Merry Christmas And Remember to Forget Jesus

The "War on Christmas" has turned out to be a great fundraiser for right-wing Christian organizations. According to the LA Times, The American Family Assn., the Liberty Counsel and other conservative groups have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of "Merry Christmas" items.

But what about Jesus?

Of course, a big part of Christmas is the nativity scenes of shepherds, wise men, and parents standing aside the cradle in the manger. After all, the Christian gloss on the old Roman Saturnalia is that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

But what does the birth of Jesus have to do with Jesus?

The baby Jesus wasn't saying anything yet. It wasn't the baby Jesus who was supposed to have rejected temptation in the desert, spoken the Sermon on the Mount, attracted followers, formulated a "new law" for the Hebrew people, come into conflict with the Temple authorities, or been resurrected after a cruel execution. In celebrating Christmas, Christians seem to be celebrating the least "Christian" part of Jesus, the time when Jesus was least connected to the work and doctrine of his adulthood.

In fact, Christmas seems to be more about creating a personal mythology around Jesus than anything that Jesus would ever say or do. Given the resemblance to the story of Moses in Herod's killing of the young children in Bethlehem, the story of the birth of Jesus in Matthew 2 is one of the most mythological parts of the gospel. That's a big reason why it was easy for popular writers to use Christmas as a hook for stories about failing bankers and jolly old elves flying in the night or songs about the wonders of snow. Christmas has always been about creating and embellishing a "heart-warming story" first.

But why would Christians want the biggest holiday of the year to celebrate something as far away from the core of their religion as the birth of a Jesus? In Christian doctrine, Jesus is the "Word [of God] made flesh." To the contrary, what Christians are celebrating at Christmas is a wordless Jesus. Perhaps that is what Christians in fact mean to celebrate--the silent Jesus, the Jesus whose words no longer have authority in their lives, the Jesus who does not condemn wealth, possessions, authority, social respectability, family ties and other things that most people value in life.

Christianity is a very demanding religion. Even the most simple formulations to "love god with all your heart" and "love your neighbor as yourself" involve breathtaking claims on human affection that religions like that of the ancient Greeks never dreamed of. By celebrating the infant, silent Jesus instead of the Jesus who speaks this particularly harsh doctrine, Christmas gives Christians an opportunity to take an extended break from the adult Jesus and his doctrine just as it gives them a holiday from their jobs, schools, businesses, and other avocations. No doubt, the Christmas "vacation from Jesus" was one of the reasons why our Puritan forebears sought to ban Christmas celebrations. Celebrating Christmas is a way for Christians to be "Christians" and revel in Christian mythology without dealing without everything that's discomfiting about the adult "Jesus." For Christians, Christmas isn't so much about the birth of Jesus as it is about the sense of comfort and release in having Christianity without having to deal with the person of Jesus at all. Christmas is about forgetting Jesus.

This puts an ironic twist on the whole "Merry Christmas" business. If Christmas is about forgetting Jesus, then the secularization of Christmas means that Christians won't be able to forget Jesus during the "holiday season." Instead of celebrating Baby Jesus between Thanksgiving and New Years, they'll be stuck with the Jesus of "woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep" (Luke 6:25) all year long. That's a sure-fire prescription for guilt, failure, inadequacy, and self-doubt and a number of other burdensome feelings. So Everybody! Give your Christian brothers a break. Say "Merry Christmas" and remember that you're helping them forget Jesus.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Scar

Today's announcement that the title for the final Harry Potter book is going to be Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sparked some renewed Harry Potter speculation at the local book store. The question wasn't whether Harry was going to live or die, but whether Harry's scar was a horcrux or a hiding place for part of Voldemort's soul.

If the scar was a horcrux, that would be a neat solution to the dilemna of whether Harry is going to live or die. If the scar is a horcrux, Harry has to die if Voldemort is ever going to be killed. So, Harry has to die and the series comes to a definite conclusion assuming that no one wants to explore Harry's existence after death, whether Harry gets involved in the life of his friends, or not. A second consideration is that Rowling has said that the last word of the last book is going to be scar. Harry's scar obviously has tremendous significance at the end of the book where Harry's fate will be decided. Perhaps, it's significance will be as a horcrux.

However, the scar/horcrux concept is a neat solution that does not quite work. At least in a simple way. If Harry's scar is a horcrux, Harry has to be able to get rid of the horcrux without dying. Because all the horcruxes have to be destroyed before Voldemort is killed, Harry has to live through the destruction of his own horcrux if he is going to be the one who kills Voldemort. If Harry is going to die, there has to be another scenario besides the possibility of his scar being a horcrux.

