Rick Santorum attacked President Obama on Saturday for being “a snob” because, Santorum said, the president wanted all Americans to have a college education (Obama hasn’t actually said such a thing). Then it turns out that when Santorum was in the Senate he said he wanted all Pennsylvanians to go to college. Hypocrisy much? Moreover, Santorum has a BA from Penn State, an MBA and a JD, so when he says not everyone is cut out for college (the way he was), it seems to me that he is the one who is being a snob.
Santorum is cynically making a play for the Reagan Democrats, the white, ethnic blue collar workers who typically only have a high school education, and who are skittish about both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. But whoever told him that they don’t aspire to a college education for their children doesn’t actually know any working class people.
Santorum has given ample evidence that despite all the taxpayer dollars wasted on his education, he failed to learn anything about how to think independently, which is what education should have taught him. So here are some things he might have learned if he had been paying attention, and which might have kept him from saying a string of silly things in public.
5. Santorum: “I’m for income inequality.” College could have taught him that too much income inequality has negative effects on a country, as is held by Fed chief Ben Bernanke, who has a college degree in . . . economics. In nations with high levels of inequality, periods of economic expansion are shortened to a third as long. And, persistent inequality that is felt to be unfair contributes to high degrees of social conflict.
4. Evolution isn’t “just a theory,” as Santorum has put it in his quest to have the pseudo-science of Creationism taught in biology classes. In science, a “theory” is a robust explanation for observed phenomena that accounts for all the known facts about them. So, physicists speak of the theory of gravity. It isn’t that they think gravity isn’t a fact, or that they entertain other explanations of why books always fall if you let them go in mid-air (for instance, that each book has an invisible elf on it who likes a giddy ride down to the floor and guides it that way). Likewise, biological evolution is one of the more solidly proved things in science, and has been repeatedly observed in nature. Whether a divine power has set the universe up in this way, so that evolution occurs, is a theological question for seminaries, not a question for high school biology classes. Only someone insecure in their faith would need to bolster it by attempting to insert it into non-theological realms like science.
2. Santorum maintains that Usamah Ben Laden was tracked because the US tortured al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. Actually, Usamah was found by tracking his courier. But torture or “enhanced interrogation” is notoriously unreliable. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi under torture told the US government that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had trained al-Qaeda agents in chemical weaponry– a complete falsehood, which Dick Cheney and Condi Rice quoted in support of going to war with Iraq. Someone educated in a Security Studies Program could have given Santorum better information than his own little brain has been able to come up with. Santorum, notoriously, tried to instruct Senator John McCain in how torture works; McCain was tortured by the North Vietnamese while in custody there.
1. Santorum maintains that there is no such thing as a genuine liberal Christian because, he says, the plain text of the Bible is contrary to the principles of liberalism. He goes on to conflate liberalism with “liberation theology” (they are not the same thing). But the American Roman Catholic bishops of Santorum’s own church often take social positions that are recognizably liberal, basing them in scripture and in papal encyclicals. When it comes to feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, visiting prisoners, and doing to others as you would have them do to you, it is actually Ayn Rand style conservatism that is incompatible with Christianity. Santorum’s Bible appears to be missing the Beatitudes, and his Catholic education seems so defective that he is unaware of “Evangelium Vitae” (1995), which forbids the capital punishment that Santorum favors, or “Laborum exercens” (1981), which recognizes the right of workers to unionize, or “Caritas in Veritatae” (2009), in which Pope Benedict says, “Therefore, it must be borne in mind that grave imbalances are produced when economic action, conceived merely as an engine for wealth creation, is detached from political action, conceived as a means for pursuing justice through redistribution.” Sounds like welfare to me. Someone who studied religion in college might have been able to help Santorum avoid all these errors.
Rick Santorum attacked President Obama on Saturday for his theology. Although people assumed that Santorum was, like other conservatives, hinting around that Obama is not a Christian but rather a secret Muslim, Santorum denied this allegation. And, likely he meant instead to lump Obama with the 45 million members of mainline Protestant churches in the US who he considers to be pagans. You see, for Santorum, Methodists and Lutherans and Episcopalians may as well be Muslims, since he does not believe that they are Christians.
What is remarkable is that it is Santorum who sounds like a Muslim fundamentalist. And ultimately maybe what he is saying is that Obama isn’t Muslim enough.
