“Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself.” - full text
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The one thing that I didn’t anticipate before coming to Britain: I’ve never been to a place that is plastered with visual surveillance (aka Closed Circuit TV) to such a sickening extent. It’s not even that you notice all those cameras everywhere (especially in London), but they even have big signs all over the place that you’re on TV.
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“I reject the idea that the Republicans are the bad guys and the Democrats the good guys. It tends to be much more structural than that, more a question of how high the stakes are and who has the opportunity. And where you have a series of elections, as we’ve seen in the last few years, where the stakes are high and the count appears to be very close, you have absolutely ripe conditions for both party organizations to push for every conceivable advantage. In many cases the way they push for that advantage will often flirt with the boundaries of the permissible and in some cases go beyond it.” - Interview with Andrew Gumbel
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In a sense, this whole Plamegate affair looks like what you would happen is you created a mix between Kabuki theater, The Night Before Christmas, and the movie Groundhog Day, with the country waking up every morning (like Bill Murray’s character in the movie) to find the same headlines over and over again (something along the lines that Santa Claus will surely deliver indictments today), Democrats gleefully rubbing their hands in anticipation of the gift they so desperately need since they exchanged their spine with the political equivalent of tertiary syphillis (dementia, tremors, loss of coordination, paralysis, blindness), and the general going through an extremely ritualized routine of pretending to be seriously surprised and appalled by what everybody has known for such a long time (as Maureen Dowd pointed out: “It’s exactly what we thought was going on, but we never thought we’d actually hear the lurid details”). Amazing.
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Have a look at PBS’ special The Torture Question. I have some reservations about parts of that documentary, in particular about how they set it up. Often, a debate about torture is being argued along the lines “Can we torture people if thousands of lives are at stake?” But that’s an absurd entry point for the debate for the following reason: You pretty much do not know a priori whether you are dealing with such a case (“24” is a TV show, and a bad one - I’ve noticed how people are only too eager to replace reality with Hollywood fantasies). Which then leads to the situation where torture ends up being applied on a wide scale. In the end, if you support the torture of people under extreme circumstances (“terrorist knows about nuclear bomb in New York City”) you end up getting wide-spread applications of torture (Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, etc.). History is full of examples for this, and sadly enough, the US is now part of that history. In a sense, the debate in the US about torture is very similar to the debate about whether oral sex qualifies as sex or not.
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“Last Thursday on Countdown, I referred to the latest terror threat - the reported bomb plot against the New York City subway system - in terms of its timing. President BushÂ’s speech about the war on terror had come earlier the same day, as had the breaking news of the possible indictment of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation. I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences - a political downturn for the administration, followed by a ‘terror event’ - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.” - story
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“I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions. How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it’s almost as if America has entered ‘an alternate universe’?” - full speech
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“With Lynndie England’s conviction earlier this week, nine US soldiers have now been sentenced for their role in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. But is it enough? DER SPIEGEL looks at two lives destroyed by Abu Ghraib. One, an Iraqi community leader — the other, his American guard.” - story
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“Germany, on the Monday after the election, has two chancellors, no coalition government and little in the way of a plan how to resolve the situation. It was an election without a victor.” - story
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You have to take this article with a grain of salt because Germans are not the most cheerful people. But then, the results of what they call the reunification are not all that rosy. And I’m sure most non-Germans have no idea about the actual dimension of the problem.
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Given the discussion about copyright and given that I just discovered I neevr linked to this: Lawrence Lessig is one of the US’ leading (if not the) leading expert on copyright. His book Free Culture is a must read for anybody interested in what the issues are and what can be done about it. The book is available for free (link), and it is much more interesting that you would think. It contains a very detailed discussion of what copyright used to do and what it got to do now, also what it might do etc. And if you’re still griping about me being unwilling to discuss copyright issues in the context of Thomas Ruff’s work just read the book.