Dissecting the Surge

One of the good things in life is the wisdom comes out of casual conversation. At Morehead State, I've always been fortunate to have sensible friends with whom I could work out my ideas and theirs. Ed Reeves of Sociology is one of those friends. In talking with Ed on the steps outside our building the other day, I found that one of his other friends had discussed a "graceful exit" option to the upcoming build-up of American troops in Iraq. The Bush administration could increase the number of American troops by 25,000 for a year, claim in Spring 2008 that the U. S. had done everything it could in Iraq, and then begin major troop reductions in plenty of time for the 2008 election.

That makes three basic options connected with the troop buildup.

1. The Dissipation Option. Bush adds 25,000 troops, no progress is made, and the build-up is another embarrassment that hurts the Republicans in 2008. Hillary/ Obama get a ten point win and the Democrats pad their majority.

2. A Graceful Exit. Bush adds 25,000 troops, no progress is made, and the U. S. uses the lack of progress as a rationale for drastically reducing our commitment. The Hillary/ Obama ticket still wins, but the Republicans hold their own.

3. Making the Disaster Worse. Bush adds 25,000 troops, attacks the Mahdi Army militia, and makes the situation in Baghdad even worse than the current nightmare. The American public recoils in disgust, Hillary/Obama landslide, and Congressional Democrats get their biggest majority since 1964.

All of these options and more are being debated in the Bush administration. However, my bet is that the pressure for #3 builds up within the White House bunker. If attacking al-Sadr actually did stabilize Baghdad as the Bush administration hopes, Bush would be able to claim a real victory. So, there will be a lot of pressure from Dick Cheney's office and some military people to go for broke and take option #3. Unfortunately, the odds on the U. S. achieving a higher level of stability are a lot longer than the odds on making things worse. As a result, I conclude that option #3 will make the current disaster even worse and lead to a Republican apocalypse in the 2008 elections.

The Evil of Abstinence

What everybody knows. The news that 95% of Americans have had pre-marital sex probably wasn't a surprise to most people. Given that rates of pre-marital sex were high even for people born in the 1940's, it's evident that American teens and singles were leading sex soaked lives even before there was a sex soaked media. I'm glad of it myself. Having been a product of pre-marital sex, I've always had a soft spot for the idea of sex before marriage.

The failure of abstinence. The author of the study, Lawrence Finer, used the results to question the federal government's support of abstinence programs. According to Finer, "the data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds." In other words, abstinence programs can't work because teens and singles are going to have sex in the way they've always had sex.

The Evil of Abstinence. Abstinence programs don't harm most young people because most young people listen to peer-group messages encouraging sex instead of the abstinence message of purity and virginity. Of course, the ones who don't listen are the lucky ones. The abstinence message harms those who listen intently to the advocates of purity and sign the pledge to abstain from sex until marriage, but are still involved in sex. Viewing sex primarily in terms of guilt and disease, these kinds of teens and singles are less likely to be knowledgeable about contraception, less likely to see sex in terms of building relationships, and therefore less likely to develop any maturity about sex as they go along. Those who listen to the abstinence message would be more likely to have unwanted pregnancies and less likely to be emotionally ready for marriage on the day of the wedding. Because so few people listen to it, the abstinence message is not one of the world's great evils, but it is still an evil nonetheless.

The Bush Truth Translator

I have no idea why the mainstream media is crowing so much over Bush admitting that we're no longer "winning" in Iraq. After all, the President only retreated to "we're neither winning nor losing," and the meaning of the rhetorical retreat might be that things are getting much worse, perhaps much worse than pessimists already belief.

Here's how the administration's rhetoric has translated into reality so far.

"Mission Accomplished" = "We have not yet begun to fight"

"A Few Dead Enders" = "The remnants of the Hussein regime have quickly organized an effective resistance

"The Insurgents are Desperate" = Insurgent attacks spiked again.

"The Last Throes of the Insurgency" = "We haven't been able to eliminate the insurgency despite continual offensives in al-Anbar"

"Very Tough" = "Baghdad has descended into a state of anarchy while al-Qaeda in Iraq dominates in Anbar.

"History will vindicate" = "I'm still better than Buchanon and Hoover"

This is how the President's latest formulation translates into reality:

"We're Neither Winning Nor Losing" = "It's too late to stave off disaster"

Tough on Hillary

Hillary Clinton lost the support of my 12 year old daughter when the senator from New York talked as if "national security" was a more important issue than global warming during an NPR interview. Maybe I shouldn't have bought An Inconvenient Truth for her after all.

The Loaded Dice

The Throw. Today, President Bush threw the dice on his new Iraq strategy--increase the number of troops by 25,000, primarily by keeping the next rotation of troops in Iraq rather than taking them out as planned. Merry Christmas guys!

