Obama and Romney Both Lose

By David K. Shipler

If you want to vote early, stop by Congdon’s Donuts in Wells, Maine and drop a coffee bean into the glass jar of your choice. You don’t have to be a professional bean counter to see the results so far. You can tell at a glance that Romney is trailing Obama, but not by much, and both are way behind the jar labeled “None of Em.”

Summarizing national moods is always risky, since a moody country such as ours has many emotions simultaneously. But the dark, shiny beans tell something about the level of alienation from political leaders, the cynicism about politicians, and the distaste for government that grow out of this period’s unusual fear of uncertainty and sense of personal vulnerability.

The Weight of Race in the Race

 By David K. Shipler

It will be instructive during this election campaign to watch certain conservative whites try to activate racist attitudes against President Obama without seeming to do so. This will be a challenge, in part because wild exaggeration will be necessary to make Obama into a caricature resembling the ugliest stereotypes of blacks.

Nothing about him fits the malicious images traditionally imposed on African-Americans by American society. He is not stupid, lazy, violent, dirty, criminal, corrupt, or immoral. He is a loving and responsible family man. He does not abuse power or behave arrogantly when he gets it. He does not see through a racial lens, does not remind whites of their guilt, and does not indulge in anti-white polemics. (Being biracial, of course, he is as white as he is black.)

Terrorism: The Ambiguity of Intelligence

By David K. Shipler

A strange aura of infallibility still surrounds the gatherers of secrets. Oddly, the false premise of the Iraq war seems not to have damaged public trust in the spy, the interrogator, and the computerized dragnet that captures and sifts petabytes of data. Whatever is hidden, and is ferreted out, carries a presumption of accuracy so seductive as to have beguiled a couple of federal judges, who have issued an unprecedented ruling that unverified intelligence reports deserve unquestioned acceptance. Only the Supreme Court has the power to break this spell, which it will consider doing tomorrow. [Update: The Court on June 11 decided not to review any of the seven habeas corpus decisions by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, letting stand the pernicious opinion in Latif, described below.]

The espionage agencies’ reputations have been bolstered by the spectacular intelligence coups that have led to Osama bin Laden and, most recently, to the foiling of an aircraft bombing plot by a double agent who infiltrated al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to pose as the bomber himself. Nevertheless, scattered among the dramatic successes are untold numbers of dubious reports, false positives, half-truths, and outright absurdities. Such is the nature of intelligence work, according to those in the business.

The Other Argument For Gay Marriage

By David K. Shipler

Government has no business telling people whom they can marry. It’s as simple as that, and why most small-government Tea Partiers and other conservatives don’t see it is one of those vexing mysteries of hypocritical politics.

President Obama did not make that argument when he finally completed his circular “evolution” of 16 years and returned to where he had stood in 1996, when he had said, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages.” Yesterday, he declared on ABC, “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

It seems that he has finally come around to accepting his own opinion. That’s what integrity looks like. Now let’s see if he can lead some of the Americans on the other side to accept it as well.

Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.

By David K. Shipler
(as published in The New York Times Sunday Review Apr. 29, 2012)

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.


But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

Stop Local Immigration Enforcement

By David K. Shipler

The cleanest, most honest way to oppose Arizona’s draconian immigration law is not the way it’s being done in Wednesday’s oral argument before the Supreme Court. It would be to oppose all local police involvement in federal immigration enforcement, including two programs that have been expanded by the Obama administration. They have led to just the kind of error and profiling feared by critics of the Arizona statute.

But profiling is not on the Court’s agenda, although it’s been raised in amicus briefs. The question at this stage is one of federalism, whether federal immigration law implicitly preempts the states’ powers to legislate in this area. Congress included no claim of preemption in the relevant law, so it’s up to the justices to decide whether there is implied preemption, a concept not warmly embraced by states-rights conservatives.

That is an important constitutional issue. But for swarthy people with foreign accents, the more practical, everyday matter—which will surely be litigated if Arizona’s law is upheld—is the license given to local police departments to stop and question and detain people on the basis of hunches and guesses that translate into racial and ethnic profiling. Many of them may be U.S. citizens and legal residents.

