It seems to be a signature tactic in the Karl Rove playbook: Anytime your guys get attacked, find a way to beat your enemy over the head with the same blunt object. Cast the two sides as morally equivalent; if the results are not to your liking, rinse and repeat. Take, for instance, the debate over whether the Bush administration misled the nation into invading Iraq with trumped-up charges of biological, chemical, and nuclear arms. The administration and its clone army of pundits keep hammering their talking points: The Democrats looked at the same intelligence. They came to the same conclusion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. How dare the Democrats play these blame games! Yes, it may be true that the Bush administration controlled the gathering of intelligence … selectively presented the juiciest morsels to Congress … pushed contrarian views into footnotes … blatantly mischaracterized the degree of dissent in the CIA and elsewhere … parroted Iraqi defectors known to be liars … but we, the poor, helpless executive branch, were just as duped as you were!

In the past several days GOP leaders have been using this tried-and-true strategy to do another sort of damage control. The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA was holding terror suspects at secret prisons in eight countries, including several Eastern European democracies, in violation of the laws of these countries and the most meager standards of international human rights. But instead of saving their fire-and-brimstone for an executive branch that had chosen to conceal this information from Congress, Republican lawmakers decided to launch a formal investigation into who had spilled the bad news to the media. The investigation will also examine the leaking of the identity of a CIA covert operative, Valerie Plame, whose husband had criticized the Bush administration; that disclosure brought about the indictment of one of Vice President Dick Cheney’s top aides last month. The implicit message of the Republican-led investigation is that the two leaks are morally equivalent: Blowing the whistle on government misdeeds is just as evil as perpetrating government misdeeds to savage your opposition.

This could not be farther from the truth. In the Plame affair, the leak was the crime. But in the case of the CIA-run prisons, the actual crime dwarfs any harm caused by the act of whistleblowing. Establishing secret prisons in a far-off country where you can torture as you see fit is morally indefensible. It pushes us into the shadows of tyrants past — the Latin American dictators who would “disappear” their enemies, holding them in extrajudicial limbo where their torture and execution could occur unseen, or the Soviet “Evil Empire” with its secret police operations, labor camps, and prisons (ironically, the CIA has reportedly used at least one Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe for its hiding and interrogating). Whether or not the Bush administration can find a convoluted legal justification for its actions, the fact that it has chosen to outsource its dirty work to foreign lands shows nothing but moral bankruptcy: Who other than a two-bit criminal would cross the border to escape a rap? If we can’t do these things within the borders of the United States, why are we doing it in Poland, Romania, or, for that matter, Guantánamo, Cuba?

Morality aside, the secret prisons pose risks of a distinctly pragmatic nature. Nothing has been more harmful to the U.S. effort in Iraq than the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. The scandals have strengthened extremists and radicalized moderates in Iraq and across the Arab world. So, when will the Bush administration realize that it needs to balance its short-term tactical need to acquire intelligence with its long-term strategic need to win over the moderate Muslim world? It can root out as many terrorist cells as it likes with the information it obtains from interrogations in secret locales, but if more terrorists rise up with every new allegation of Soviet-style secrecy and abuse, how is that progress in its war on terror?

The politicians who are so angry with The Washington Post should read The Gulag Archipelago and ask themselves whether they want to be following old Joseph Stalin’s lead on this one. Maybe some more ethics classes would help, too.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The science radio show Explorations recently rebroadcast an interview with energy expert Tom Mast that is worth listening to if you’re more than a tad concerned about rising gas prices and heating costs. Mast, a mechanical engineer who has worked in the oil industry for decades and is author of the book Over a Barrel: A Simple Guide to the Oil Shortage, offers the best analysis I’ve heard about what today’s high oil prices mean and what we should be doing about it. Instead of getting caught up in secondary questions like automobile fuel efficiency or drilling for oil in Alaska, Mast focuses on the key problems: the supply of oil is finite; the world will experience oil shortages within a decade or two; and the current crop of energy alternatives are either too unreliable or too polluting to replace oil.