The Dice. As a result of his own incompetence and cynicism, the dice are heavily loaded against the President and American interests in general. What are the 25,000 troops going to do. If we had 25,000 troops, that would double the number of Americans in al-Anbar but still wouldn't allow us to maintain the continuous offensives and massive economic reconstruction needed to stabilize the province. In fact, it wouldn't come close.

The most likely deployment would be to Baghdad where the additional troops would either be driving around the streets trying to provoke attacks (it's called DAB--Driving Around Baghdad) or launching a major offensive against Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. The former deployment would be pointless; the latter a major disaster. Attacking and defeating al-Sadr would leave the remnants of his fighters fragmented, angry, and ready for the sort of long insurgent campaign being conducted by the Sunnis in Anbar. Defeating al-Sadr would also inflame a big part of the Shiite population into being more sympathetic with or joining a Shiite insurgency. The American military would "win," but the victory would be self-defeating. Just like the all the other American victories in Iraq.

Why Can' t Anybody Say Anything Good About Hillary?

Hillary Clinton is the leading early candidate for the presidency in 2008. Today, a Newsweek poll came out showing her leading John McCain by 7 points at (50-43) and Rudy Giuliani by 1. She's also far ahead of Barack Obama among Democrats at 50-32. Aside from the right-wing attack media, however, there is practically a blackout of any positive news on Hillary. Almost all the items about a Hillary candidacy from the mainstream media, pundits, columnists, and bloggers are bad. She's portrayed as either too much or too little--too polarizing on the one hand, but not charismatic enough, not visionary enough, not moderate enough, not liberal enough.

In addition, Hillary's popularity has grown without her doing much to promote it. Hillary isn't in the media nearly as much as John McCain or Barack Obama, does not say anything particularly noteworthy about the great issues of the day, and has intimidated her closest supporters into silence. There's been no Hillary hype, no Hillary media machine, and no Hillary for Hillary public relations campaign.

As a result of all this, there is a deep gap in our information. Hillary Clinton is the most popular politician in the United States, but hardly anybody has given any thoughts as to why a majority of people support her in head-to-head match-ups. What is it about Hillary that makes her popular even if it doesn't make her as lovable as Obama is on the left or George Bush used to be on the right?

Racism Central High in Kentucky

In many parts of rural America, white supremacist loyalties lead a semi-public kind of existence. White racism is in the public square, but not justified in explicitly racist terms. That's especially the case with the Confederate flag. Confederate flags and Confederate flag paraphernalia have popped everywhere in my home town of Morehead, KY since the flag controversies in Georgia and South Carolina in 2002. The Confederate flags are especially popular as bumper stickers on cars, but can be seen in yards, on shirts, as bandanas, and on motorcycle helmets. If Confederate flags aren't more popular than American flags in Morehead, they're running a close second.

The Confederate "flaggers" have all types of non-racial justifications for their displays that they'll tell you with a little smirk on their faces. For the flaggers, the Confederate battle flag is about regional pride, family, independence, rebel spirit, and opposition to political correctness instead of racism. However, the flaggers know just as well as everybody else that Confederate flags are the pre-eminent symbol of racism all over the South. In adapting the battle flag as a general symbol for everything they like about the South, flaggers have made white racism the uber sentiment that defines all things Southern.

The flag controversy has sprouted back up in Kentucky this week as controversy has erupted over the use of the Confederate flag as a school symbol at Allen County Central High School in Prestonsburg. The all-white high school uses a version of the Confederate flag as its school emblem, features rebel flags at all of its sporting event, and fosters "rebel pride" on its web site right next to educational cliches like "authentic," "interactive," and "learner centered." The few black students and athletes at other high schools in mountainous Floyd County and neighboring Pike County are offended by the flag but don't protest or seek boycotts. Members of the Louisville-based Justice Resource Center travelled to Prestonsburg to talk with the school superintendent about the connection between the Confederate flag and slavery and emphasize the need to prepare students to live in "a diverse society where these symbols have already been eliminated." Unfortunately, their appeals fell on deaf ears as students rallied to the defense of the flag, defending it as "our tradition."

And that's really the core of the issue. Many people in Eastern Kentucky and other rural areas bordering on the South have made the symbolism of slavery and bigotry into the defining element of "their tradition." Of course, Allen Central could embrace its tradition more closely if it just renamed itself "Racism Central High."

What the World Needs Now

More Gaffes from Public Figures: Last week, head coach Jim Mora of the Atlanta Falcons committed the bone-headed gaffe of talking on a radio show about how much he wanted the head coaching job at the University of Washington. Of course, Mora is already being paid a couple mill to coach the Falcons by the now unhappy owner Arthur Blank.