Legalizing Drugs Would Bolster Constitutional Rights

By David K. Shipler

If Secret Service agents hadn’t infatuated the American press last weekend by cavorting with prostitutes in Colombia, there might have been space and time for newspapers and broadcasters to dwell on a more significant event that took place, also behind closed doors, at the Latin American summit. It was the discussion about partially legalizing narcotics to undermine the lethal drug cartels that have turned parts of the hemisphere into war zones.

This is not about to happen, obviously. As a politician in an election year, President Obama naturally rejected the idea. But the leaders—pushed by President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, President Felipe Calderon of Mexico, and President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala—did order up a study by the Organization of American States. Desperation about drug violence has driven the decriminalization proposal to the highest levels of certain governments.

The arguments for and against legalization are familiar, but there is one in favor that has rarely been made: The war on drugs has also been a war on the U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Mike Wallace: The Question That Changed America

By David K. Shipler

It’s not often that a two-word question can shake a country’s self-regard as deeply as Mike Wallace’s to Private Paul Meadlo, the soldier he interviewed about the My Lai massacre.

“And babies?” Wallace asked.

“And babies,” Meadlo answered.

It was a pivot point in Americans’ downward trajectory of honor during the Vietnam War. Something snapped. The struggle to disbelieve the emerging story was now impossible to sustain. No longer was it inconceivable that a U.S. Army platoon had walked into a South Vietnamese hamlet on March 16, 1968, rounded up villagers, herded hundreds into a ditch, and gunned them down.

Long after 9/11: Plato’s Shadows

By David K. Shipler

I recently asked a class of undergraduate journalism students what they remembered about September 11, 2001, since most of them were only eight or nine at the time.

Nobody chose to answer except one young woman, who said that she remembered her parents’ reactions. She did not elaborate, but it seemed that what stayed with her, more than the scenes from lower Manhattan, were the faces and voices of her mother and father.

Inevitably, as generation supersedes generation, that clear and terrible morning will be interpreted through the country’s reactions.

Health Care: The Myth of Free Choice

By David K. Shipler
If the Supreme Court overturns the health care law, the best response would be to enact a single-payer system, possibly by expanding Medicare downward by age until everyone is covered: in other words, a tax-funded service that is clearly constitutional.

Democrats in Congress toyed with the idea, but it won’t happen, of course, because Republicans who don’t know what socialism is will scream, “Socialism!” Nor are we open to learning from other industrialized countries, which have fashioned an array of methods to finance and deliver medical care to their populations. Our pride in American exceptionalism seems to make us impervious to others’ experiences.

Therefore, as seems likely after today’s skeptical questioning by conservative justices, the United States will remain buffeted by a semi-private system that creates the illusion of free choice.

The Secret Service As Thought Police

By David K. Shipler

A case of security vs. speech, before the Supreme Court for oral argument today, may set important standards for law enforcement agents who make misjudgments in the heat of the moment. As usual on matters of civil liberties, the Obama Administration is on the wrong side.

Under President Obama’s predecessor, the Secret Service was mobilized to suppress political speech. To create glowing television portrayals of President George W. Bush wherever he spoke, White House staffers screened out people wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, had the Secret Service expel them from public presidential events, and even cruised parking lots looking for hostile bumper stickers so the cars’ occupants could be turned away once they reached the door. The Secret Service, which is supposed to protect the president from physical harm, protected him from political dissent as well, by instructing local police to restrict demonstrators to distant “free speech zones,” usually out of sight of both the president and the cameras.

The Permanent Emergency

By David K. Shipler

When President George W. Bush went outside existing law to fight terrorism, his unilateral, ad hoc measures were so lacking in authority as to be vulnerable to political pushback and constitutional challenge. They had a transitory quality, cobbled together hastily to address sudden danger. When he ordered the National Security Agency to ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and secretly monitor communications without warrants, when he declared prisoners enemy combatants who could be held indefinitely without lawyers or trials, and when he avoided Congress and established military tribunals on his own, he faced an uproar from both the left and the libertarian right, and the prospect of reversal in the courts.

