Law and Order

Well, this is going to be fun. I admit that I find it odd to seek the death penalty as punishment for those whose most fervent desire is martyrdom through death. Isn't that rather like punishing a bank robber by giving him the keys to the vault? In any case:

Sitting at the front of a line of five detainees accused of carrying out the most devastating terrorist attack in U.S. history, Mohammed stroked his long, bushy gray beard and spoke in confident English of his contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the military commissions designed to try him.

Calling the process an "inquisition," Mohammed told Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann, the presiding judge, that he wants to represent himself at trial and looks forward to the death penalty.

Contempt for the Constitution? An "inquisition"? Oh no he di'in't!

Even acquittal would probably leave the men in U.S. custody indefinitely. The government has determined them to be "enemy combatants" and serious threats to the United States and its allies.

Oh. So. Well.

Claims that the Anglo-Saxon model of justicial proceduralism is a guarantor of actual justice are overblown, but nevertheless it seems clear that the presumption of innocence, evidentiary rules, impartial (such as it is) review, etc. form at very least a reasonably coherent means of determining guilt and meting out penalties. What's interesting about these tribunal proceedings is that they have not, contra the claims of many opponents, actually done away entirely with this process, but have instead simply skipped a step--hopping over the trial phase and going directly to sentencing.

Mine-Shaft Gap

"But Doctor . . . wouldn't this require the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relaionship. At least, as far as men were concerned."

The True Nature of the Force

Despite the Marianan depths of my cynicism about the man, even I was a little surprised that the first thing Barry O. did after clinching the Donk conference championship was go up to AIPAC and bark like a neutered toy poodle defending its master's yard from the paperboy.

But, as such internetsian luminaries as Dennis P. and Jonathan S. (plus cobloggers) have long noted, Liberal America has always been indifferent at best to the fate of the Palestinians. How many conversations have I had in which nice, Reform-Jewish Democrats, who love the Blacks and the Gays and Feminism and Social Democracy, solemnly note that when Israelis began ejecting Palestinians . . . the Arab countries refused to take them in, as if this failure on the part of the Umma, or whomever, somehow justified the long twilight of Palestianian pseudo-peoplehood. This argument, I point out, is not unlike justifying the Third Reich on the basis of Roosevelt and Hull's refusal of The Saint Louis. Besides, I note, a substantial majority of Palestinians ejected, for example, from West Jerusalem in 1948-1949 were Christian, and in any event Palestinians were not widely considered culturally Arab in any event. To no avail.

So. Obama's first foreign policy address of the championship round of our political playoffs was dedicated to assuring one of the most war-hungry gangs in America that, far from repudiating the policies of the current administration, he will solidify and expand them (perhaps adding some of that much-bruited "competence"). This was not unpredictable. Whatever his private feelings, the Empire makes certain demands on a man. "Search your feelings, Father, you can't do this. I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate." "It is too late for me, son. The Emperor will show you the true nature of the Force. He is your master now."

"But Professor, that would be bigamy!" "Yeah, well, it would be big ah me, too."

Alors. Little Pittsburgh is currently moving toward a codified "Mutual Commitment Registry," which, though not legally binding, would presumably help cohabiting gay and straight couples attest to their relationship status for whatever domestic partner benefits their workplaces offered. That's no small potatoes; I can say from experience that the hoops through which you have to jump to prove that your boyfriend is really your boyfriend is really your boyfriend when trying to add him to your healthcare plan are a royal pain and a real impediment. Yet I'm struck, as usual when it comes to anything in the realm of gay marriage, by the ostentatious nod in the direction of the preservation of taboo:

To have their relationship listed, the couple must live within the city and fill out a "Mutual Commitment Affidavit." The statement pledges that they've been in "a committed relationship" for at least a year, and "intend to remain together indefinitely." They must also be at least 18 years old, not married or in another domestic-partner relationship, and "not related by blood closer than permitted for married couples."

Against all the Ew!s in the audience, I'll ask it straight--you'll pardon the expression--out: if a couple of queer brothers or sisters, or a couple of queer cousins, want to bone, what's the rational basis for prohibiting them from doing it? The answer, I think you will find, is that there is no rational basis, but only an acculturated predisposition to finding incest yucky and inherently disgusting--exactly the same type of predisposition, I'll add, that formerly applied to faggotry itself.