But few people realize how tough politicians, celebrities, and sports figures have it in their almost daily rounds of broadcasts, interviews, and call-in shows. All of these are impromptu forms of entertainment in which the person being interviewed--here the coach of the Atlanta Falcons--is supposed to be interesting, funny, emotionally compelling, or entertaining in some other way without having the benefit of a script or a writer. It's not easy to be creatively entertaining on the spur of the moment like that, especially if you're being asked about something that's personally touchy or something that you don't know anything about as all. A few weeks ago, the campus newspaper interviewed me about the presentation of an artist named Matuschka on my campus. I had gone to the presentation, enjoyed it, and had some vaguely formulated ideas, but I don't know anything about art and I was tired at the end of the week. So I tossed out a couple of boring platitudes and gave up to the disappointment of the interviewer who had been counting on me to say something interesting.

Personally, I think we should be more accepting of political, celebrity, and sports gaffes. If we expect people to say interesting things all the times, then we should also allow for a certain percentage of gaffes to allow for the human element. Maybe they get paid well, but politicians, celebrities, and sports figures are human like the rest of us.

More Brawling in the NBA. Well, David Stern handed down penalties from last weeks big NBA brawl. Carmelo Anthony of the Denver Nuggests was suspended for 15 games while J. R. Smith of the Nuggets and Nate Robinson of the Knicks will sit for 10. Once again, I'm surprised that there aren't more brawls in both pro and college sports. Athletes play at tremendous peaks of intensity seeking to "impose their will" on their opponents and are expected to exercise the super-human self-control needed to stay within the rules of the game. In football and basketball, it's all about manhood--proving that you're nothing less than a man or "the man" and fighting against any aspersions on your manliness. Nobody should be shocked when a player like Mardy Collins loses control and commits a flagrant foul or when Carmelo Anthony steps in on behalf of his teammate. In fact, basketball and football players should be allowed the same emotional flexibility as coaches. Coaches, both professional and college, regularly explode into histrionics--often at their own players. For a variety of perverse reasons--quite often race-- the emotional outbursts of authority figures like coaches are much more acceptable than any loss of control by their subordinates.

Love, Sweet Love. Mrs. RSI says that I should include love in the things that the world needs more of. Who am I to argue with her or with Burt Bacharach? But one of the ways that we create a little space for love is to allow a little more space for the less dignified human emotions and enormous spur-of-the-moment errors. I'm not talking Oprah-like confessions or Bill O'Reilly bombast--just some more openness to the emotional irregularities of the human condition.

Crashing Republicans and Big Gestalt Shifts

The Bush Burden on the GOP. Like the rest of the country, the right-wing dreams of a time they'll be free of George W. Bush. According to an internet Republican styling himself as JackDallas, "a Republican can run, unfettered [in 2008]". There will be no Bush stigma attached to the next republican candidate." If Bush decides to increase the number of troops in Iraq by 25,000 and launch new offensives in Iraq, that won't be the case. What a burden for Republican candidates. Expected to show loyalty to the idea of "victory" during the primaries, Republican candidates have about as much luck selling the war during the general elections as Mondale had in selling higher taxes in 1984. And they'll drag down a lot of Republican candidates for the Senate and House with them. Instead of the McKinley-like long-term Republican majority that Karl Rover originally imagined, the Bush era is going to end in a Hoover-like disaster for the GOP.

The Hillary/Obama Choice. One of the major legacies of the Bush years is going to be either the first female president in the history of the U. S. or the first black president in the history of the U. S. Probably anyway. If the Bush administration drags down Republican candidates to the extent I am forecasting, the GOP nominee in 2008 could be beaten by a potted plant let alone genuinely popular politicians like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Obviously, any Democratic president is going to have a hard time cleaning up the Bush mess, but electing a woman or a black person as President will be a major event in American culture. Too bad the Bush administration is going to make us pay such a high price for our cultural breakthrough.

Notes From the Day After Yesterday

Keeping the Priorities of Political Junkies Straight. It looks like Sen. Tim Johnson's condition is very serious. I had brain surgery myself as an infant and three people I know have had brain surgery in the last two years. Johnson has my best hopes. As for a Democratic majority in the Senate--it matters a lot less than Johnson's life and health.

The First Idea That Lead to Defeat. During his news conference yesterday, President Bush said he had heard some ideas that would "lead to defeat." The main idea leading to defeat was that it would be a good idea to invade Iraq in the first place. The rest of the bad ideas just flowed from there.

Death to Plagiarists. One thing I can say in President Bush's favor is that his administration did not steal their disastrous ideas about invading Iraq from others. The same can't be said for my students. I've had three plagiarism cases with my final exams this week and I'm not very happy about it.

