* Katherine of Obsidian Wings is hanging up her blogging spurs. I’ll miss her. She’s written a long, thoughtful swan song about why we should care about U.S. human rights abuses towards people we suspect of terrorism.
* Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom argues that right-wingers probably shouldn’t crow about this story. According to the Financial Times, a British governmental report is about to say that the British claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger was “reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.”
The famous sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, are arguably technically correct. However, the use of the word “learned”, and the context (in the SOTU, as part of an argument for war on Iraq) strongly implies that the United States believes that the substance of the statement is true.
Tim points out, in great detail, that the best intelligence in American hands said otherwise. (It wasn’t just Joe Wilson.) He points out that the CIA had successfully removed the claim from previous speeches. He also points out that the Administration already apologized for using the claim when Ari Fleischer said “This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.”
(Also, Tim reminds me to mark my calendar. July 14th is the one-year anniversary of the outing of Valerie Plame by two senior Administration officials. Congratulations to the lucky felons!)
* From Reason’s Hit and Run, Tommy Chong is out of jail, having served nine months for selling bongs over the internet. He’ll be on the Tonight Show this evening. According to the Drug Policy Alliance:
Tommy Chong was arrested and indicted following a series of DEA raids in February 2003 as part of the Government’s “Operation Pipe Dreams” crackdown on illegal drug paraphernalia. The crackdown involved at least 1200 officials, including hundreds of DEA agents, and at least 103 US Marshals. The operation led to 60 arrests. It occurred during an Orange Alert against terrorist attacks.
* The Poor Man is right about everything.
Finally, at least two evangelical Christians have written about Focus on the Family’s decision to distribute Michael Moore’s home address to their email list.
* David Wayne at Jollyblogger has a very good post arguing that FOTF is only hurting the Christian cause.
* Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost thinks that the concern is overblown. He thinks that the real issue is (surprise!) the hypocrisy of the left. I agree with him that politicially motivated outings of gays are shameful. However, I don’t understand how Carter can dismiss the right-wing invasion of privacy, condemn the left-wing invasion of privacy, and then feel secure enough in his own righteousness to condemn the left for selective outrage.
There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy. They happen a lot.
I should note that Carter doesn’t seem to have much support in his comments. If you choose to comment, please be polite.
{ 18 comments }
Joe Carter 07.09.04 at 9:35 pm
Actually, I didn’t dismiss the “right-wing” invasion of privacy. I said repeatedly in the comment section that I think FOTF was clearly in the wrong. Still, I don’t think that passing out an address is nearly as invasive as “outing” suspected gay politicians.
Oh, and you’re right that I don’t have much support in my comments section. Most people think that FOTF’s actions were clearly evil and that “outing” is somehow justified. That is the hypocrisy that I was attempting to point out.
Ted Barlow 07.09.04 at 9:42 pm
“I believe their intentions were relatively benign”
“If the mere publication of someone’s address leads automatically to the potential for violence then the telephone book people would have a lot to answer for. The outcry over the incident does seem rather overheated.”
Sorry, that sounds pretty dismissive to me, Joe. I’ve seen overheated outcries. A couple of blogs have called out FOTF. It hasn’t made the mainstream media; even Moore himself hasn’t complained. That doesn’t seem too overheated to me.
Joe Carter 07.09.04 at 9:55 pm
While I could be wrong, I don’t think that the FOTF considered the danger that could be posed to Moore and his family by posting his address. Of course, any nut who wanted to harm him could have found it themselve. But there was no need to make it so readily available.
That doesn’t seem too overheated to me.
Sorry for the confusion but I was mainly referring to your comments section, not to a general outcry over the incident.
By the way, I’m encouraged to see that you condemn the “outing” incidents. I think that such behavior should always be denounced no matter what end of the political spectrum it is coming from. Trust me, if someone on the Right pulls such a stunt I will be the first in line to denounce such behavior.