Santorum told his audience in Ohio that Obama’s policy is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phoney ideal, some phoney theology — not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology.”
Likely Santorum was condemning Obama for being a theological liberal. Despite the Obamas’ occasional attendance at African-American Baptist churches just before Martin Luther King Day, they also have gone to the Episcopalian church.
Rick Santorum does not think Episcopalians are Christians.
As Alan Seitz-Wald argues, Santorum has excommunicated Christian liberals. He said in a 2008 speech,
” We all know that this country was founded on a Judeo-Christian ethic but the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant Judeo-Christian ethic, sure the Catholics had some influence, but this was a Protestant country and the Protestant ethic, mainstream, mainline Protestantism, and of course we look at the shape of mainline Protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it. [...]
Whether its sensuality of vanity of the famous in America, they are peacocks on display and they have taken their poor behavior and made it fashionable. The corruption of culture, the corruption of manners, the corruption of decency is now on display whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.”
Mainline Protestants make up roughly 18 percent of adults in the United States; Seidz-Wald estimates them at 45 million, roughly the number of adult adherents of churches belonging to the National Council of Churches. These denominations for the most part reject a literal approach to the Bible and accept a social gospel, the idea that Christianity mandates good works and care for the poor, needy and vulnerable. The scriptural bases for this belief are quoted here.
So the most likely explanation of Santorum’s outburst is that he believes the social Gospel and non-literal approaches to the Bible are un-Christian, and he has thrown President Obama out of Christianity along with 45 million other mainline Protestants. Santorum does not believe that the Bible suggests you care for the poor and needy.
In fact, Santorum by declaring the social Gospel to be un-Christian has not only excommunicated liberal Protestants from Christianity, he has excommunicated the majority of American Catholics, along with the US Council of Bishops and the last few popes, all of whom speak of an “option for the poor.”
So if Santorum doesn’t believe in this sort of thing is Christianity:
Mt. 25:31-46. “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. And all the nations will be gathered before Him, and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on His left.
Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’
Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite you in, or naked, and clothe You? And when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’
And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.”
what does Santorum think Christianity is about? He thinks it is about moral puritanism.
Thus, he condemns fornication and adultery, but also implicitly revealing clothing. And he is against condoms and birth control pills because in his view they encourage sleeping around (though he doesn’t approve of them for married people either; go figure).
Rick Santorum does not adhere to any recognizable Catholic theology of the social. Rather, he is a Puritan in the Calvinist tradition, staying awake at night afraid that someone somewhere might be committing fornication at the same time that he takes worldly success as a sign of divine favor.
Moreover, Santorum’s approach to religion and social policy is reminiscent of Muslim fundamentalist parties such as al-Nahda in Tunisia.
Just as Santorum has excommunicated Obama and the other mainline Protestants, so Muslim fundamentalists such as Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) in Egypt declared mainstream Muslims to have departed from the faith. In Islam this is called Takfir or declaring someone to be an unbeliever even if the person considers him or herself a believer. Sunni Muslim authorities, and even the Muslim Brotherhood, reject the practice of takfir. Thus, Santorum is more extreme in this regard than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
And, for instance, the new fundamentalist government in Tunisia is prosecuting three journalists for reprinting in that country a German GQ cover showing Tunisian-German soccer player Sami Khdeira with his mostly unclothed German model girlfriend (Lena Gercke), and him providing her with a hand bra. Santorum? He wants to ban pornography. I presume that if it is banned, then publishing it will be prosecuted.
And, the minister of culture in Tunisia is refusing to allow Lebanese singers Nancy Ajram or Elise, or Egyptian performers Tamer Hosny and Shirin Abdelwahab, to appear at the Carthage music festival. He is excluding them because at one time or another they have made a music video he considers to be immoral, i.e. sexually provocative.
So Mahdi Mabrook of the al-Nahda Party agrees with Santorum about the decline of morals in mainstream society, “whether it’s the NBA or whether it’s a rock concert or whether it’s on a movie set.”
In fact, President Santorum might like to bring Minister Mabrook over to head our National Endowment for the Humanities, since the two of them see eye to eye so much about culture.