“The high prices of crude oil — and therefore gasoline — these days are a symptom of the problem, and not the real problem,” says Mast. “The fundamental problem is that the worldwide supply of oil is having a hard time keeping up with the demand.” About half of the world’s oil reserves have been used up in a single century of production and consumption, Mast notes. Given an ever-increasing world population with ever-increasing energy needs (China alone accounted for 40 percent of the growth in oil demand last year), there’s every indication that we will blow through the remaining half of the world’s oil reserves much more quickly. Conservation, increased fuel efficiency, new oil production technologies, drilling in not-yet-exploited wildernesses like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which lawmakers seem intent on opening up) — all these tactics may buy us a little time, but in the absence of a serious, “Man on the Moon”-style government initiative to develop alternatives, we will soon arrive at a worldwide energy crisis.

When that oil shortage strikes, we’ll have much more to worry about than having enough juice to feed our SUVs. Oil accounts for 38 percent of the world’s energy — by far the largest chunk — and the consequences of a shortage would be catastrophic for the economies of every country. Scarce oil supplies would sharply increase oil costs and slam inflation into high gear. It’s not just commuters who rely on oil-based fuel, after all: The price of shipping every sort of good, from groceries to TV sets, would increase, making businesses of every niche less efficient and ultimately leading to nationwide recession or depression. The United States would suffer in particular, because a substantial portion of its trade deficit — 35 to 40 percent — is devoted to oil imports. With oil prices rising, the country’s debt would mushroom, weakening the dollar and wreaking further havoc with the economy. Finally, a shortage of oil would inevitably worsen relations between gas-guzzling nations who have grown dependent on cheap energy but suddenly have no easy way of obtaining it. (The much-anticipated, much-feared future clash between the United States and China, in fact, may not be over Taiwan but over oil: An expansionist China sniffing everywhere for oil is already butting heads with the United States in central Asia.)

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has not yet made the search for energy alternatives a priority. Instead, it seems to approach the impending oil shortage with the same faith-based reasoning that it applies to global warming (and that it applied, until this past week, to the influenza danger): Nothing bad is going to happen. Why worry? If the oil crisis of the 1970s taught us anything, it was the danger of not being prepared for the unexpected — of not having a Plan B. These days, we’re dealing with the very-much-expected — and yet we’re still woefully unprepared.

(To listen to the Mast interview, click here. The interview starts at 28:48 in the program — right after another interview worth listening to about the dangers posed by bird flu.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

You know, we have a beautiful highway landscaping redevelopment in our downtown. We have desert tortoises and beautiful paintings of flora and fauna. These punks come along and deface it.… I’m saying maybe you put them on TV and cut off a thumb. That may be the right thing to do.

—Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, offering a modest proposal Wednesday on a Nevada talk show. Another panelist on the show, State University System Regent Howard Rosenberg, suggested that Goodman “use his head for something other than a hat rack.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Joan Didion has written a memoir of personal loss, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she describes the twin tragedies that seized control of her life at the end of 2003 — the sudden, grave illness of her only child; the sudden, anguishing death of her husband — and the year that followed of questions, delusions, and relentless unknowing. Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had been her partner in life and letters for nearly 40 years; her daughter, Quintana, would die shortly after this book was finished.

With her memoir in my head, I went back to one of Didion’s earlier works, the celebrated collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which was first published in 1968. There, Didion depicted the American moral wilderness — a society fragmenting in a thousand shards of culture and counterculture — with prose steeped in the prophetic gloom of W.B. Yeats: “The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.” Her latest book in a way returns to this theme of unraveling, but now Didion wanders in the wilderness of her own grief, circling personal totems — sickness and mortality — that she, too, finds blank and pitiless.

In one of the earlier book’s essays, a piece titled “On Going Home,” you will find sketches of her husband and daughter, and this remarkable snapshot of Didion celebrating her baby’s first birthday:

It is time for the baby’s birthday party: a white cake, strawberry-marshmallow ice cream, a bottle of champagne saved from another party. In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine. She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

It is a thin and shadow-slight immortality that writing grants, but it is some comfort nonetheless: Quintana lives, nameless, limitless, in her mother’s hopes for her.