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Frank Rich is spot on again: “It isn’t just Mr. Bush who is in a tight corner now. Ms. Sheehan’s protest was the catalyst for a new national argument about the war that managed to expose both the intellectual bankruptcy of its remaining supporters on the right and the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place.” - story
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“It’s a common misconception among the left in the United States that Europeans are much more serious, better educated and more intellectual than their American counterparts.” - full story
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From the how-not-to-win-the-hearts-and-minds department: “Afghan human rights officials Wednesday described as ‘unbelievably lenient’ the sentences U.S. military courts have handed down to American soldiers convicted of abusing two Afghan detainees who later died.” - story
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It’s kind of obvious what authorities think of people when they put surveillance “security” cameras all over the place. Now we learn of this: “MTA investigators are keeping a secret database of people stopped and questioned for filming or photographing bridges and tunnels as part of the agency’s efforts to thwart terror, the Daily News has learned.” (story) (found by Brian)
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If I remember correctly it was one of those people currently residing in the White House who called the Iraq war a “catastrophic success”. And it certainly looks like one: “The people of Baghdad do not need statistics to tell them that they are living through terror unimaginable in the West. Every two days for the past two years more civilians have died in Iraq than in the July 7 London bombings. ” (story).
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We’ve heard a lot about what drives suicide attacks. Turns out that most of what the media and/or our leaders want to make us believe is utterly wrong. The reality is quite a bit more simple, and it doesn’t have much to do with Islam at all. Read this interview to find out more.
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Images are telling - as frequent readers of this blog know. When the president of a democratic country prefers to use soldiers as backdrops for his speeches what does that tell us? Maybe this? And what is it supposed to tell us? And, related, you really don’t want to miss reading this article.
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“With the enthusiastic collaboration of the American news media, the sideshow has somehow become the main attraction in American culture; the weirder the guy, the bigger the headlines. It’s sickening that it takes a columnist in an entertainment magazine to point out that more than 2,000 newspeople covered the Jackson trial — which is only a few hundred more than the number of American servicemen and women who have died in Iraq. On the same day that crowds gathered in Times Square (and around the world) to learn the fate of the Pale Peculiarity, another four suicide bombings took place in that tortured, bleeding country. And if you tell me that news doesn’t belong in Entertainment Weekly, I respond by saying Michael Jackson under a black umbrella doesn’t belong on the front page of the New York Times.” - full story
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Amnesty International releases its annual report: “Governments around the world betrayed their commitment to human rights in 2004, Amnesty International says.” - full story “Amnesty International called on foreign governments to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. While the U.S. government has failed to conduct a genuinely independent and comprehensive investigation, the officials implicated in these crimes are nonetheless subject to investigation and possible arrest by other nations while traveling abroad, the organization said. The human rights organization warned that at least one dozen former or current U.S. officials are vulnerable to this action. The individuals, who, to date, have either dodged investigation or escaped sanction, include those at the highest levels of government, such as President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, as well as Attorney General Gonzales and former CIA Director George Tenet. They also include government lawyers who advocated or approved setting aside critical protections against torture or recommended interrogation methods that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as military officers who implemented those decisions. While the United States bears primary responsibility for investigating these acts, research by Amnesty International establishes that more than 125 countries have legislation permitting investigation of serious crimes committed outside their borders.” - story
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“For those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear.” (full story)
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This following exchange of opinions between a German and an Englishman is quite typical of the kind of atmosphere between Germany and England. On the surface, everything is quite polished, and everybody is good friends. Underneath the surface, ugly sentiments linger and omit a foul stench. I don’t want to add too much to this whole debate; maybe this one comment: The fact that a German has this kind of exchange with somebody from England and not from France does tell us something, and it’s not about Germany. Anyway, let the games begin. It all started with Matthias Matussek, an author of Germany’s ultra-influential weekly Der Spiegel noting that “the British love to hate us Germans. So much so that my 10-year-old son was chased by English school kids chanting ‘Nazi, Nazi’. In fact, the hunt for Nazis has become a neurotic English parlour game. The British really enjoy raking over the German past instead of devoting themselves to their own.” (full text). Not so, responded British author Frederick Taylor, author of a book about the bombing of Dresden (where he argues there were many good reason for the bombing, which happened when the war was long lost for Germany), because even though Matussek’s article “though rather grumpy in tone, makes some good points, especially about the legacy of the British Empire and the causes of the continuing disaster that is the Iraq war. Nevertheless, it does seem rather one-sided.” (full text).
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“In one case - after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me […] in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units - soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.’s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insurgent kill. It’s a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I’m sure it’s briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, ‘128 Vietcong killed.’ And so you have that pattern again.” - Seymour Hersh
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US Senator John Cornyn has an idea (and this is an actual quote): “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.”