Many big capitalist bosses in the US have had striking workers killed over the decades, but they don’t mostly appeal to the teachings of Jesus to justify it. Don’t tell the Republicans about that Tunisian parliamentarian’s weird interpretation of the Qur’an, or the GOP will all convert immediately to Islam, and that religion already is struggling to deal with its own fringe of nut jobs.
American Decline in Perspective, Part 1
By Noam Chomsky
Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.
At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.
The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.
When the invasion was launched 50 years ago, concern was so slight that there were few efforts at justification, hardly more than the president’s impassioned plea that “we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence” and if the conspiracy achieves its ends in Laos and Vietnam, “the gates will be opened wide.”
Elsewhere, he warned further that “the complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history [and] only the strong… can possibly survive,” in this case reflecting on the failure of U.S. aggression and terror to crush Cuban independence.
By the time protest began to mount half a dozen years later, the respected Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall, no dove, forecast that “Vietnam as a cultural and historic entity… is threatened with extinction…[as]…the countryside literally dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size.” He was again referring to South Vietnam.
When the war ended eight horrendous years later, mainstream opinion was divided between those who described the war as a “noble cause” that could have been won with more dedication, and at the opposite extreme, the critics, to whom it was “a mistake” that proved too costly. By 1977, President Carter aroused little notice when he explained that we owe Vietnam “no debt” because “the destruction was mutual.”
There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.
The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.
It is hard to decide what is the most despicable thing about senatorial Republican hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s Superbowl ad attacking rival Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. The ad has a Chinese young woman speaking broken English and gloating about the indebtedness of the US to China and the export of US jobs to China. Given the ugly history in Michigan of Asian-bashing over economic competition in the automobile industry and the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit, Hoekstra’s ad is incendiary and has offended right-thinking people in both major political parties.
Although the controversy that ensued mostly focused on the scapegoating of Asians and Asian-Americans for current US economic difficulties, there are other heavy duty issues in the ad.
The current US deficit was primarily the work of the Republican majority under George W. Bush, as this chart demonstrates:
Hoekstra and his colleagues voted to go to war with Iraq, which was an unfunded war, most of the so far $1 trillion price tag being borrowed. Hoekstra and his colleagues voted to cut taxes on the rich, much reducing revenues. And Hoekstra and his colleagues voted for an unfunded Medicare prescription benefit. The tax cuts on the rich have gone on raising the deficit every year since enacted by hundreds of millions of dollars. Hoekstra voted for the TARP bailout. Iraq was still costing billions in 2011. And the Medicare prescription benefit likewise. Hoekstra’s votes are an ongoing budget disaster, long after he got out of government.
Although it is true that China is a holder of a little over $1 trillion of our national debt, Japan comes in as a close second. And, the UK, Brazil, a group of oil exporters, Switzerland and Taiwan together hold more US debt than does China. Proportionally speaking, China doesn’t hold that much US debt. And, far from being a a threat in this regard, China is is doing us a favor. But it is Hoekstra who gave them that opportunity, by creating so much debt.
“Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich…. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”
O’Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, “There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, ‘That sounds odd.’”
Romney continues, “We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor…. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus….”
•Nearly 47 million people were in poverty in the US in 2010, up from 37.3 million in 2007. That was the 4th year in a row in which the number of people in poverty increased. In the 52 years that poverty rates have been being published, this is the largest number ever.
•20.5 million Americans are in “extreme poverty.” That is, their family income is $10,000 or less a year for a family of 4, about half that of the poverty line. But since they’re so well taken care of, Romney is not interested in those 20 million people. Or maybe it is because he knows that they don’t typically vote, being too busy on Tuesdays trying to make a living.
• There were 17.2 million households or about 1 in 7 that were food insecure in the US in 2010, the highest number ever recorded. (“Food insecure” means “at risk of going hungry.” About 1/3 of these households, or over 6 million, actually went hungry at some points of the year because they were not able to afford food. This hunger encompassed the children as well. Romney’s safety net is leaving millions of children hungry at times. He seems to get plenty of nice meals.)
Taylor Marsh writes in a guest column for Informed Comment
The Party’s Over
There’s a reason Obama reelect doesn’t have a slogan.
All they’ve got is a question: Are you in?
Symbolic of this problem is what happened to Elizabeth Warren when her rise was met by Tim Geithner’s foot, and why Ron Suskin’s book Confidence Men made the Administration queasy. Since Pres. Obama was forced to make a recess appointment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Warren created, you have to ask why he didn’t fight for Warren in the first place, because he could have appointed her in the same way. Pres. Obama’s leadership style is also seen in Wall Street firms earning more in Pres. Obama’s first years than in both terms of George W. Bush.