It Could Be Worse Than Staying the Course

I was glad to see that President Bush has put off his "New Way Forward" speech until January. Like the rest of the country, I want to see a change in American policy in Iraq. But I'm also convinced that the Bush administration wants to change policy in a way that would make the situation in Iraq much worse. In other words, the Bush administration wants to forge a new governing coalition, bring in 20,000 more troops, and then launch an all-out attack on al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Why they see that as a winner is beyond me. The Sunni population did not stop resisting once the American military had overcome large-scale units. Given that the Shiites won't stop resisting either, the U. S. is going to be faced with two insurgencies when we actually can't handle one.

My new slogan--Stay the Course: Don't Make It Worse.

The Sixers Cover Up Their Failures

All the initial press about Allen Iverson's trade demand was about controversy--missed practices, conflicts with Larry Brown, skipping a bowling event, not getting along with Mo Cheeks, and diddly things like that. Of course, the media has a template in which what is newsworthy about players like Iverson, Chris Webber, Shaquille O'Neill, Kevin Garnet, and Ben Rothlesberger are their controversial incidents and failures rather than their importance to an organization.

What exactly does a guy like Iverson do for an organization?

In the case of the Philadelphia 76ers, they've known for eleven years that they had a very special player in Allen Iverson. When there is an Allen Iverson on board, the problem for management is to create an environment where Iverson's special efforts have the best opportunity to produce team success. That means bringing in coaches, complementary stars, role players, trainers, and other people who can complement, play off, assist, or otherwise team up with the special players or players in order to win games and contend for championships.

The problem for ownership is to bring in a management team that can put all of these pieces together in an effective way. The Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan era had enormous success in bringing in coaches and players who played off, worked well with, complemented, and helped Jordan. The Dallas Mavericks and Detroit Pistons are great examples of recent success. They've put presidents and general managers in place who had a nose for the trades and draft choices that worked with their players.

The Sixers management has failed pretty miserably. Nathaniel Friedman of Slate tries to develop a case that Iverson's talents don't mesh well with other players. How would anybody know? Allen Iverson has been in Philadelphia for eleven years and the Sixers have yet to bring in a power forward or center who has any prime time left in them. Say what you will about Jerry Krauss, but he did draft, sign, or trade for Scotty Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and John Paxson while getting some good mileage out of Bill Cartwright. The Sixers have traded for long-past-their-primes Glenn Robinson and Chris Webber while making almost singularly undistinguished draft picks. Their best pick-up was Derrick Coleman while neither Kyle Korver, Andre Iguodala, nor Samuel Dalembert could start for any other team in the NBA. Iverson has grown as both an offensive and defensive player but neither ownership nor management have done their jobs well enough for the Sixers to give their Hall of Fame guard really fruitful employment.

The deep irony of the situation is that the Sixers have been so anxious to get rid of Iverson now that he's expressed a desire for a trade. They won't let him play, wouldn't let him shootaround, took his nameplate off his locker, and seemed to efface all evidence of Iverson around their facilities. Management seems to think that banishing Iverson will mean that they will no longer be reminded of their own failures. Their next losing streak will disagree.

Deeper Into the Wilderness

Obama v Bush. The rise of Barack Obama is further evidence that American politics is more unsettled than it's been at any time since the sixties. Obama's admirers view him as a person who can get the country out of the intense partisanship of the Clinton/ Bush years. However, I would like to suggest that the Obama boom is fueled by the dream of a world without the right-wing--an America without the right's viciousness and arrogance, an America without the drumbeat of wedge issues, an America without the Iraq War, and an America that is more at peace with itself. Obviously, the Obama surge is bad news for Hillary Clinton, but it might be even worse news for the future of the Republican Party. If the Bush administration is not careful, the war in Iraq could keep the Republicans in the wilderness for the next generation as the nation lurches away from the era of right-wing government.

The Nightmare Option. One of the real dangers of the present is the disconnect between the Bush administration and the American public. The Bush administration has conducted the war so poorly that large majorities of the public have given up and want to withdraw. As a result, the U. S. no longer has a government that is credible with the American public. Ironically enough, it looks like the Bush administration is preparing reckless new initiatives in Iraq to re-establish a credibility that was lost because of their arrogance and recklessness. The outlines of President Bush's response to the Iraq Study Group are emerging and it looks like he wants first to reshuffle the Iraqi government to exclude Moqtada al-Sadr and then to attack Sadr's Mahdi Army in the Sadr City slum of Baghdad and other cities in Southern Iraq. The idea is that the removal of Sadr and his militia will make it possible for Shiite, Sunni, and Kurd politicians to form a government of real national unity.

