An autobiographical argument for the rule of law

What if the United States had treated the challenge posed by terrorism that aimed to kill its citizens indiscriminately as a criminal problem rather than an occasion for fear-mongering, chest thumping, war-making, and expansion of executive power? FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, along with Daniel Freedman, has published a professional counter-terrorism specialist's account of how bureaucrats, jealous spooks, and ultimately our highest authorities chose courses that continue to subvert our best interests and ideals in The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War against al-Qaeda.

Soufan is an Arab American born in Lebanon who applied to become an FBI agent on a bet with college friends. None of them imagined the Bureau would want a foreign born native Arabic speaker. But in the mid-1990s, it did and the new special agent was assigned to the New York office. Like many immigrants, he especially valued our historic freedoms:

While the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance may perhaps seem largely symbolic to many Americans, to those of us who have have lived with alternatives, they are filled with meaning. I know that the protections offered therein are very necessary.

He also was fascinated by exotic figures he had learned about from reading Arabic language newspapers; while still in college he made a sort of hobby following the activities of a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden. While still an FBI trainee he wrote a memo about bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and was transferred into the New York taskforce that had worked on the 1993 bombing in the World Trade Center underground garage. When al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Nigeria and Tanzania in 1998, he was among the New York team that digested the work of on-the-ground investigators. Later he was sent to Yemen to investigate the 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole. That investigation led to the FBI becoming aware that a clandestine meeting had taken place in Malaysia involving only partially known persons and possible plots. Despite repeated requests, they were unable to get the CIA to share what they knew of this; in hindsight Souffan claims that if bureaucratic rivalries and suspicions had been overcome, the 9/11 plot probably would have been foiled. When he first learned, while still in Yemen, of the 9/11 attacks, his reaction was to sit in the lavatory and vomit, so sure was he that if information had been shared, all those people would have lived.

After 9/ll, as one of the U.S. government's few Arabic speakers, an experienced interrogator, and an expert on al-Qaeda, Souffan was a busy guy indeed, debriefing the numerous men seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the hunt for terrorist plotters. Because he understood the intricacies of their organization and could imagine the mindset of those prisoners who turned out to be members of the group (many were just innocents who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time), Souffan reports he repeatedly won admissions and genuine information. He always sought practical intelligence that would enable the U.S. government to foil any plans and also built legally viable cases again conspirators that could be used to convict them in court.

This kind of legal case-building rapidly came to be treated as foot-dragging by the higher ups in the Bush administration who became enamored of crack-pot ideas spun by contract psychologists of breaking the captives through coercion. Holding suspects in freezing cold rooms, led to locking them in stress positions while bombarding them with noise, led to water-boarding -- and the prisoners stopped providing any meaningful information, no matter how much they jabbered. Souffan maintains that al-Qaeda prepared its adherents to expect truly grotesque tortures from Middle Eastern dictatorships: rape by dogs for example. No wonder the modulated torments so favored by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld only led them to lie and/or clam up. And the torture "techniques" rapidly spread from Guantanamo to Iraq and Abu Ghraib, helping to ensure the failure of our rulers' Mesopotamian adventure. Souffan and the bureau eventually walked out, refusing to adopt the new torture practices, and thus depriving the anti-terrorism effort of the people who had the most knowledge of and experience with actual threats. The book makes it abundantly clear that some in the CIA and the Bush Administration hated Souffan for blowing the whistle on intelligence failures -- and for having been better at protecting U.S. citizens than they were.

The story of all this drama as Souffan tells it is actually pretty dry. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of unfamiliar names and their complex connections. He's building a case here in this book and that object determines its structure, even when he shares memories of the anger and frustration he felt over his own government's many missteps and misdeeds.

As the book was ready to go to press, already cleared of classified and confidential information by the FBI, the CIA weighed in with demands for Souffan to excise additional material. Rather than hold up publication, his publisher went ahead and released the book with the contested bits printed but blacked out. Souffan claims that the material the CIA forbade is either already in the public domain, unclassified, or improperly classified to prevent Agency embarrassment. Some of the redactions are transparently absurd. For example, they made him black out one sentence of a nationally televised exchange with Senator Lindsay Graham. If complaints through FBI channels don't relieve him of these CIA requirements, he knows his preferred remedy.

…if they fail in their duty, I plan to compel disclosure of the redacted information through legal means.

Once again Souffan is painstakingly building his case, placing his faith in the law.