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By the beginning of this week, I thought there wasn’t really anything that could turn the sorry spectacle around Terri Schiavo into an even bigger travesty, and then Jesse Jackson “intervened” - of course without changing anything. What would a Jesse-Jackson intervention be without the media circus but with actual results? That would just not be very Jesse-Jackson’ish. In any case, I didn’t think I would be able to find an article about the case that was not bordering on the insane - as did most articles from both camps (this seems to be the new standard in the US; makes you wonder where that thing called the sensible middle ground went - wait, who left the window wide open?) - and then The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg very pleasantly surprised me with his article. If you’ve never read something about the case before, this is really all you need to know (there also are some details in there that you didn’t read anywhere else like that the “persistent vegetative state” was the result of an eating disorder!). And if you’ve read everything else now that the body has finally died, too, you can make this the last article you want to read about it. It just seems to me that the main phrase of Hertzberg’s article (“The body lived; the mind died”) applies equally well to American politics these days.
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“By nominating Paul Wolfowitz to be head of the World Bank, President George Bush appears to be sending a message to the world that he intends to spread into development policy the same neo-conservative philosophy that has led his foreign policy.” (story) So what are they gonna do next? First claim the poor are making up being poor and then bomb them? Oh, excuse me, I meant liberate them? PS: Note this: “Some who know Wolfowitz tell me that he wanted to fill the impending vacancy at the bank. He may be, in this sense, a latter-day Robert McNamara - a war-weary Pentagon master seeking refuge to wring the blood from his hands. McNamara suffered something close to a public breakdown when he moved from secretary of defense to president of the World Bank in 1967, as the Vietnam War spiraled out of control.” (story)
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If you want to ignore the fact that apparently only dead US GI’s are worth being counted as victims let’s remember all those arguments made 1,500 deaths ago why the US would have to invade Iraq. PS: Somehow, I think all that talk about “freedom” will disappear into thin air along with those non-existing WMDs. Just wait a few months. And this is not because freedom is bad - quite on the contrary - but because when Bush jr. talks about “freedom”, it doesn’t mean he’s talking about actual freedom.
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Founder of Amnesty dies aged 83
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“America is fast becoming a nation of faith not fact. A nation where the unpleasant aspects of human existence are simply airbrushed away.” - story
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James Dale Guckert owned and advertised his services as a gay escort on more than half a dozen websites. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.” (J. Seinfeld) Under the (obviously fake) name of Jeff Gannon he became accredited as a White House correspondent (!), evading the usual FBI security check (!!), and being planted by the Republican party (no exclamation marks here, coz there really isn’t anything surprising or notable about this bit) - the party of homophobia. “Jeff Gannon” asked the president questions such as “How are you going to work - you said you’re going to reach out to these people - how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” Faux News anyone? (Needless to say, the propagandists at Faux News just loved the guy!) The other day, his cover was finally blown. Now this all sounds like a clip from a comedy show, but it’s real. Read commentaries/summaries by Frank Rich (probably the best), Sidney Blumenthal, and Joe Conason. Also quite comedic was the mock outrage, displayed by some tool from the New Republic, the other day on PBS, outrage directed not at a party, which was trying to introuce Soviet-style pseudo-journalism, but at the “left-wing” people - lots of bloggers - who had dared to blow the guy’s covers. You gotta admire the guts of those people! In a sense, this whole episode summarizes perfectly the presidency of George W. Bush, the first perfect faker in the White House. There is nothing real about this guy, not the touted compassion, not the claimed leadership, not the credentials as a soldier in the National Guard, and definitely not the faith.
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Judith Miller, known to some as journalist with the New York Times and to many as one of the main cheerleaders of Bush jr’s Iraq war, is supposed to testify in the Plame case. The Plame case boils down to finding the person who told another reporter that Valerie Plame - wife of Joe Wilson, who unmasked one of the many lies used to promote the Iraq war - was a CIA operative. That’s a federal offense (aka crime - for those who prefer simple words). Mrs Miller now refuses to testify. Which is interesting. For example, if it turns out that someone from inside the Bush White House leaked the information about Mrs Plame, we’d have the Bushies’ Watergate. You’d imagine that a reporter with the New York Times had an interest in either making sure that doesn’t happen - as, I’m assuming, Mrs Miller, the former cheerleader, would be happy to do - or in making sure that the truth comes out. Not Mrs Miller. Now she’s casting herself basically as a defender of democracy who has the right to keep her secret. Quote: “For all the mistakes that we journalists make at times, try running a functioning democracy without us.” (source) Wow, imagine that - if you have the time while trying to run a functioning democracy with journalists. As we have just seen during the presidential elections, that is not the easiest thing to do if those journalists aren’t really that interested in doing their job properly. Maybe Mrs Miller simply isn’t the kind of journalist who I would associate with a functioning democracy. But, I’m sure, if worst comes to worst she could always emigrate and move to places where they can make good use of her. I heard Russia is moving back towards some sort of pseudo-democratic autocracy. I bet they could use some cheerful journalists… PS: I happened to read the US constitution the other day, and it didn’t say anything about journalists in there.
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“Human Rights Watch opposes the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to serve as Attorney General of the United States. Mr. Gonzales played a key role in providing legal justification for policies that led to torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.” (my emphasis, full story) Despite all this, the US Senate just confirmed Alberto Gonzalez. What this means is fairly obvious. You can’t seriously claim you don’t support torture but ask for “rough treatment” of foreigners. Torture is torture - regardless of what you call it. And for one person this is a particularly sad day, namely for Senator John McCain, the supposed “maverick”. Senator McCain was tortured himself while being in captivity in Vietnam, but this experience didn’t prevent him from voting for Mr. Gonzalez. This is John McCain’s personal day of infamy.
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As I mentioned a few times already, Germany is still slowly coming to terms with the bombing of its cities during World War II. As is easy to understand, things aren’t very easy to deal with, and the flames of discussion are being actively fanned from all sides, including the extreme right and British historians.
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… if it’s done by the US on foreigners, and then it’s not torture, of course. Don’t believe it? Have a look yourself: “Alberto Gonzales has asserted to the Senate committee weighing his nomination to be attorney general that there’s a legal rationale for harsh treatment of foreign prisoners by U.S. forces. […] Gonzales told senators that laws and treaties prohibit torture by any U.S. agent without exception. But he said the Convention Against Torture treaty, as ratified by the Senate, doesn’t prohibit the use of ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ tactics on non-U.S. citizens who are captured abroad, in Iraq or elsewhere.” - story. I don’t know what’s worse: That the president seriously wants to make a Schreibtischtäter Attorney General or that spineless yes-men (aka Republican Senators) will vote for that. Update: Republicans love torture, too. It’ll be interesting to see how John McCain, who was tortured as a POW in Vietnam, will explain his vote for Alberto G.
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Let me try to understand this. On the day when a president is inaugurated who, for example, is a) a former alcoholic who probably had a cocaine problem (never properly addressed or resolved), b) a habitual liar, c) a war monger who, however, evaded service when his country called him (never properly addressed or resolved), the American right is concerned about a comic character?
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“How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? […] The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won’t be allowed to hear […]. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not. So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a fantasist.” - George Monbiot
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There’s hardly any need to comment on this. It’s maybe only worth pointing out the following: Argueing that a recent Human Rights Watch report reflected a “foreign perception” is pretty much what the Communist Party in the Soviet Union did when it tried to discredit dissidents by calling them tools of the West.
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“On November 8, the American army launched its biggest ever assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, considered a stronghold for rebel fighters. The US said the raid had been a huge success, killing 1,200 insurgents. Most of the city’s 300,000 residents, meanwhile, had fled for their lives. What really happened in the siege of Falluja?” - story
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There’s a German word less well known than Schadenfreude, but pretty much equally powerful. It’s Schreibtischtäter and it means somebody who is involved in something but instead of doing it actively he’s “just” doing administrative work or, if he’s in that kind of position, he’s advocating the cause. As a German I know lots of Schreibtischtäter (if I may use the German plural which, in this case, is the same as the singular). They’re easy to spot and I’m looking at one right now. The US Senate also looked at one yesterday, but they couldn’t really spot the problem. PS: Schreibtischtäter is (roughly) pronounced sh-ripe-tish-tater with “ripe” like in “ripe”, “tish” like “dish” with a “t’” instead of a “d”, and “tater” like “later” with a “t” instead of an “l”. PPS: This is a slightly modified and updated version of this entry.
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“Our own inquiry into medical involvement in military intelligence gathering in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay has revealed a more troublesome picture. Recently released documents and interviews with military sources point to a pattern of such involvement, including participation in interrogation procedures that violate the laws of war. Not only did caregivers pass health information to military intelligence personnel; physicians assisted in the design of interrogation strategies, including sleep deprivation and other coercive methods tailored to detainees’ medical conditions. Medical personnel also coached interrogators on questioning technique.” - full story from The New England Journal of Medicine And while you’re at it, this article is also quite sobering: “Alberto Gonzales, the lawyer who sponsored a regime of torture for his President, will soon become the nation’s attorney general. Perhaps it’s fitting. Then the Justice Department can enter the same world of twisted names as Camp Justice, saved from the tsunami’s surprise impact by a special Pentagon warning.”