This idea is so breathtaking in its foolishness that only the Bush administration could have thought of it. Of course, there wouldn't be much difficulty in defeating the Mahdi Army militarily and either arresting or killing Sadr. The problem is the the U. S. military would have to turn all of the towns and cities dominated by the Mahdi Army into more Fallujahs and Ramadis in order to destroy Sadr's military and social apparatus. Without Sadr, the Shiite militia movement would fragment in the same manner as the Sunni insurgency with Shiite guys from all over Baghdad and the Southeast taking up arms to fight the American occupiers and their Sunni "terrorist" allies. Not only would the anarchic situation in Baghdad get worse, but other Shiite towns and cities would start looking more like Baghdad.

Back to America. Projecting into the future, it looks like the Bush administration and the American right-wing are going to go down swinging in Iraq. This will only compound the current disaster. In many ways, the weak solutions offered by the Iraq Study Group have served as an indication of the extent to which the current American elite is not capable of devising a credible strategy for dealing with Iraq. If the Bush administration goes after Sadr over the next couple of years, the situation will be that much worse when a new President is elected. By that time, Bush will have led our country much deeper into the wilderness.

Fly-Over Notes

Where I am. My day job is teaching at one of the nation's real fly-over schools--Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky. As a rural, regional state university in a poor state, Morehead State is very low on the educational totem pole. Sure, we're above community colleges and regional state universities in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama. However, Morehead has a hard time measuring up even to other regional universities like Western Kentucky and Murray State in Kentucky let alone places in wealthier states like Appalachian State in North Carolina.

Drafting. Today, I piled through drafts of take-home exams and research papers. Unlike places like Oberlin, Morehead State students need to be taught and examining early drafts is one of my most effective teaching techniques. It's a lot of work, but students benefit from having simple things pointed out to them like the need to refer to the assigned readings, the benefits of correlating their ideas, and the beauty of carrying out their arguments to the next permutation. It's simple editing work on my part, but the result is often rapid improvement on the part of students. Interestingly enough, the students have a lot of talent that only needs minor tweeking to come out.

Students. Students at Morehead State generally go to crummy high schools and usually don't have very good skills or much confidence as a result. Even the best students have a hard time believing that they're any good. But there's considerable advantage to that. Being poorly trained, Morehead State students aren't as wedded to the conventional wisdom as students at places like Oberlin which means that they are capable of highly original work. A fair number of Morehead State students burn with new ideas and original perspectives. Students often respond to small pointers or a little encouragement by embarking on first-rate work. Last year, a white student tore through a long paper locating herself within black feminist thought. Earlier this evening I read through an intense and tough-minded feminist reflection on virginity in a world of abstinence.

Needless to say. My work as a professor is usually very satisfying even if it's not taking me to the big time.

The Student Double Shift. Saturday, I took a walk down to the coffee shop where one of my students named Lindsey was working at the counter. That evening, my family went to the little Italian restaurant in town and there was Lindsey again working as a waitress. It turns out that she also has a work study job and baby-sits. Even though she has four jobs, Lindsey carries a 3.6 as a junior in the honors program. That kind of educational heroism is much more routine at Morehead than it is in the Ivy League. Almost 25% of the students in one of my classes work 40 hours a week with no guarantee that it will work out for them at all.

That's one of the reasons why I keep reading their drafts.

Two Shadows Over Bushland

Pinochet is dead. Today, Augosto Pinochet died at the age of 91. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to notice it, but the point needs to be made anyway. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez, John Ashcroft, John Yoo, and other Bush administration figures are going to spend the rest of their lives under the same shadow of arrest and trial as Pinochet. Theoretically, all of the inmates at Guantamo, prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and suspected terrorists who were tortured in European and Middle Eastern prisons who have a case against the Bush administration will get to pursue charges. Perhaps the U. S. will still be able to stiff the International Criminal Court, but Bush administration figures won't be able to travel abroad in the future any more than Henry Kissinger is able to travel now.

That might be a long time for George Bush. Given that he'll only be 62 when he leaves office, Bush will be looking at 29 years of criminal liability if he lives as long as Pinochet. Bush and his people better hope that the Europeans never get any leverage over an American government. As discredited as the Bush administration is going to be, handing Bush and his advisers over to international courts might not prove to be that hard in the future.

Syria and Iran. One of the well-known recommendations of the Iraq Study Group was the re-establishment of direct communications with Iraq and Syria. Less well known is the fact that the Iraq Study Group concluded that Iran wasn't much of a threat to the U. S. and that Syria was even less of a threat. As the Iraq mission failed, the Bush administration and their neo-con allies have built up an image of Iran as a Shiite version of Saddam Hussein, armed to the teeth, relentlessly expansionist, and working without scruple to overthrow U. S. interests in the Middle East.

It's all nonsense. The Iranians have a run-down military, they're only able to give chump change of a couple hundred mill to their Hezbollah allies, and they're responding to their Shiite allies in Iraq rather than the other way around. Of course, the Bush administration will continue to pump the "Iranian threat" fantasy over the next couple of years. However, one of the shadows hanging over Bushland is the likelihood that a more credible administration will conclude that Iran doesn't even rate as a paper tiger.