The Kulturkampf Right terrifies the well-meaning Left with its hoary invocations of polyandry and man-on-dog-on-lizard-on-flea-on-amoeba group action, and so our advocates of gay marriage go far out of their way to make the perfectly preposterous assertion that the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples somehow fails to imply its extension to polygamous and bigamous groups, for example. Of course it implies the extension of such rights to such groups. The objection from the Right is that this constitutes innate immorality, and from the Left that it constitutes inherent coercion--that polygamous relationships by their very nature place women in a subordinate relationship (as if that were somehow not the case in "traditional" marriage). But to my mind allowing multiple valences in human relationships rather than a rigid insistence that the only meaningful sexual bond is a long-term, committed, monogamous pair-bonding, is precisely the sort of social disorder we ought to be sewing. I happen to know a trio of men who lived together in what they rather jokingly called trinogamy for quite some time, with what appeared from the outside to be a greater measure of happiness and emotional stability than I, for instance, found in my own monogamous couplehood.

A procedural objection to all this is that if we allow people to form almost any domestic arrangement that they desire, the multiplicity of arrangements will swiftly make it impossible for the state to administrate any meaningful system of rights and benefits, which are by their very nature exclusionary and particularistic. To which I reply: yes, exactly! "Traditional marriage" and the "traditional family" are units in a political economy. To turn a phrase: fuck the system.

A Bridge to Sell Ya

The progressive capacity to stick his neck out through an intervening guillotine is something to behold. Here witness Digby co-blogger dday opining that it is now incumbent on Obama, as the Donk's leader (and oh, how the progressive loves that word), to stop some new incarnation of a warrant-less wiretapping bill. After all:

Obama positions himself as a new kind of Democrat who wants to change Washington and has a background as a Constitutional scholar. There is no other issue which both shows the rot of the Democratic leadership and their disinclination to enforce or even recognize the Constitution than this one.

How I love that: "positions himself." These fools actually recognize the sawdust in the engine, but they're gonna buy the motherfucker anyway.

Anals of the Agean

True, true, heterosexuality and its attendent deviations are mostly inventions of the twentieth century, and Classical sexuality, especially in pre-Roman times, remains a difficult and alien subject for the modern mind, yet something about the "First Same-Sex Weddings in Greece" just tickles the fuck out of me, as if none of those fucks had ever read an Isherwood novel before.

Functions

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained "special groups" that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is -- of course -- too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments -- and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the "this-war-is-lost" caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

-Fred Hiatt, et al.

Other than an odd tendency to replace commas with em-dashes for no discernible reason, what's most striking is the insistence that the announced intention of the Mahdi Army to avoid direct confrontation reflects "disarray." There was at the time some reporting on contention in the ranks of al-Sadr's militia from those who would seek open conflict with the Americans and official Iraqi government forces, but in the end there was little armed resistence during recent American-backed actions, just as al-Sadr ordered, and that, it would seem to me, constitutes the opposite of disarray. The desire to see al-Sadr, or the government of Iran, or whoever happens to be Enemy Number One in Iraq on any given Monday in June, strictly through the prism of our own belligerence speaks loudly of the futility of our efforts. Neither the major homegrown Iraqi interests nor any Iranian proxies in Iraq are operating for the sole purpose of "killing Americans," as is the neverending, self-refutingly self-absorbed conviction of the Washington Post editorial board and most of the major national participants in the government of the United States. When killing Americans achieves or advances their political ends, they're more than willing to go at it. When not, not. The same is true of our Sunni psuedo-allies, who fought us viciously for a time and then perceived that temporary accomodation would accrue greater benefit to their cause. None of these parties is a gang of mindless thugs who--what is the phrase?--"only understand force," although they certainly employ thuggery when necessary. These are sophisticated political actors pursuing strategies across a timeframe measured in years and decades. (Of course, Hiatt and the gang would probably take that as an argument for indefinite occupation. Well, what can you do?) The "rapidly improving" conditions that the editorial foregrounds run asymtotically to any end to the occupation; the "improvements" themselves necessitate continuing the endeavor. Almost, hm, as if that were the point.