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“The ‘Person of the Year’ issue has always been a symphonic tribute to the heroic possibilities of pompous sycophancy, but the pomposity of this year’s issue bests by a factor of at least two or three the pomposity of any previous issue. From the Rushmorean cover portrait of Bush (which over the headline ‘An American Revolutionary’ was such a brazen and transparent effort to recall George Washington that it was embarrassing) to the ‘Why We Fight’ black-and-white portraiture of the aggrieved president sitting somberly at the bedside of the war-wounded, this issue is positively hysterical in its iconolatry. One even senses that this avalanche of overwrought power worship is inspired by the very fact of George Bush’s being such an obviously unworthy receptacle for such attentions. From beginning to end, the magazine behaves like a man who knocks himself out making an extravagant six-course candlelit dinner for a blow-up doll, in an effort to convince himself he’s really in love.” - full story
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With its article Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays, CNN easily wins this month’s Journalistic Race to the Bottom Price.
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“A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. […] The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and ‘sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.’ The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists.” - story
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“The problem today is not the growth of stupefying television but the lack of cultural and institutional support for the promotion of artistic and intellectual standards. It is easy to react against the inane spectacle of reality TV. But banal entertainment is the least of our problems. We should be far more concerned with the powerful trends that work towards the dumbing down of education, academia, the arts and politics. The pressure to devalue content exercises a destructive impact on contemporary culture. That is why we need to overcome our estrangement from cultural standards, and affirm the fact that content really counts.” - Frank Furedi
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The latest edition of Digital Journalist features lots of photos from Iraq. I am very uncomfortable with what is shown on those pages - many of the images and a lot of the reporting are very close to what they used to do for the Deutsche Wochenschau. I don’t see anything heroic about flattening a city in an occupied country (apart from the fact that international law has lots of very unpleasant things to say about actions like this). So it’s quite good that two very relevant and important articles from the New York Review of Books have been made available online. Chris Hedges, one of the few war journalists who manages to escape simple propaganda consistently, discusses two books about the latest Iraq war1. And once again, Michael Massing rips into what we think is the free press.
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It is not very hard to see why mainstream America keeps belittling Noam Chomsky as an “extremist”: “On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75% of the electorate regarded it as a game played by rich contributors, party managers, and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and produce meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why the population paid little attention to the ‘stolen election’ that greatly exercised educated sectors. And it is why they are likely to pay little attention to campaigns about alleged fraud in 2004. If one is flipping a coin to pick the King, it is of no great concern if the coin is biased. “In 2000, ‘issue awareness’ - knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues - reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About 10% of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate’s ‘agendas/ideas/platforms/goals’; 6% for Bush voters, 13% for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry calls ‘qualities’ or ‘values,’ which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies (PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them. Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them, often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same was largely true of Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had probably never heard.” (my emphasis) Needless to say, this essay about the 2004 election contains more useful information and meaningful analysis than anything else I’ve seen so far.
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“The weekly compendium of articles and analyses of global affairs from Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper has long been regarded as an antidote to government controlled, spun and inept local media. Nelson Mandela, when he was held in South Africa’s Pollsmor Prison, referred to the Weekly Guardian as a ‘window on the wider world.’ “But is it really appropriate to compare the United States in 2004 with a warped media market like South Africa during apartheid days? “Actually, the comparison may be a bit unfair to South African media in the apartheid era—when many courageous journalists struggled to speak truth to power.” - full text
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When reading this article about the experiences of an American living in Paris after the recent US election I realized how his experience is very similar to my experiences as a German expat living in the US. I think, in the end, there is some sort of universal expat feeling.
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After calling George Bush jr incompetent on its cover and endorsing John Kerry (we got quite worried here at Conscientious!), The Economist is now back on track, claiming that “George Bush’s victory had more to do with hope and growth”. Or maybe that’s that famous British humour everybody keeps talking about?
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I used to simply make fun of stuff like this; but I find this increasingly hard - given that it’s people with a medieval mindset like this who represent the most important constituency of George W. Bush.
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