Joe Carter 07.09.04 at 9:57 pm
While I could be wrong, I don’t think that the FOTF considered the danger that could be posed to Moore and his family by posting his address. Of course, any nut that wanted to harm him could have found it themselves. But there was no need to make it so readily available.
That doesn’t seem too overheated to me.
Sorry for the confusion but I was mainly referring to your comments section, not to a general outcry over the incident.
By the way, I’m encouraged to see that you condemn the “outing” incidents. I think that such behavior should always be denounced no matter what end of the political spectrum it is coming from. Trust me, if someone on the Right pulls such a stunt I will be the first in line to denounce such behavior.
mg 07.09.04 at 10:01 pm
Oh, and you’re right that I don’t have much support in my comments section. Most people think that FOTF’s actions were clearly evil and that “outing†is somehow justified. That is the hypocrisy that I was attempting to point out.
By “most people” Joe means, of course, not “most people in my comments section,” because that would be a lie. No idea what he does mean.
Who taught you to talk like this, Joe, GWB or Michael Moore?
Erik 07.09.04 at 11:41 pm
There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy.
Hypocratastic?
Hypercrisy?
P O'Neill 07.10.04 at 12:18 am
Get that typo on Niger/Nigeria — Crooked Timber runs a reputable operation, not some Condi “I didn’t read the footnotes” Rice shambles.
Glenn 07.10.04 at 12:57 am
i think you are missing out on the most important lessons of this intelligence fiasco with niger and the uranium. if you take what british intelligence has said to be true, and what will most likely be confirmed to be accurate in the butler report, then some other european agency spent three years surveilling a nuclear smuggling ring (one in which Saddam was involved). so the real questions are these:
a) why was the cia unable to penetrate this smuggling ring itself or even know anything about it?
b) why wasn’t this information passed on from the european agency to the cia??
is our cia that weak?? they got no pull at all in the intelligence community?? those are clear signs of an intelligence service being run poorly, and that’s the scandal. everything was going on behind our backs. that’s when today’s senate intelligence committee report comes into play. on iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, the only thing left to be said is that u.s. intelligence was unable to gather the available evidence that was out there to prove that saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons. the cia’s only document was a forgery and that just shows that they were duped, but we do not yet know by whom (is that tpm’s big secret??). and so it was the right thing to do for bush to rely on the uk’s intelligence. the uk was our ally and they supplied us with the information. what the hell is so wrong with that?
Abiola Lapite 07.10.04 at 4:30 am
—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA1
I see someone’s already beaten me to it – Niger and Nigeria are NOT the same country!
—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) – GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt
iD8DBQFA72LGOgWD1ZKzuwkRAuRyAJ93X5iHW3h21WpZkTulL+fW43EsJQCfQwG2
VMRBafqRXCeSS8Ak9/jgHqY=
=Ge5K
—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–
Ted Barlow 07.10.04 at 5:57 am
Niger thing fixed; good call, Paul.
Thorley Winston 07.10.04 at 7:50 pm
Really, this whole Michael Moore address thing is a non-issue – it was already public information and FOTF or any other group has a right to ask the readers of their email list to send him letters expressing their displeasure at his latest polemic.
I don’t agree with Joe Carter though in trying to compare this to outing a homosexual politician. A more apt comparison would be Michael Moore putting a camera outside Lucianne Goldberg’s living room and broadcasting it on the internet and his television show.
T. V. 07.10.04 at 11:48 pm
“It’s already public information anyway”
Bloggers who make this tired claim should be willing to place all their information that is technically “public” on the front page of their weblog and in the signature of all their emails. Their financial information, street address, legal records–anything that is hypothetically available either with or without paying a fee. Attach it to every single post, in every medium.
The basis of the pooh-pooh is that there is no difference between information being available and information being promulgated to saturation, made available to people to whom it would not have occured to look it up and who wonder what might be done with it now that it’s been placed in their hands so easily.