Things fall apart. A writer puts the pieces back together.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Americans constantly tell pollsters and journalists that they dislike the slickness of today’s politicians. That, above all, was the criticism thrown at Bill Clinton. “Slick Willy” was a little too adept at gauging the political winds, triangulating and out-Republican-ing many of the GOP on issues like welfare reform and deficit reduction. When faced with this sort of ideological maneuvering, however justified by the politics of the moment, voters turn cynical. It’s no surprise that, when asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethical standards, Americans place politicians near the bottom of the heap.

The problem is the desire to find that rare politician with integrity and honesty bumps up against our other compelling desire as voters: to find that rare politician who shares all our views on policy, government spending, taxes, the American flag, violence in video games, the wearing of boxers vs. briefs, etc., etc.

When those desires conflict, we’re left in a quandary. Do we want politicians who offer moral leadership, or do we want politicians who pursue our particular interests? Do we want politicians who stick to their core convictions or politicians who cater to our every policy whim?

It’s not surprising that politicians tend to go with strategy #2:  appease the finicky voter. It’s easy to craft a political platform that perfectly matches the views of the poll-tested and focus-group-approved majority in your district. It’s easy to give the appearance of integrity with a few sound bites written by your handlers and rehearsed until you approach eloquence. It’s hard to stick with your personal beliefs — beliefs that will inevitably differ from the views of the majority unless you were born in a cookie-cutter and fed Gallup reports from birth. It’s hard to weather the criticism that comes from either the opposing side’s partisans or the ideological commissars of your own party.

Virginia gubernatorial candidate Tim Kaine decided to stick with his personal belief that the death penalty is wrong. Of course, he’s a politician and he’s found a way to massage that politically unsightly knot on his record: He insists that he’d uphold the death penalty if elected and, when pressed by a journalist, conceded that some murderers “may deserve” the death penalty. But, in the kingdom of the integrity-less, the man with a half-ounce of character is king. A Democrat and a Roman Catholic, Kaine has long held that the death penalty — and abortion as well — violate the sanctity of human life. The fact that Kaine has not repudiated his anti-capital punishment views in spite of the intense political pressure to do so should be cause for praise.

Instead, Kaine is being assailed as a treacherous, effete liberal, a friend of Hitler and murderers everywhere. His opponent, Republican Jerry Kilgore, has paid for ads putting forth these charges and featuring the father of a murder victim. Never mind that Kaine has pledged, if elected governor, to enforce execution orders. Never mind that he has the courage to think unpopular thoughts in a state that — as Leonard Pitts Jr. points out in this excellent column — “executes people with a gusto.”

It is, ironically, Kaine’s very integrity that makes him untrustworthy. “I don’t trust Tim Kaine when it comes to the death penalty,” says Stanley Rosenbluth, the father of a murder victim, in one of Kilgore’s ads. Why? Because Kaine has a belief that Rosenbluth doesn’t like.

If Tim Kaine loses the Virginia gubernatorial race because of these attack ads, it will prove a sad truth about American voters: We really do get the politicians we deserve.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

A reader KS responds to one of my posts from last month:

My thanks to KS for taking the time to write a thoughtful critique.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Well, it’s been two years since the Iraq invasion, and it seems the Bush administration still needs to learn how to pick its battles. The U.S. Senate voted 90-9 yesterday to prohibit the “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. custody. In reality, the measure — an amendment to a military spending bill — merely clarifies rules of prisoner treatment that had been thrown into ambiguity ever since the invasion of Afghanistan, when the Bush administration decided to toss out the Geneva Conventions as a binding standard for military behavior. Nevertheless, the vote drew fierce opposition from the White House, which threatened a veto of the entire $445.5 billion Defense Department spending bill if the measure was not removed. The anti-torture amendment, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, “would limit the president’s ability as commander-in-chief to effectively carry out the war on terrorism.” (The proposed ban on torture, by the way, doesn’t apply to the Central Intelligence Agency, nor does it prevent the military from moving prisoners to other countries where torture is allowed.)

