Informant38

Notes on television:

Antonin Scalia was on C-SPAN (though C-SPAN itself seems unaware of this) today, in a "Conversation about Civil Liberties" with someone from the ACLU, followed a little later by Andrew Sullivan. Scalia's a Supreme Court Justice, Sullivan's a blogger whose site gets around 100K hits a day.
Scalia's a Catholic, and a conservative.
Sullivan's a Catholic, a conservative, and gay.
Scalia is surprisingly humourous, to the boundaries of gaffe considering his power and position, openly religious, and intelligent.
Sullivan's sincere and forthright, openly gay without being effected, open about his religious quandaries with a conservative church and his political difficulties with a conservative community, to both of which he belongs and seeks to continue to belong, despite stern disapproval and bigoted condemnation of his lifestyle from elements in both.
The someone from the ACLU was Nadine Strossen. Oh, Nadine.
In response to Strossen's illustration of the inherent Protestant bias of things like posting the "ten commandments" in public places - that there are different versions other than the Protestant one - a Jewish version and a Catholic one, among others - Scalia scoffed, though warmly, and said he hadn't known until recently that there were any other versions. Rhetorically it blunted Strossen's point, but it was a trick, a diversion, and seems indicative of an internal state that's not conducive to clear insightful reasoning, let alone courage and rigor.
Scalia also said, in response to Strossen's attempt to separate the legislation of sexual morality as a protective response to potential harm from moral legislation as a continuation of received prejudice - that all societies have always legislated or codified sexual mores.
This is inarguable, but as a refutation of Strossen's distinction - between laws to ameliorate the potential for actual harm, to protect the weaker party in a relationship from coercion and abuse, and laws that are nothing more than simple prejudice trying to maintain itself - it was as intellectually rigorous as if he'd started quacking like a duck.
Something that wouldn't have been quite as startling as one would have thought before seeing and hearing him speak.
Most every society up to the 18th century practiced slavery of one kind or another, too. How that becomes an argument for the preservation of slavery into the present time is beyond me.
The push and pull of gay rights and the "defense of marriage" was illuminated in Sullivan's rap on Q&A as well.
But most striking in the bit I saw was the sincere and forthright delivery of his - one assumes now widely-shared - conservative befuddlement at an Administration that marched the country off to war in response to Sept. 11th 2001, and having successfully invaded and essentially conquered Iraq, militarily if not politically, discovered, when it arrived victorious in Baghdad, that it had absolutely no plans for what to do next.
Sullivan expressed his mystification at this in a sincere and forthright manner, but that's when I turned the sound down and picked up the guitar.
How anyone could manage to avoid thinking, at least for a second or two, that maybe, just maybe, what has transpired in Iraq was in fact the plan, that present conditions - no army, no air force, no internal security, no national coherence, no possibility of translating oil revenue into economic power and distributing that power to other groups and organizations - give or take a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis, a few thousand dead Americans, and a couple dozen destroyed hospitals and schools more or less - how anyone could not wonder that these conditions are exactly what was hoped for, planned for, and headed for all along, is beyond me as well.
Isn't that one of the first things a sensible person would ask themself about any big mess?
That maybe whoever did this wanted it to happen.