Election 2008--Race Baiting Starts Early on the Right

The significance of race-baiting for the right. You have to give our friends on the right-wing credit. They waited a whole month after Barack Obama first expressed interest in the presidency to start race-baiting him. Because political racism is viewed as morally repugnant, there is very little comment on the the significance of racism in American politics. For the activist right, however, race-baiting is an important part of their rhetorical arsenal. Of course, race-baiting allows right-wingers to express their own racism and this is far from insignificant. It also serves the political purpose of connecting them with others who resist the "politically correct" orthodoxies concerning the worth of blacks, women, gays, immigrants, and disabled people.

Even more important for right-wingers is the way that baiting blacks, Muslims, and hispanics allows right-wingers to demonstrate what they see as their moral superiority over white liberals. Right-wingers see themselves as smarter, tougher, more determined, more willing to defy social convention, and more authentic than white liberals and race-baiting is one of the pre-eminent ways that the right demonstrates these qualities. The right especially relishes shoving their race-baiting down the "whiny little throats" of liberals while taking any outrage on the part of the left as a sign that they've won. In this sense, race-baiting is an integral part of the right-wing's "war against liberalism."

The Technique for Obama. The trick to public race-baiting is to express racial loathing without directly attacking blacks in the manner of Michael Richards. So, people on the right are constantly looking for clever new ways to employ symbols of racial hostility, remind minorities of racial stereotypes, attack minority public figures, or defend race-baiting as non-racist. When George Allen called the Indian-American guy a "macaca," he thought he was using a clever and defensible way to call a black person a racial epithet. Of course, that one blew up in his face.

With Barack Obama, what people on the right are doing is playing with his name. Ele_, a poster on Slate's Fray, notes that you get "Osama" when you substitute an "s" for the "b" in Obama's name. The race-baiting trick here is to associate Obama's African-sounding name with terrorism so that "Obama" can become a synonym for terrorism. What's clever here is that the rhetorical manuever is defensible as "word-play" used to score a point against Obama even though the effect of the word-play is generated through attaching Obama's name to a stereotype--i. e., race-baiting.

In the same thread, "JackDallas" sticks in the knife a little further by associating the Osama connection and Obama's middle-name of "Hussein" with a traditional symbol of racial animosity. "[Y]eah that's it," says "Dallas," "Just what this country needs, an arabic lawn jockey for president." Here, "Jack Dallas" fuses the Arab associations of Obama's name with a traditional American racial image. Once again, this is defensible approach to race-baiting. Even though lawn jockeys are well known as demeaning images of racial servitude, they don't have the same force as the n-word or cotton images. Consequently, if Obama himself or any white liberal were offended, they could readily be seen as "over-reacting," "emotional," or "weak" because they were upset over such a minor bit of racism. For a right-winger like Dallas, the lawn jockey image would be a two-fer. He gets to engage in some race-baiting at the same time that he has an opportunity to make liberals look bad.

The Prognosis. Assuming that Obama is going to run and that he's competitive, we're in for at least a long 18 months of race-baiting. And the race-baiting will hurt his candidacy because it will tend to transform Obama from a symbol of hope into yet another black symbol of "racial controversy." In my opinion, the best way to counter race-baiting in the context of Obama's campaign is to respond quickly and go beyond the accusation of racism to emphasize what the right-wing is trying to accomplish with their racism.

Obama: Clearing Out the Second Tier

Maybe I'd be more excited about Barack Obama if I had read The Audacity of Hope, owned a television, or hadn't been excited about Howard Dean in 2004.

But I'm not.

One thing that Obama is doing, however, is killing the long-shot candidacy of John Kerry. He's also making an Al Gore bid a little less likely than it already is.

In the most recent Fox polling, Obama polls at 12% among Democrats, enough to put him alone in the second tier of interested Democratic candidates but not enough to bother Hillary too much. Given that Kerry sinks from 13% to 6% and Gore dives from 15% to 11%, almost of Obama's support is coming from people who still support former candidates.

Not exactly a hip crowd.

And Obama hasn't taken anything from Hillary. Her support increased slightly from 32-33%

Assuming that Gore is not going to run, that means that Obama is the only Democrat other than Hillary with more than 10% support. Eventually, this will make Obama the anti-Hillary in a precedent-setting and high-quality Democratic primary campaign.

The third tier is made up of John Edwards and John Kerry drifting below the Lieberman futility line of 9% while Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack, Wesley Clark, and Bill Richardson all barely register.

