in the WaPo story that we had seized on: "distributed to Republican senators by party leaders." Fine. Martinez is not a party leader. He sure isn't Bill Burkett, either.

There is more fallout, however, especially when looking at the opinion polls from before the news on the origin the infamous supposed Republican "talking points" on this tragedy became public. From USA Today:

The controversy over Terri Schiavo has raised concerns among many Americans about the moral agenda of the Republican Party and the political power of conservative Christians, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds. (Related: Poll results)

In the survey, most Americans disapprove of the efforts by President Bush and Congress to draw federal courts into the dispute over treatment of the brain-damaged Florida woman. She died last week.

Some old stereotypes about the two parties have been reversed:

• By 55%-40%, respondents say Republicans, traditionally the party of limited government, are "trying to use the federal government to interfere with the private lives of most Americans" on moral values.

• By 53%-40%, they say Democrats, who sharply expanded government since the Depression, aren't trying to interfere on moral issues.

The debate over Schiavo has spotlighted the central role "values" issues — abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage and the right to live or die — now play in politics.

Mark Rozell, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia who studies religion and politics, says the case has created a "clear backlash."

"It's one thing to look at religious conservatives as part of a broad coalition that makes up the Republican Party," he says. "It's entirely another if people think that religious conservatives are calling the shots in the Bush administration for what was a deeply personal situation."

But Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition says a poll his group commissioned shows wide support for those who sought to preserve Schiavo's life when the issue is placed "in the broader context of protecting the rights of the disabled."

As the last sentence in the above quote indicates, there is more complexity here than a simple headline or single sentence "talking points" can encapsulate, or the attention-deficit media can comprehend.

Ultimately, though, there was strong disapproval indicated by the public towards the intervention of both the Congress and the President in a family matter that had been handled by the state courts in Florida.

What ties this all together into a pattern that can be extracted from the cacophony of white noise?

Focusing on a single issue, especially when voting.

How exactly?

This is how.

Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice (a weblog where I am privileged to guest-post) has commented several times upon what he (and Glenn Reynolds, incidentally) calls the hubris of power that is being exhibited by Tom DeLay and the Republican Party in general, most recently and most visibly in the Shiavo matter, but also in the rallying cries to defend Tom DeLay at all costs against questions regarding his arguably flexible ethics.

I disagree with Joe in this, I do not think this is the hubris of power. Instead, my conclusion is that these politicians gained power to advance this very agenda.

This behavior is not because of their power, but why they sought that power.

In other words, they are doing exactly as they said they would do, but most took what they said as rhetoric rather than their intended reality.

Why did those who believe in this agenda (including their leader, George W. Bush) gain so much power through the 2004 election?

Because people were voting on a single issue, fear of terrorism.

I cannot count the numbers who have confided in me they do not agree with much of the agenda of the Bush administration, but they voted for him anyway because they felt he would "better conduct the War on Terror."

It is apparent that most citizens of the US oppose how the Congress (as led by DeLay) and President Bush intervened in the Shiavo affair.

Yet, these politicians are acting in a manner exactly as they had campaigned they would act if elected.

I have to give the radical-wing of the Republican Party credit for that consistency, at least.

No one, I repeat, NO ONE, should be surprised.

If the citizens do not like it, then they need to do some soul-searching for why they did not listen to the entirety of the positions of those they were choosing to form our government.

This is not the hubris of power, it is the peril of single-issue voting.

That is the pattern.

Do the math.

Posted by Jack Grant at 20:28 on 7 April 2005