There is an inertial barrier that prevents much “public” information from being widely disseminated and placed before the minds of volatile people who might act violently on it.
Moore has a weblog where people can send him hate mail: http://www.michaelmoore.com. It takes far less web research to find that than it does to uncover his unlisted home address. (Look at that esoteric blog title.) That pretty much covers the right to send a letter.
Publishing his home address is an incitement to something more, up to and including violence. Just as publishing the unlisted home address of an abortion doctor would be.
That’s why this story has legs. It was an incitement to violence against a man’s family by a group who pretends to speak on behalf of families.
If it’s so innocent, let’s see Dobson publish his family’s “already-public” address in the domains where it will be read by his political enemies. And let’s see the right-wing bloggers put the address and pick-up times of their children’s daycare center on the blog sidebar, every day.
After all, with enough archival fortitude anybody could figure it out anyway.
Lance Boyle 07.11.04 at 5:11 am
As far as I know, no churches have been bombed by pro-choice atheists. The body count on the other side may still be in the single digits or even the low two digits but, you know, c’mon.
In the only prominent political assassinations I can think of that targeted right-wing/Republican politicians in the US, Wallace, Ford, Reagan were each non-fatal – two wing shots and a complete miss, not to make light of George Wallace’s debilitating injury, or Jim Brady’s.
The list of left-wing politicians who have been killed is lengthy. Ghastly long. Spooky long.
The vicious psychopaths who support the even more vicious psychopaths who gun down doctors and blow up clinics are part of an even larger group of mentally ill and ungoverned dimwits. There’s no boundaries between them, it goes seamlessly from Falwell to the shrieking, armed, lunatics.
It’s fatuous to presume that controversial left-wing celebrities aren’t deluged with death threats and hate mail, just because they aren’t publicly announcing it. Which a little thought would suggest might just intensify the problem.
bellatrys 07.11.04 at 6:57 pm
I’m curious why “outing” someone as a hypocritical homosexual is as bad as revealing someone’s home address and phone number to a hostile crowd in a deliberate effort to have that person and his/her family menaced.
Is it because those who object to closeted conservative gays being outed, *know* that their own side will also persecute and menace and even worse, perhaps, to the now-revealed hypocrites in the name of godliness and traditional values?
Is this an admission, then, that the “Christian Right” is really the Xtian Wrong, the party of those who think it’s okay to beat people to death for their minority sexuality?
Otherwise, how is it any different from revealing any other public person’s hypocritical disjuncture between practice and preaching, or the celebrated tactic of taking photographs of those who frequent “adult bookstores” and publishing them?
Or is the last only okay because it’s done by “Christian” ministers?
Bozhemoi, but I’m sick of unprincipled ideallists.
Thorley Winston 07.12.04 at 2:50 pm
T.V. wrote:
Then the story (at least that aspect of it) has no actual legs since there was nothing in the email that qualifies as an “incitement to violence†in any meaningful sense of the term. Unless of course Moore’s almost routine harassment of others including the infamous “LucyCam†now also qualify as an “incitement to violence.†No more so I’d wager than protesting at the homes of Judge Kenneth Starr or Karl Rove.
Pete 07.12.04 at 4:29 pm
Turnabout is fair play, yes? Has someone provided the home address for FOTF leader James Dobson?
Thorley Winston 07.12.04 at 7:10 pm
Does that mean that we’ll be seeing live broadcasts of Michael Moore’s living room on the web and on television?
T. V. 07.13.04 at 8:40 am
Address, phone number, license plate, relevant public financial information please, Thorley. Already theoretically public. At the bottom not just of one post, but every post you make here.
Just make a sig file. It’s not like I’m asking you to retype it every time.
You’re the one claiming that frequency and breadth of distribution of personal information makes no practical or moral difference.
It’s a perfectly fair test of your proposition. Breadth and frequency, please.
Comments on this entry are closed.