But now, more than a decade after 9/11, most of the policies that once seemed so extraordinary have been codified in law and practice, and recently portrayed by Attorney General Eric Holder as permanent, justifiable features of the legal landscape. This sea change in the constitutional culture will be difficult to undo, and it may lead eventually to a harsh judgment by history.

Church, State, and Santorum

By David K. Shipler

Given the history of religious persecution in colonial America, not to mention elsewhere in today’s world, it’s hard to think why Rick Santorum and his acolytes would so zealously wish to undermine what President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 called the Constitution’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” Jefferson coined the famous, controversial phrase in answer to a worried letter from leaders of the Baptist minority in Connecticut, where religious freedom was not an inherent right but merely a privilege granted by the legislature—one that could be withdrawn.

It had also been Baptists, in Virginia, who had inspired the First Amendment. Baptist preachers there had been jailed at the behest of the Anglican Church, and the growing Baptist voting bloc feared oppression by the fledgling federal government. Their leaders pressed a certain congressional candidate in 1788—James Madison—to abandon his ambivalence about amending the new Constitution. Madison hadn’t seen the need for amendments spelling out specific rights, but he did see a need for votes in a tough election. We know the result: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

‘I Confess!’ Why Do People Admit to Things They Haven’t Done?

By David K. Shipler
(Published in the New York Times Sunday Review of Feb. 26, 2012, online Feb. 23)

Several months after Antonio Ramirez was shot seven times in Oakland, Calif., the police picked up a frightened 16-year-old named Felix, isolated him in an interrogation room late at night without a lawyer, rejected his pleas to see his mother, and harangued him until he began to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear.

They wanted a diagram of the crime scene, he later told his court-appointed lawyer, Richard Foxall, but whatever he drew was so inaccurate that the police never produced it. When he described escaping in one direction after the killing, they corrected him, because they knew from witnesses that the shooter had gone the opposite way. When he didn’t mention an alley nearby, they told him about it, and he incorporated it into his statement. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said one officer, as Felix recalled to his lawyer.

A Lesson for Candidates

By David K. Shipler

If political candidates want a quick lesson in how to speak to both the hopes and the hardships of America, often in a single sentence, they would do well to spend a little contemplative time at the new memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. on the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C.

In his day, King could probably not have been elected to much of anything, even if he’d had such an aspiration. But his words of nearly half a century ago, engraved into the memorial’s semi-circle of dark granite, reverberate now in haunting harmony with the yearning of the country.

The Tattered Safety Net

By David K. Shipler

Mitt Romney’s remark that the poor don’t need his concern because they have a safety net has triggered worry on the right and glee on the left that he’s emerging as an uncaring, unelectable patrician. But the more important issue is the myth that a safety net even exists—the widely accepted notion that the fragmented, underfunded programs to address poverty actually rescue falling families from destitution.

To give Romney his due, he said that “if” he found holes in the net, he’d “fix” them. Let’s take him up on that. Since he doesn’t already know about the gaping holes through which 46 million Americans have fallen into poverty, perhaps he’ll want to talk with a few such folks on the campaign trail. Then, all he’d have to do as president is summon up the billions it would take to do the job—a worthy investment, but not one that Republicans have ever been willing to make.

Arresting the Witness Instead of the Criminals

By David K. Shipler

Does this make sense? The Obama administration is prosecuting a former CIA analyst for allegedly telling reporters the names of two interrogators, but it is not prosecuting interrogators who committed torture.

Sometimes the law collides with morality. When that happens, prosecutorial discretion is supposed to reflect a certain wisdom and perspective, not a narrow agenda of expediency. But here we have the United States misreading its national security interest and misunderstanding what constitutes a threat. It was the torture itself that damaged America’s global influence, not the disclosure of a couple of names to journalists. If any repair to American moral authority is possible now, it would come by bringing to trial those who authorized and carried out the torture—a federal crime much more serious than the victimless crime of which the analyst, John Kiriakou, is accused.

Imagining Terrorism: Bombs Not Nukes, Guns Not Germs

By David K. Shipler

After 9/11, we blamed ourselves for lacking the imagination to think that hijackers might drive jetliners into buildings. To compensate for this failure, we expanded our imagination to picture terrorism by nuclear, chemical, and biological means. Now a carefully researched study concludes that weapons of mass destruction are unlikely to be used by jihadi terrorists. Their goals are more attainable with explosives and firearms, and the skill and equipment needed to mount an unconventional attack are far beyond the reach of existing terrorist groups.