What often happens is that third tier candidates drift along hoping to become the leading alternative to the favorite and then catch some kind of lightning to the top. For all the guys in the Democratic third tier, this means that they would be hoping to seize any opportunity afforded if Obama either faltered or decided not to run.

You have to wonder why they bother.

Right now, Barack Obama's main contribution to the Democratic presidential nomination process is to make it necessary for the third-tier riff raff to have a lot more audacity if they want to keep hope alive (to borrow a Jesse Jackson line).

I'm all for that.

The Iraq Study Group and Credible Government

The odd imperative of bi-partisanship. As Matthew Yglesias has emphasized, the Iraq Study is an effort by Washington Wise Men to re-establish some sort of bi-partisan elite reconciliation in the United States. It's an important point. In fact, the Iraq Study Group is about the United States as much at least as much as it is about Iraq and the leaders of the Iraq Study Group are putting a strong emphasis on bi-partisanship. However, Yglesias is mistaken in thinking that the Iraq Study Group is simply trying to exclude the left (although they did that). He is also mistaken to think that James Baker, Lee Hamilton, and David Broder are trying to create bipartisan harmony for it's own sake. American government is confronting a real, difficult, and under-appreciated problem right now.

The Perils of Presidential Government. In fact, the U. S. is undergoing the most serious crisis of presidential government since Watergate. The Bush administration has been almost as universally repudiated in the United States as it is in world opinion. Bush policy in Iraq has been repudiated in the polls for months, a repudiation that was reinforced by the heavy losses of the Republicans in the Congressional elections. On top of that President Bush's conduct of the war has lost the support of the neo-conservative policy elite after first losing the loyalty of the CIA, State Department, and military bureaucracies. If Bush were a prime minister in a parliamentary system, his own party would have forced him to resign and make way for a different leader. Because the U. S. has a presidential system where even the worst leaders serve their full terms, we are stuck with an administration that has been repudiated by the public, the government apparatus, and opinion elites of all ideological persuasions. Having a government that has been almost universally rejected is a dangerous thing in a time of war because it prevents the various elements of our enormous society from coalescing around one or two approaches to conducting the war. That's what's happening in the U. S. in relation to Iraq right now. There is a broad sense that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating, but not the least bit of consensus about how to understand that deterioration or what to do about it.

A Substitute for Credible Government. Given that the Bush administration is no longer credible on Iraq and that the Democratic opposition has not found its voice, the Iraq Study Group is serving as an elite substitute for credible government. The fact that such a fragile mechanism is necessary constitutes one more embarrassing measure of the foreign policy and defense failures of the Bush administration. Nevertheless, the Iraq Study Group succeeded in a very basic sense. They re-asserted a sober sense of the reality on the ground in Iraq as the basis for mapping out future policy, a sense of reality initially developed on the left. For years, anti-war commenters have emphasized the failure to get Iraq's economy functioning at more than pre-war levels, Iraq's explosive sectarianism, and the general ineffectiveness of the Iraqi government, army, and police. All of these conclusions and more were adapted by the Iraq Study Group and now have the character of a bi-partisan, elite conclusion. With the work of the Iraq study group, we can have a national consensus about how bad the situation is in Iraq and how ineffective the Bush administration has been in addressing that situation.

Forward Movement. The Iraq Study Group has defined the problems in Iraq in termsthat Disaffected Republicans, the Democrats, and anti-war people can mostly agree on. The only question is whether the Bush administration and the right-wing will continue in their hyper-aggressive denial of reality. I suspect that the answer to that question will be "yes" and that the Bush administration will find themselves increasingly marginal to public debate.

What to do? The weak point of the Iraq Study Group was their suggestions for addressing the many dimensions of the problem in Iraq. Launching a new international initiative, challenging the Maliki government to engage in a broad national reconciliation, and concentrating more on embedding American advisers into Iraqi units are all worthwhile recommendations. However, these ideas don't provide the ballast needed for a comprehensive solution to Iraq's problems. The Iraq Study group wants to reach out to Syria and Iran but provides little reason for Syria and Iran to respond. Likewise, they demand that Maliki embark on broad national reconciliation but provide no idea on how that could happen. Here, the Iraq Study Group has not being able to prioritize Iraq in relation to other American priorities on Iran, Syria, and Israel. If the U. S. is going to seek to integrate Iran and Syria into efforts to stabilize Iraq, it might have to accommodate Iran on nuclear weapons and accomodate Syria on Lebanon. If the Iraq Study Group wants the Maliki administration to become a more forceful presence, it will have to allow Maliki to build on his strongest assets, the Shiite militias.

The Iraq Study Group could not come up with a magic bullet for making the Iraq situation better. However, the members of that group deserve a great deal of credit for agreeing on the nature of the target in Iraq. At a time when the U. S. desperately needed a substitute for credible government, the Iraq Study Group provided one.