This book is not light or even gripping reading. Rather it is a very dry, detailed, and workmanlike narrative of one man's experience in the United States' shameful lost decade post 9/11. That's probably what we should hope for from a law enforcement officer, not bombast, speculation, or posturing.

Upside down goose on the loose?

No, this photo is not a clever use of Photoshop. Geese and other birds really do sometimes fly upside down in order to brake when landing.

Here's a slow motion video of such a flight:

During flight, geese can twist their necks to flip their bodies upside down, while keeping their heads upright.

Now amateur videographers Hans de Koning and Lodewijk van Eekhout have captured the first slow-mo video of the manoeuvre, winning a prize in a competition organised by the Flight Artists group at Wageningen University. Known as whiffling, the move is often performed before landing as a means of braking. Upside down wings generate more drag causing a goose to slow down quickly, just like what happens when a plane is inverted during flight. 

New Scientist

Ain't reality grand?***I'm pooped today. More thoughtful blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope.

Is this any way to run an empire?

It's gotten harder and harder for even its advocates to explain a purpose or rationale for the continuing U.S. war in Afghanistan. As with the festering sore of our gulag-that-can't-be-closed at Guantanamo, it seems one reason U.S. troops are still mired over there is that we have a lot of prisoners we can't figure out what to do with.

Under George W. Bush, the prison at Bagram was a central node in the network of "black sites" where U.S. intelligence personnel held suspected terrorists. Obama came into office calling for closure of such secret prisons where both the local Afghan authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross were excluded -- and where abuse, murder and torture have been documented. NATO allies with forces in Afghanistan also called for the closing of Bagram. And Afghans demanded that they should take over the prisoners. But the Afghan prison system is notoriously corrupt and also itself a site of torture. So U.S. hold on the Bagram prison and the prisoners continues.

The Obama administration did proscribe a procedure -- it can hardly be called a hearing or a court-- for determining which prisoners should remain locked away.

Candace Rondeaux of the International Crisis Group described actual workings of this legal mirage recently.

As part of its new detainee policy, the Obama administration launched a process in which a review board of three military officers hears evidence to determine whether a Bagram detainee is a supporter or member of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or another insurgent group. Detainees are allowed to attend unclassified portions of their hearings. They are also assigned personal representatives, U.S. military officials who are responsible for assisting detainees with presenting their cases.

When I visited Bagram last November, Colonel Peter Masciola, head of the legal operations directorate there, described this to me as a “meaningful opportunity to counter claims in an administrative procedure.” The hearings, however, fall far short of international legal standards. Detainees are still barred from reviewing classified evidence or from listening to classified testimony in their cases, which largely consists of hearsay evidence of the detainee’s alleged terrorist connections. Personal representatives assigned to detainees are allowed to see the classified evidence but not share it, and since these representatives are not lawyers, there is no way for detainees to challenge their inability to review classified evidence. This is a clear violation of international law on fair trial standards. But by providing a hearing that mimics a regular court procedure, the White House has been able to airbrush these concerns out of the picture.

In the classification-obsessed culture of the U.S. military, the simplest details about a detainee’s capture are often classified. Since the U.S. military also limits the information it shares with the Afghan government, Afghan judges and prosecutors are also barred from reviewing all the evidence in cases that are transferred to them under the Bagram transition agreement.

[The military] has generally solved this problem by either delaying the transfer of detainee cases or, sometimes, by handing over virtually empty case files to Afghan authorities. As a result, Afghan judges have thrown out dozens of cases because of a lack of evidence.

That's not satisfactory to the U.S. Therefore our military won't hand over many of the prisoners to the Afghans. Therefore Bagram must remain a U.S.-run prison for the foreseeable future. Therefore the war must go on. And therefore proud Afghans fume and individual prisoners are denied any resolution of their status.

Is this any way to run an empire?

Spring must be on its way

The heath is blooming on San Bruno Mountain.

Saturday scenes and scenery: from the SAFE California campaign

I'm off to Los Angeles today for my work, organizing to put an initiative to end death sentences in California on the November 2012 ballot.



These pictures show some of the people I have the privilege to work with. Many are from the Dr. Martin Luther King day holiday when volunteers attended over 30 events statewide and collected thousands of signatures to qualify our measure.

Californians: we need help, lots of it. Visit SAFE California today and sign up.