The Silver Lining of Super PACs

By David K. Shipler

Here’s a surprise: So far, super PACS have actually enhanced the political debate. They have used big money to inform voters about the checkered pasts of Newt Gingrich in politics and Mitt Romney in business, prompting mainstream news media to focus on legitimate issues that had received scant attention.

This is the first, not-so-bad impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission) granting First Amendment rights to corporations, unions, and other groups. The negative effects may be felt in the months ahead, but for now it is easy to see why the American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief supporting this outcome.

Obama Toys With the Constitution

By David K. Shipler

President Obama has adopted one of George W. Bush’s most troubling tactics, roundly denounced by liberals when a conservative Republican used it, but now generally excused by liberals when employed by a Democrat in the White House. It is the “signing statement,” a litany of reservations and reinterpretations of a bill, issued by a president as he signs it into law.

Obama did this on the last day of 2011 to soften the immediate effect of the military detention powers he had just been awarded by Congress. He said he would “not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” as the new law allows—but he signed a bill empowering any president to do so anyway. He rejected the statute’s requirement that foreign suspects be held by the military, saying he would use his option under the law to waive the mandate broadly, both for individuals and for “appropriate categories of cases.” Nevertheless, he signed a bill that would impose no such restraint on any president.

Counterterrorism: Legalizing Illegality

By David K. Shipler

You may have noticed a pattern in counterterrorism since 9/11. First, the executive branch violates the law, provoking an uproar of outrage, and then Congress changes the law to permit the violations. This has happened several times in the last decade, most recently in the National Defense Authorization Act’s mandate that suspected terrorists be imprisoned by the military, possibly indefinitely. President Bush started doing just that without clear legal authority, locking up three U.S. citizens in military jails until the courts intervened. Instead of acting to prevent a recurrence, Congress has now codified this extraordinary power.

The peculiar dynamic here is very different from the one seen in the 1970s, after the FBI and other federal agencies illegally spied on civil rights and antiwar groups.

Big Father: The Government as Parent

By David K. Shipler

When President Obama endorsed the decision to overrule good science and put Plan B contraceptives beyond the reach of girls without doctors’ prescriptions, he cited his role “as the father of two daughters.” It was a revealing remark, because this was not the first time that government had played an immoderate part in family life—not quite Orwell’s Big Brother, but something of a Big Father, taking over a task that rightly belongs to parents to choose how to raise and guide and converse with their child.

It is conservatives, the supposed champions of limited government, who most often want government to act like Big Father. In Tecumseh, Oklahoma, parents got the public high school to do random drug testing after a mother discovered her son and friends using drugs in her house. She and other parents couldn’t cope with their own children. In Stockton, Missouri, a father enlisted a conservative pastor to get the public high school to remove a popular and powerful book, about an American Indian facing racism and poverty, because of a brief passage extolling masturbation. Some parents, unable to talk with their kids about sex, are relieved to shift the burden to the school, or to see the topic erased altogether from available readings.

Poverty: How Much Is a Family Worth?

By David K. Shipler

We’re being peppered with a lot of numbers that tell us less than we need to know about financial hardship. We have the 99 percent and the one percent. We have the 8.6-percent unemployment rate. We have the average payroll tax cut of $1,000 this year, which next year will become either $1,500 or $0, depending on how well Congress dysfunctions before Christmas. Either 46.6 million or 49 million people are poor, depending on whether you want to reduce “poverty” by using the official formula based on families’ 1950s spending patterns, or would rather reconcile yourself to living in the 21st century, whose facts of life produce the higher calculation by the Census Bureau.

It is hard to get to the human story of poverty, and none of these numbers takes us there. A more revealing statistic helps, but it doesn’t get the attention it deserves: a household’s net worth—assets minus liabilities.

In Search of Thanksgiving

By David K. Shipler

The Monday before Thanksgiving, the head of Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., urged an assembly of high school students to mark the holiday by giving thanks, by reflecting on the people in their lives who had contributed to their well-being. The act of expressing gratitude in itself, he said, had been shown to improve well-being.