Then there’s Obama’s foreign policy, which picked up where Bush left off. Pres. Obama’s “serious reservations” didn’t keep him from signing the NDAA, something any conservative Republican president would have signed. Indefinite military detention without trial is now the policy of the Obama administration, which is something Mitt Romney would also do. There is no habeas corpus at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. What is called “targeted killing” has actually increased under Pres. Obama, something Glenn Greenwald writes about regularly. As for “secret prisons,” it’s not quite as a bad as Bush, because now people are held for a “short-term transitory” basis. But Pres. Obama’s surveillance program is identical to his predecessor. Candidate Obama was against the Iraq war, but he had no trouble bombing Libya without congressional oversight or approval, even though it was not of strategic interest to the U.S. or a clear and present danger. We’ve supposedly gotten out of Iraq, but there is a 104 acre embassy, the biggest on planet earth, with support and logistics to match.
It’s also why Pres. Obama showing up in Osawatamie, Kansas to use the Occupy message didn’t fool smarter folks, because if his leadership matched the words he spoke Robert Reich wouldn’t be floating hail Mary posts about switching Biden with Hillary.
Today, women’s concerns are focused on economics. But is it enough that the 111th Congress passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Pres. Obama signed? We should expect all 21st century politicians to support economic equality. But to laud something as fundamental as financial equity for the same job simply because Senate Republicans don’t reveals women, regardless of political party, are expecting way too little from our politicians who depend on our support to keep their job.
Pres. Obama proved his economic timidity in the 2010 midterms, when you didn’t hear anything close to the speech he gave in Kansas, which didn’t come until he began campaigning for his own reelection. At least he always has his own back. Back in 2010, he and his pal at the DNC, Tim Kaine, now running for Senate from Virginia, refused to make any Democratic case at all on economics. Obama then followed that up by caving and extending the Bush tax cuts. Obama and the Democratic midterm shellacking is what delivered state houses in record numbers to the right, which led to an assault on unions, the middle class, as well as women’s individual freedoms.
Looking at reelection, Pres. Obama decided to put politics over science on Plan B, even though it was proven completely safe for females, regardless of age. To make matters worse, because he evidently thinks women are stupid, he hid behind Secy. Kathleen Sibelius, the head of Health and Human Services, saying it wasn’t his decision. This kind of cowardice in a grown man is unattractive; in a Democratic president it is unacceptable.
It’s not like Plan B is an abortificient like RU486. All Plan B does is stop pregnancy or implantation. If you want a non-scientific description, this basically means ingesting a pill that makes a female’s uterus inhospitable for fertilization; a chemical change in the female’s body so a pregnancy cannot begin. It’s absolutely not an abortion, because there’s no fetus yet.
Pres. Obama made a choice any Republican president would have made. That’s not what I voted for in 2008 and not what Democrats have promised for decades.
Leader Nancy Pelosi gave Pres. Obama a pass on his Plan B decision, while Rep. Diana DeGette, a member of the so-called “Pro-Choice Caucus,” said she was “disappointed.”
George W. Bush inspired the rise of the Tea Party, so one hoped that Barack Obama’s repeated applications of conservatism would unleash a requisite uprising on the left. However, there has been no challenge to Pres. Obama, with progressives in Congress and outside groups again and again rallying for him, while choosing to ignore his choice of conservatism over progressivism.
Pres. Obama can’t find a reelection slogan because his 2012 campaign boils down to the reality that “hope and change” has been reduced to “Republicans are worse.”
Graffiti from Mission Street, San Francisco in honor of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the Tunisian Revolution, inspired the Tahrir Square demonstrations, and the Arab Spring:
Mohamed Bouazizi Graffitti, Mission St., San Francisco
OWS San Francisco demonstration, California Street, January 20, 2012 (inspired by the Tahrir Square demonstrations of January 25, 2011, and after in Egypt):
Occupy Wall Street in turn put pressure on the Obama administration to get tougher with, well, Wall Street. So he announced in his State of the Union Address that he was establishing a financial crimes unit and would make sure the big banks would get no more massive taxpayer bailouts.
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