Seen in the 'hood ... a laughing matter

Somehow I don't think this would have been parked happily on a foggy Mission District street in the early years of the last decade. But apparently some of us have regained our sense of humor post 9/11.


At the Bomb Truck website, I found this:

Organic Vegan Handmade Pops. We are like the Willy Wonkas of gourmet pops. Inspired by mom and pop shops,hole in the walls, neighborhood ice cream trucks, and childhood memories.

Our comparative equanimity is not universal.

A FedEx driver was delivering a package to an Army base in Utah when someone asked what it was. The driver replied it was probably a bomb. Military police evacuated more than 2,200 people, and prosecutors have charged the driver with making a threat of terrorism.

NPR

And a federal court still thinks is within the law for security authorities to order a citizen locked up as an "enemy combatant," drive the guy crazy, and only then put him into the federal court system on vague charges. That would be Jose Padilla. Padilla's lawyer, Ben Wizner, said of the decision

the appeals court “handed the government a blank check to commit any abuse in the name of national security, even the brutal torture of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.

“This immunity is not only anathema to a democracy governed by laws, but contrary to history’s lesson that in times of fear our values are a strength, not a hindrance,” said Wizner, litigation director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

Appropriately, there's not a lot of humor in that conclusion.

Not their grandmothers' electorate

Apparently tonight the participants in the latest Republican clown show debate bumbled and stumbled around over which presidential hopeful would be more eager to deport undocumented grandmothers. No kidding.

It's not surprising that the essential futility of these guys comes out in Florida over immigration issues. The Republican party has had a good long run since Richard Nixon at being the bastion of frustrated white resentment, but their country is not the country we live in, in many places today and everywhere going forward. The country is changing.

Florida is one of the places where demographic shift is happening fast. According to the 2010 census, Florida's is about 58 percent white, 22 percent Hispanic/Latino of any race, and 16 percent Black. Unlike any other group of Latinos in the United States, Florida's Cuban immigrants tend to be Republicans, but these days they are more and more balanced out by Democratic-leaning Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and others from countries to the south.

Contemporary Republicans have nothing much to say to Latinos, aside from anti-Castro Cubans. Their white base won't let them deal sensibly with the fact of 11 million people who live here without papers. So we get the kind of nonsense Mitt and Newt traded tonight.

In the Boston Review, Stephen Ansolabehere pointed out some less obvious ways the electorate is changing that bode ill for Republicans:

Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, and other states have recently enacted measures calling for stricter enforcement of existing immigration laws. Some of these measures even aim to deny birthright citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. These initiatives, overwhelmingly supported by Republicans, drive Hispanics to vote increasingly for the Democratic Party.

… Most of the demographic change in the American electorate today comes not from waves of new immigration but from the echoes of past immigration: the children of immigrants and their children. Nationwide roughly 21 percent of white citizens are under eighteen years old, compared to 44 percent of Hispanic citizens. Over the coming decade, aging alone will increase the number of Hispanics who are eligible to vote by 25 percent.

Hispanic voters will continue to emerge in Texas, California, and other states where Hispanics have long been gaining in numbers. But the tide of Hispanic citizens is rising in some surprising places as well. The states with the highest percentage of Hispanic citizens under eighteen years old are North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, and South Carolina.

And closing the borders will not appreciably affect the increasing numbers of Hispanics and Hispanic voters in the United States for a simple reason: the Hispanic population is already sizable and has a much higher birth rate than the white population. The policies that the parties pursue now on immigration, education, and other matters that particularly affect Hispanics will define electoral politics for generations to come.

Today Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, himself of Greek-Salvadoran ancestry and so quintessentially a modern citizen of the U.S., mocked the idea that Republicans were going to pick up Latino votes.

Latinos may be disappointed in the lack of progress on immigration reform the last few years. But they saw who voted against the DREAM Act in Congress, and they see who is still campaigning against the DREAM Act. They see who is demagoguing Mexico and kowtowing to the notorious Latino-hating Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and they see who is passing anti-immigrant laws in places like Arizona and Alabama. They know that Romney wants to make things so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they "self-deport."

There may be disappointment in Obama and the Democratic Party among Latinos, but … there is zero opening for Republicans with this key, growing, demographic.

Note to discouraged white progressives: people of color have a lot of experience with making disheartening lesser evil choices. For most of U.S. history, that's all that was on offer -- none of the available politicians really represented them. Grown ups make the best of bad choices -- and then know that political participation doesn't end when the election is over. Why sometimes, people have to go on to Occupy ...

Gay marriage is coming to Washington State

It looks as if Washington State is going to win marriage equality by legislative enactment. They've counted the votes and the governor says she'll sign the bill. Of course there are naysayers:

"It's not done. In fact, it's just started," said Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, vowing that legalization of same-sex marriage would end in a referendum challenge.

LGBT people haven't done so well at winning these kind of state ballot measures; in both Maine and California, marriage victories were overturned by voters. But I wouldn't be surprised if Washington voters turn back marriage opponents in a November vote; among other strengths, they can count major state businesses like Starbucks and Microsoft in the pro-marriage equality camp. And the northwest has an honorable history of winning electoral fights over gay rights

A Washington vote to uphold a gay marriage law would repeat one of the great early successes of the LGBT rights movement. Thanks to the movie Milk, there's some historical memory of the 1978 defeat of a California initiative that would have fired out lesbian and gay teachers and silenced their supporters. But the same year, Seattle voters rejected an attempt to repeal their local ordinance that protected lesbians and gays against employment and housing discrimination. History Link tells the story.

On November 7, 1978, Seattle voters rejected Initiative 13 decisively, by nearly two to one. Initiative 13 would have repealed city ordinances protecting employment and housing rights for gays and lesbians. Also, it would have dissolved the City of Seattle's Office of Women's Rights.

The initiative was sponsored by Save Our Moral Ethics (SOME) and by Seattle Police Officers Dennis Falk and David Estes. Opposition was led by the Committee to Retain Fair Employment (CRFE) chaired by Charles Brydon and directed by Jill Shropp. Other groups opposed the measure as well.
Seattle was one of the first large American cities to enact specific civil rights protections prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Employment rights of sexual minorities were affirmed in 1973, and the City broadened its housing laws in 1975. [The reforms] ... generated little controversy at the time of their adoption.

…CRFE was organized as a broad coalition of civil rights groups, religious moderates, and political liberals. Initiative 13 was also vocally opposed by more radical gay and lesbian groups, but CRFE raised the largest war chest and was able to broadcast radio and television messages. Its campaign focused on the theme "Your Privacy is at Stake," arguing that Initiative 13 exposed all citizens, straight and otherwise, to intrusive background checks by employers and landlords.

Early, unofficial vote counts showed Initiative 13 defeated, with a vote of 59,797 (37 percent) in favor to 101,809 (63 percent) opposed. Also on November 8, 1978, California voters rejected the "Briggs Initiative," which sought to curtail the civil rights of gays and lesbians in that state. …

Good friends of mine lived through the campaign adhering to "more radical" opposing positions; in fact two poured donated blood on the office of proponents and served local jail time for this act of uncivil though nonviolent disobedience.

As a political campaigner, I'm interested in lessons collected in oral histories of the victory. The Seattle Committee Against Thirteen and Women against Thirteen (SCAT/WAT) was a "more radical" group that wanted to talk about a lot more than generic privacy rights. Jan Denali explained

What I was mostly involved with was the canvassing project, which was a joint project of SCAT/WAT. ... That was the door-to-door stuff. We were big on education. ... We prioritized the city by precinct, you know, going for the swing precincts: who do you have a prayer of convincing? And running amazing orientation sessions to go out and canvass the city on the issue and being very educational about it. So that was what I did. ...

To be addressing the issue straightforward ... to be able to stand there in front of somebody and have a conversation ... and we had all this stuff about de-briefing and teamwork because you’d get icky stuff too and how to deflect that, and it was all just so completely empowering.

In the struggle for full gay rights, there simply is no doubt that repeated exposure to the humanity of ordinary gay people -- those face to face meetings that may begin in ignorance and prejudice but lead to mutual tolerance -- are what has turned the tide in our favor. We are everywhere and the end of the world (or of the family or heterosexual marriage or whatever) hasn't come. That approach worked on a citywide basis (alongside a more conventional electoral effort) as far back as 1978. It obviously works better in smaller settings and when the heat behind the issue hasn't been driven up too high by demagoguery. It probably takes a mix of campaign styles to win, but I have little doubt that victories that push back bigotry that are won with a strong component of public education are durable, in fact likely to be permanent. That 1978 campaign, super-heated and fraught as it was, laid the groundwork for marriage equality in Washington State this year.

"No on 13" from Out History.

Warming Wednesdays: How about that State of the Union speech?