Then he introduced me as the morning’s speaker, and I flipped the question around. What did they want to be thankful for? What would they like our generation to leave them in this world that would deserve their gratitude?

Tortured Republicans

By David K. Shipler

A flicker of discomfort crossed Herman Cain’s face in last Saturday’s debate as he was asked about torture. He appeared to be considering the question. For a moment that lasted only as long as his first two sentences, he seemed about to take the high road: “I do not agree with torture, period.” Then he came up with an idea suitable for a banana republic: Leave it to “our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture.” Yet in a final twist, he took a position different from military leaders’ by endorsing waterboarding, which (he may not have known) the Army Field Manual explicitly forbids. He said it wasn't torture. Michele Bachmann followed suit. Rick Santorum had already announced last May that John McCain, who was tortured for five years as a P.O.W. in North Vietnam, doesn’t understand the issue.

Behind this spectacle is an unpleasant truth: Republicans who can’t kick the addiction to torture have been enabled by President Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress, who could have created an investigative commission to nail down the facts, expose them to public scrutiny, and puncture the myth that reliable information is obtained by abusing prisoners.

The Blurry Poverty Line

By David K. Shipler

Now that the Census Bureau has offered a more realistic way of calculating poverty, the outdated method should be discarded instead of retained as the “Official Poverty Measure” used to determine eligibility for government benefits. It was designed in the 1960s, when the average family spent about one-third of its budget on food, a proportion that has fallen to one-seventh as housing and other costs have soared. So it makes no sense to take the price tag of a minimum food basket and multiply it by three. But that will continue to happen unless Congress and the administration act—a hard act to perform with federal and state governments in fiscal straits.

Palestine: The Theoretical State

By David K. Shipler

Finally the Palestinians have gained complete, uncontested control over a piece of territory: several comfortable chairs in the hall at Unesco’s Paris headquarters. If their quest for national recognition continues along this path, the Palestinian state will expand to similar furniture in various exquisite meeting rooms in Geneva and New York, rendering Palestine the first country to exist in committee but not in reality.

There is something terribly sad about this spectacle.

Can Israel Survive?

BOOK REVIEW
By David K. Shipler
(Published in the Nov./Dec. 2011 issue of Moment)

The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival
Hirsh Goodman
PublicAffairs
2011, $26.99, pp. 288

 “Can Israel survive? The question used to infuriate me,” Hirsh Goodman begins in The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival. “Does someone wake up in Britain, or America, or even Burundi, and ask themselves whether their country can survive?”

No, not yet. But nobody asked that question about the Soviet Union either, except for the dissident Andrei Amalrik, in his aptly titled Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? It did, but only seven years past the date he chose as a sardonic nod to Orwell. Add Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and now Sudan, and throw in the non-state actors—al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, which have the leverage to ignite war and shape international politics—and the world order of nation states seems stricken by impermanence. It’s a wonder that the Palestinians want the United Nations to grant them a status so precarious.

Mission Accomplished?

By David K. Shipler

The true results of the two wars ending in Iraq and Libya are likely to be long in coming. The death of Col. Muammar Qaddafi does not close the book on Libya, and the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops in December is certainly not the last chapter in Iraq. The only reliable prediction is that whatever seems obvious today will eventually prove incomplete or incorrect. Especially in the Middle East, wars usually fool the hasty pundits and reward the patient historians.

Democracy and Bigotry

By David K. Shipler

It is autumn. The Arab Spring has lost some of its lush promise in Egypt, and a familiar pattern is emerging. We have seen it elsewhere. More freedom means more license for all expression, not just the admirable and uplifting. The hatreds of one group for another, long buried under the boot of autocracy, are suddenly released, widening the fissures along the boundaries of race, ethnicity, class, language, tribe, or religion. So it has been in nearly every country that has thrown off dictatorship, from the Soviet Union to Yugoslavia, and now to Egypt, where churches have been burned, and Coptic Christians massing in protest have been brutalized by security forces and Muslim toughs. Almost invariably, it seems, the path from authoritarianism to democracy passes through the swamp of bigotry.