Fortunately, many Democrats and Republicans — chief among them, Senator John McCain of Arizona — are standing up to the White House on this issue. An explicit ban on torture is the only moral and sensible thing to do, they say. “We have to clarify that this is not what the United States is all about. This is what makes us different from the enemy we are fighting,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held and tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

In his remarks McCain cited a letter written to him by an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, Capt. Ian Fishback, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq. “Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees,” Fishback wrote in a September 16 letter to the senator. “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.” Fishback said he had complained to superiors for 17 months that soldiers were operating under conflicting views of what was humane treatment, and yet no one was able to point him to any explicit standards.

Fishback was the officer interviewed in the Human Rights Watch report on prisoner abuse that I mentioned in a post last week. While the Abu Ghraib investigations netted the convictions of nine low-ranking soldiers, the claims made by Fishback and others suggest that the problems at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere began at the top: with the generals and politicians who refused to impose clear standards of conduct. McCain took this case to the floor of the Senate yesterday. “We demanded intelligence without ever clearly telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden,” he said. “And then, when things went wrong, we blamed them and we punished them.”

Given all the other political fights it needs to focus on, it’s puzzling why the Bush administration is so intent on keeping its policy of no policy in place. Forty-six of the 90 senators voting for the amendment were Republicans. More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili, have also come out publicly in support of the measure. The fact that so many members of his own party are opposing a wartime president on his wartime policies must be disquieting and humiliating for Bush. Of course, there’s still a good chance that the commander-in-chief will get his way: The House version of the military spending bill does not include the torture provision, and McCain and other supporters worry that it could be gutted in the negotiations to reconcile the two bills, if not axed by presidential veto.

As the White House well knows, the widespread, well-publicized abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became a sort of Pearl Harbor for Muslim extremists around the world: If they had any doubts that the fight against the American Satan was a cause worth spilling blood for, now they could rest easy in their paranoia. Top officials in the Bush administration recognize the serious damage caused by the prison abuse scandals. What’s more, it is clear to some — including Bush-appointed CIA Director Porter Goss — that the American occupation, plagued as it has been by a host of tactical and moral failures, has become a rallying point “to recruit new, anti-U.S. jihadists.” How, then, can the administration persist in its belief that having a clear, consistent policy against torture will somehow endanger its war on terror? Having no policy clearly doesn’t seem to be helping things.

Now, what definitely seems to be harming things is the vitriol from anti-Muslim extremists like Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska. “I believe we are seeing the beginning of a crusade against freedom from the militant terrorist Islamic entities throughout the world,” said Stevens in opposing the amendment. “If this amendment passes, the United States will not have effective control of those people.”

“Crusade”? “Effective control of those people”? Did I say they were paranoid?

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

What you allowed to happen happened. Trends were accepted. Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it. They wanted intel. As long as no PUCs [“persons under control,” i.e., detainees] came up dead it happened. We heard rumors of PUCs dying so we were careful. We kept it to broken arms and legs and shit. If a leg was broken you call the PA — the physician’s assistant — and told him the PUC got hurt when he was taken. He would get Motrin [a pain reliever] and maybe a sling, but no cast or medical treatment…. People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

—U.S. Army sergeant, 82nd Airborne Division

Human Rights Watch (HRW) came out with a new report this week that presents graphic accounts of torture by U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the prisoner abuse problems afflicting an overextended U.S. military, and the damage that poor leadership has caused to the Iraq war effort. The report features interviews with two sergeants and one officer stationed at a base in central Iraq who said they witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners — torture that was ordered, the soldiers said, by their superiors and by intelligence officers. The practice was so common that soldiers had developed a lingo for it, the report says: “‘Fucking a PUC’ referred to beating a detainee, while ‘Smoking a PUC’ referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness.”

