Critical Exponent

As a purely intellecutal exercise, I want to list the corruption lowlights of the Bush administration (both White House and Congress). I’ll start brainstorming and I’ll insert more in the days and weeks ahead.

Please, please feel free to contribute to this list via the blog comments or private email! I’m looking to fill out this list with more items and with links to relevant documentation. I’ll add the information to the main blog entry.

Let’s watch it grow!

Without further ado, in no particular order:

• Plamegate: leaking names of covert CIA operatives ( ordered by the WH? )
• Muzzling NASA scientists on global warming
• Withdrawing from Kyoto protocols
• Removing safe-sex and STD information from government website (NIH)
• Using known faulty intelligence on WMDs to justify war on Iraq
• Politicizing the faulty intelligence to justify the war on Iraq
• Spying on private communications, including those between US citizens, without a warrant, not even the super-double-top-secret-court ex post facto warrant
• No-bid contracts for Haliburton in Iraq
• No body armor or other infrastructure for American troops fighting in Iraq
• Reduced social programs
• The above while the rich get their taxes cut
• Cheney’s secret energy task force
• Sealing daddy’s presidential records
• Limited, screened access by the press
• “Free-speech zones” to hinder protests
• Terry Schiavo: limited government advocates mis-diagnose via satellite

I am all for religious tolerance, and I happen to believe that the way Muslims often are marginalized in the Western World is wrong. However, the whole hubbub about the Danish cartoons is ridiculous and dangerous.

Yes, I understand that depictions of the Prophet are offensive to many Muslims. But guess what? These Muslims can choose not to depict the Prophet themselves, and not to read (or even to boycott) publications that do.

However, to be offended by a drawing, ink on paper or pixels on a computer screen, to the point of riots, arson, or worse, is to sacrifice the message for the symbol. Moreover, not all the world is Muslim, and it is ludicrous to hold others to one group’s standards, much less to impose these standards on the planet at large.

The people who are so outraged to the point of violence are no better than the fanatics of other stripes who would criminalize and persecute those who do not bow down before their idol, their dogma, their flag, or their party line. Instead of celebrating the strength and richness of Islam, they choose to put forward a face of an irrational mob that cannot be reasoned with.

There is a desire in the mainstream of Western societies, perhaps borne out of post(?)-imperialist guilt, to be sensitive to other cultures. That’s a worthy goal, but we must be careful, too, not to become so “sensitive” that we tear down the very framework of human values so laboriously constructed since the Enlightenment. Specifically, our governments and our press should defend the Danish newspaper’s freedom to publish such a provocative cartoon, even if they choose to voice their disagreements over the content or the decision to do so.

Slate’s Christopher Hitchens has a more detailed analysis, including the State Department’s and CNN’s tepid responses.

… that can get you in trouble with the Capitol Police. So can your skin color.

Cindy Sheehan wasn’t the only one removed from the SOTU address on Tuesday. So was the wife of Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.), for wearing a shirt that said “Support the troops.” Rep. Young got really incensed on the house floor yesterday and eventually got an apology from Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer.

Here’s the kicker, though:

Young said he wouldn’t be so mad if it were just Sheehan. “I totally disagree with everything she stands for,” he said. But by removing his wife, Gainer’s officers clearly “acted precipitously,” Young said.

This incident is very telling: at least this one member of the self-professed “small-government” party feels it fundamental that heavy handedness be kept in check so long as you agree with him. Everyone else is “the other” and can fend for herself..

Contrast this with the more liberal view that, for better or for worse, we are all in this community, society, planet together, and abuses against one are abuses against all. Contrast this clannish outlook on the world with principled view epitomized by Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

That was Cindy Sheehan’s crime.

AMERICAblog has a good point: The White House already knew The New York Times had the domestic spying story, and still Gonzales willfully lied to Congress during his confirmation hearings.