I was working last night, so not paying attention in real time to the Prez' big annual visit to Congress. Later I scanned the text for what he had to say about global warming. As I try to remind myself every Wednesday amid all the political noise and flapdoodle, none of this is going to matter much if we allow our economic system to make the planet unsurvivable.

A search on "climate" reveals that Obama did mention it.

The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. 

I guess saying that gridlock rules is better than saying nothing. But I think I've got a right to be disappointed in the people who rule us and in the ordinary people (too many of us) who put them in office.

Every year around the time of these speeches, pundits bloviate about whether what a president comes up with matters. This year it has been fashionable to say the President Obama was delivering the long form of his re-election stump speech or that nothing ever changed because of what was in a presidential speech. Presidential jawboning runs into the checks and balances in the system and we shouldn't expect anything to come of it ...

But did anything ever change because of what was not in a presidential speech? If our more rational political figures never speak honestly about human-induced global warming and our less rational ones denounce the concept and scientific understanding itself, is it any wonder that a huge fraction of the U.S. population denies climate change is happening?

The most intriguing bit of pre-speech punditry I ran across was from Steve Benen:

… if you want to know what Obama’s prepared to fight for, look no further than what he has to say tonight.

Really? Only time will tell.

Culture of death on the way out?

Tis the season when opposing marchers mark the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States. People who want to re-criminalize abortion marched in Washington -- USA Today reported their story:

We live in a culture of death," said [Ryan] Phillips, a high school senior who says he has attended the march 10 years in a row. "We'd like that to end."

This assumption is exactly the sort of thinking professor Steven Pinker tries to dispel in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The data say we emphatically do not live in a culture of death, says Pinker. In fact, all over the world, people are expanding our solicitude for lives that would once have been socially discounted.

Many opponents of legalized abortion predicted that acceptance of the practice would cheapen human life and put society on a slippery slope toward infanticide, euthanasia of the handicapped, a devaluation of the lives of children, and eventually widespread murder and genocide. Today we can say with confidence that that has not happened. Though abortion has been available in most of the Northern Hemisphere for decades, no country has allowed the deadline for abortions during pregnancy to creep steadily forward into legal infanticide, nor has the availability of abortion prepared the ground for euthanasia of disabled children. Between the time when abortion was made widely available and today, the rate of every category of violence has gone down, and, as we shall see, the valuation of the lives of children has shot up.

Opponents of abortion may see the decline in every form of violence but the killing of fetuses as a stunning case of moral hypocrisy. But there is another explanation for the discrepancy. Modern sensibilities have increasingly conceived moral worth in terms of consciousness, particularly the ability to suffer and flourish, and have identified consciousness with the activity of the brain. ... The change is a part of the turning away from religion and custom and toward science and secular philosophy as a source of moral illumination. ... The vast majority of abortions are carried out well before the milestone of having a functioning brain, and thus are safely conceptualized, according to this understanding of the worth of human life, as fundamentally different from infanticide and other forms of violence.

At the same time, we might expect a general distaste for the destruction of any kind of living thing to turn people away from abortion even when they don't equate it with murder. And that indeed has happened. It's a little-known fact that rates of abortion are falling throughout the world. ...abortions have also become less common in China, the United States, and the Asian and Islamic countries in which they are legal. Only in India and Western Europe did abortion rates fail to decline, and those are the regions where the rates were lowest to begin with.

Meanwhile, people more fixated on the flourishing of living women and families than on the fetus point out hard facts about abortion in the United States today. This video clip is unusually straight forward in explaining why some women continue to need legal abortion and how society could affirm women's humanity and autonomy, if we really wanted living women and children to thrive.



Well worth watching.

Adam Smith, Romney's taxes, and Republican rage

Yesterday I wrote a small note about Newt winning South Carolina by stoking racial resentment -- and my friend Rain left a comment to the effect that Mitt Romney disturbed her the most of the lot.

… I've come to see Romney [as] the scariest …His economic record for what he has helped do to our country is part of the total destruction they have plotted on the Middle Class. …Think about Romney and his taxes where he is trying to not reveal what he has been paying which is probably considerably under 15%. What kind of human being would run for the highest office in the land, would be doing such things probably up until recently, and still say he could be for the every guy. I think I'd rather have my sleaze up front and visible so at least we are forewarned.

There's something to that.

I have my own mantra along those lines: I'd rather have my fascists -- power-hungry stokers of hate -- be greedy and venal rather than charismatic true believers. And though all these guys are appealing to the worst in a section of U.S. citizens -- the section that fears and hates gays, uppity women, people of color and civilizing restraint in human life -- so far at least they all seem just self-seeking liars, not ideologues of hate.

In the wake of his South Carolina defeat, Mitt says he is going to release some abbreviated set of his tax returns. Somehow I don't expect this will appear to most of us as full disclosure; the whole point of rich people's tax returns is to make them seem less rich and hence less liable to taxes. They have armies of accountants and lawyers to make stuff up for that purpose.

The Romney tax return furor reminded me of some fascinating quotes from the oft-cited 18th century father of modern "free market" economics Adam Smith that I grabbed along with commentary from Berkeley professor Bradford DeLong. In the era of the founding of modern economies, economists had to be psychologists as well as numbers and stats guys. Smith mused on why the great masses of people don't feel more resentment of the rich. Here's DeLong's explanation with Smith's words inset.

The first reason applies to the idle rich. According to Smith:

A stranger to human nature, who saw the indifference of men about the misery of their inferiors, and the regret and indignation which they feel for the misfortunes and sufferings of those above them, would be apt to imagine, that pain must be more agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible to persons of higher rank, than to those of meaner stations...

We feel this, Smith believes, because we naturally sympathize with others (if he were writing today, he would surely invoke “mirror neurons”). And the more pleasant our thoughts about individuals or groups are, the more we tend to sympathize with them. The fact that the lifestyles of the rich and famous “seem almost the abstract idea of a perfect and happy state” leads us to “pity…that anything should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation! We could even wish them immortal...”

The second reason applies to the hard-working rich, the type of person who:

… devotes himself forever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness....With the most unrelenting industry he labors night and day....serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises....[I]n the last dregs of life, his body wasted with toil and diseases, his mind galled and ruffled by the memory of a thousand injuries and disappointments....he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.... Power and riches....keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death...

In short, on the one hand, we don’t wish to disrupt the perfect felicity of the lifestyles of the rich and famous; on the other hand, we don’t wish to add to the burdens of those who have spent their most precious possession – their time and energy – pursuing baubles. These two arguments are not consistent, but that does not matter. They both have a purchase on our thinking.

Mitt is appealing to the enduring hold of these attitudes -- to whatever residue of (mostly unearned) sympathy for and respect for the work (also usually unmerited) attaches to the rich. But he's finding unexpected resistance in a era in which rawer, uglier resentments are trumping such civil emotions. So he has to simulate a hater and though he can mouth the words, he comes across as inauthentic, a rich boy playing a brawler's game. Newt is more the real thing: vicious, grandiose and ready to kick his opponent when when he's down. And that's what a section of the electorate wants against President Obama, someone who can strike out against the Black usurper with the smooth tongue.

Adam Smith's observations seem to derive from a more civilized context than our current election.

Newt and South Carolinians show Steven Pinker wrong ...

These days I'm immersed in Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker's enormous and fascinating The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I'm nowhere near ready to write anything thoughtful about the book as whole; getting there may take several weeks more digestion.

But yesterday was not the best day to read the section on what Pinker calls "the rights revolution," to assimilate in his assertion that most racism in contemporary U.S. culture is a a thing of the past. Here's a sample:

The stigmatizing of any attitude that smacks of the dehumanization or demonization of minority groups extends well beyond the polling numbers. It has transformed Western culture, government, sports, and everyday life. … Derogatory racial and ethnic jokes, offensive terms for minority groups, and naive musings about innate racial differences have become taboo in mainstream forums and have ended the careers of several politicians and media figures. Of course, plenty of vicious racism can still be found in the cesspools of the Internet and at the fringes of the political right, but a sharp line divides it from mainstream culture and politics. … The campaign to extirpate any precursor to attitudes that could lead to racial violence has defined the bounds of the thinkable and sayable. …

Apparently not if you are Newt Gingrich and the place is South Carolina.

Beating up on Black reporter Juan Williams for challenging him to disavow the racism embedded in his attacks Barack Obama -- a Kenyan socialist food stamp president according to Newt -- and trumpeting the attacks just won the former House Speaker a nice popular vote victory. And this came even at the end of a week in which one of his ex-wive's claimed he'd demanded an open marriage while already carrying on an affair with wife number three. Newt is riding high. Apparently in his victory speech, he announced

I articulate the deepest held values of the American people.

Let's hope not.