One factor that encouraged prisoner abuse was that the soldiers guarding a detainee were often the very ones who had been shot at by that detainee hours before — contrary to the military’s own policy, which states that prisoners should be placed in the custody of military police far from the frontlines. Not surprisingly, soldiers put in these situations would go beyond the need to collect intelligence and start collecting their pound of flesh. A sergeant described one such incident of retribution:

We had these new high-speed trailer showers. One guy was the cleaner. He was an Iraqi contractor working on base. We were taking pretty accurate mortar fire and rockets and we were getting nervous. Well one day we found him with a GPS receiver and he is like calling in strikes on us! What the fuck!? We took him but we are pissed because he stabbed us in the back. So we gave him the treatment. We got on him with the jugs and doused him and smoked and fucked him.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s denials that the Geneva Conventions apply to its war on terror have created a kind of moral havoc within the ranks. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers were trained to avoid torture, period. In fact, the Army’s own Field Manual 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation states explicitly that the use of force is not an effective interrogation tool: “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” In today’s military, however, soldiers guarding detainees no longer have clear rules for deciding what is permitted and what is not. They are simply told that they must extract information and that their actions must be “humane” — a dangerously vague standard. “Well, what does humane mean?” said an officer. “To me humane means I can kind of play with your mind … To [another officer I spoke with] humane means it’s okay to rough someone up and do physical harm … We’ve got people with different views of what humane means and there’s no Army statement that says this is the standard for humane treatment for prisoners.”

When stories of prisoners being humiliated and beaten at the Abu Ghraib prison became public, terrorists trying to sabotage the U.S. military in Iraq suddenly had a perfect recruiting tool: concrete evidence of the evil of the American occupation. Now there is reason to believe these abuses are more widespread than first thought, and not just the actions of “rogue” soldiers. In fact, soldiers at one base told an officer that they had taken Abu Ghraib-like photographs but burned them once the Abu Ghraib guards started “getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do.” “It’s unjust to hold only lower-ranking soldiers accountable for something that is so clearly, at a minimum, an officer corps problems, and probably a combination with the executive branch of government,” said the officer.

Did the abuse halt after the media broke the Abu Ghraib scandal? Things “toned down,” said the sergeant, who was interviewed between July and August 2005. “We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.”

The irony is that in torturing detainees with the goal of stamping out the insurgency, the U.S. military has driven even more Iraqis to the cause of the insurgency. That connection was quite clear to one of the sergeants interviewed:

If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.

As the officer interviewed in the HRW report makes clear, the abuses he saw were not perpetrated by “dishonorable” individuals. These were courageous soldiers who also happened to be human, he said. They were being put in charge of people who might have tried to kill them or their friends. At a minimum, they deserved leaders who could set clear boundaries and accept responsibility for what happened. The fact that they have not received such leadership has jeopardized America’s mission in Iraq, both morally and practically:

We’re mounting a counter-insurgency campaign, and if we have widespread violations of the Geneva Conventions, that seriously undermines our ability to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world…. [I]f America holds something as the moral standard, it should be unacceptable for us as a people to change that moral standard based on fear. The measure of a person or a people’s character is not what they do when everything is comfortable. It’s what they do in an extremely trying and difficult situation, and if we want to claim that these are our ideals and our values we need to hold to them no matter how dark the situation.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Here are results from a 2003 survey of American global justice activists, most of whom filled out questionnaires during the protests surrounding the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial conference in Miami late that year. (The findings were previously posted on the site as a PDF file, but this format should be easier to read.) For more background about global justice activism, you can read my article here.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Recently I read an essay by the late, great Civil War historian William E. Gienapp (a former teacher of mine), which made me think of the so-called “culture war” now besetting America. In his essay, Gienapp shows how the unique structure of American democratic government exacerbated the conflict over slavery and made war likely, if not inevitable. For example, the Republican Party, America’s first successful sectional party, could win the presidency because of the rather undemocratic workings of the electoral college, which (as it was put into practice) granted all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes. Thus, anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln could receive 98 percent of the North’s electoral vote even though he won less than 54 percent of the popular vote in that part of the country. He could win the presidency even though he had no support in the South and only 39.9 percent of the nation’s popular vote. (A different electoral system — with states of smaller sizes, for instance, as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson once proposed — might not have given Lincoln enough electoral votes to prevail.) The fact that a candidate with the backing of just one part of the country could win the presidency had profound consequences. With such a divisive figure as Lincoln in the White House, radical Southern leaders felt they had no choice but to secede, Gienapp writes. They did — and brought the nation into an awesome conflict that rooted out, once and for all, the evil of slavery. A nation divided against itself could not stand, and America would eventually become all one thing — and not the other.

Flash forward a hundred some-odd years. A look at the presidential election map from 2004 shows that the two parties have increasingly become sectional parties, with only a few swing states in play. This does not mean that Americans themselves are deeply divided. Their views on gender roles, racism, homosexuality, crime, and  other hot-button cultural issues have not grown more polarized over time — in the population as a whole or across social classes, races, religious groups, or even the notorious red/blue state divide, as this book by political scientist Morris P. Fiorina shows (abortion may be the one exception, though it depends on which study you believe). In fact, in many cases, political attitudes have converged: in the last few decades Americans across the board have become more liberal on gender issues and more conservative on criminal justice issues, for example.

On the other hand, the two major parties — and the activists who lead them — have become more polarized in their attitudes and beliefs, Fiorina argues. The majority of America’s moderate voters are not really divided on the issues, but rather ambivalent, forced to choose between starkly opposed options. In this sense, America in 2005 is not much different from antebellum America, where radicals on either side had come, by the eve of the Civil War, to dominate the national political debate and the two major parties. Rather than strengthening the moderates and weakening the extremists among their ranks, the leaders of both parties chose to inflame sectional animosities, Gienapp notes. “It was they who politicized issues and framed the choices before the electorate, and it was the leaders, not the voters, who made the crucial policy decisions” that led the country to war.

I certainly do not think that Americans will fight another civil war anytime soon. But it is clear that the two major parties are engaged in an increasingly intense ideological conflict, one with other kinds of casualties — namely, the civility and unity of our nation. The fact that the Democrats and Republicans have essentially transformed themselves into sectional parties, too, means that the national political crisis that began with the 2000 election debacle will likely repeat itself again and again, because our electoral system tolerates the election of presidents without truly national mandates. Whoever wins in 2008 — or 2012, or 2016 — the result will inevitably be rancor on the losing side and increasingly strident calls for further battle. One wonders whether a house divided against itself can stand for much longer.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Whenever national calamity strikes, the same group of disloyal Americans starts to sow seeds of disunion in this country. Rather than searching for who is really responsible for the ills afflicting our nation, they blame their fellow Americans. They refuse to show compassion for the suffering of innocent men, women, and children. They point fingers and accuse the very victims of the perpetrated crimes.

Who are these shameless, unpatriotic Americans? I call them the “Blame Black People First” crowd.

New Orleans, ground zero for the government’s belated and botched hurricane relief effort, is predominantly African American. It also has a poverty rate almost twice as high as the national average.

As usual, the subversive element in this country has not stooped from singling out these suffering Americans as the perpetrators of their own misfortune. Somehow, they always blame black people first.

Some examples:

1. Media commentators self-righteously decry the outbreaks of looting in the devastated city — forgetting that some people might like food and clean clothes after being left to fend for themselves in a flood zone for several days. Says Julianne Malveaux of BET.com:

When hungry folks take food from flooded grocery stores, that’s called survival, not looting.  When people, who are strapping cardboard to their feet because all of their possessions have been swept away, go into a store and take shoes, that, too, is called survival.  The calls for zero tolerance for looting were absurd, and the images of Black people “looting” (along with the more benign images of White people “finding” food) fanned the flames of every racial stereotype there is.  Then rabidly conservative talk show hosts — Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson among them — piled it on by foaming at the mouth about looters while ignoring the conditions even George Bush called “unacceptable.”

2. Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly berates the city’s poor for not applying themselves during the disaster. (I agree. Whenever I see people drowning, I tell them to just buck up — there’s no use whining about it, save your breath!) Says Nikki Finke of LA Weekly:

FNC’s Bill O’Reilly, who spent last month verbally abusing the grieving mother of a dead Iraqi war soldier, then whiled away the early days of Katrina’s aftermath giving lip to New Orleans’ looters and shooters and then basically blamed the hurricane’s poorest victims for expecting any government help at all. “First, the huge, bureaucratic government will never be able to protect you. If you rely on government for anything, anything, you’re going to be disappointed, no matter who the president is,” he scolded. And, “If you don’t get educated, if you don’t develop a skill, and force yourself to work hard, you’ll most likely be poor. And sooner or later, you’ll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help…. Chances are that help will not be quick in coming.”

3. Sen. Rick Santorum suggests that the government fine hurricane victims. In an interview over the weekend about Hurricane Katrina, the Republican from Pennsylvania said: “You have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” (After he was criticized for his remarks, Santorum said that he actually didn’t mean to include people who lacked cars among those who should be fined. They, instead, would get a tax credit on the purchase of a new hybrid car.)

A long time ago, Harry Truman said, “The United States has become great because we, as a people, have been able to work together for great objectives even while differing about details.” How much our country has changed. In this time of national tragedy, how is it possible that these people are resorting to such divisive, un-American rhetoric?

But then, they always blame black people first.

The American people know better. They know that black people built this country with their sweat and blood. They know that African Americans have contributed heroically to America’s art, literature, science, and way of life. They know that it’s dangerous to blame a group of victims for terrible problems that they did not cause.

You would think that the Blame Black People Firsters would be ashamed of what they say. Don’t they know how much these people have suffered? Didn’t they watch “A Concert for Hurricane Relief”?

But then, they always blame black people first.

Black people will never seek a permission slip to defend their security. If they need to invade a neighboring store to advance black people’s interests (i.e., not starving), then this is their right as God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans. If they feel the need to criticize out-of-touch leaders in that far-off land of Washington, then other Americans will stand by them in their struggles to spread democracy.

Let us put an end to the blame games, the blame gaming, and the blaming games. This unpatriotic, treacherous element should not be allowed to spread its false accusations. It must be rooted out of our government, our way of life, and our 24-hour cable news channels.

The “Blame Black People First” crowd is a threat to this country. Americans will not be safe until we rid ourselves of this Red menace.

(With apologies for my blatant plagiarism from Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1984 speech at the Republican National Convention.)

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The Onion — for those moments when you don’t know whether to laugh, or cry, or throttle your nearest elected representative.

The headlines:

God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again

Louisiana National Guard Offers Help By Phone From Iraq

Government Relief Workers Mosey In To Help

Refugees Moved From Sewage-Contaminated Superdome To Hellhole Of Houston

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

Another Saints Season Ruined Before It Begins

Shrimp Joint Now Shrimp Habitat

And this one about sums it up:

Bush Urges Victims To Gnaw On Bootstraps For Sustenance

WASHINGTON, DC—In an emergency White House address Sunday, President Bush urged all people dying from several days without food and water in New Orleans to “tap into the American entrepreneurial spirit” and gnaw on their own bootstraps for sustenance. “Government handouts are not the answer,” Bush said. “I believe in smaller government, which is why I have drastically cut welfare and levee upkeep. I encourage you poor folks to fill yourself up on your own bootstraps. Buckle down, and tear at them like a starving animal.” Responding to reports that many Katrina survivors have lost everything in the disaster, Bush said, “Only when you work hard and chew desperately on your own footwear can you live the American dream.”

Last but not least:

Bush Appoints Some Guy From Horse Group to Head Nation’s Disaster Relief

Whoops, that one is actually real news …

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen