so are you

I’ve got the Rick Warren sessions to fully explore this week, I’ve only seen a bit of Obama’s session, so I shouldn’t be too hard on William Kristol. The main thrust of his opinion this morning comes to this – and ‘this’ is the main problem with the lack of understanding many have of Obama’s position:

Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, “do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”

Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn’t be ignored. But then their answers diverged.

Obama said that “we see evil all the time” — in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be “confronted squarely.” And while we can’t “erase evil from the world,” we can be “soldiers” in the task of confronting it when we see it.

But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”

It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that “of course evil must be defeated,” and he put “radical Islamic extremism,” Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning “the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform.”

So it appears to me, using Kristol’s chosen extracts, that Obama believes very strongly that our determination of evil is almost always seen through American optics. Those optics are oftentimes right but just as often wrong or misguided. Instead of assuming we’re reading the tea leaves correctly at every fork in the road we might want to measure our actions against a larger canvass of World events. In response to Kristol’s desired follow-up question, I’d say this: Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. As for his bit on our reluctance to confront evil as the greatest problem, wasn’t Sen. McCain present in Senate leadership throughout the Rwanda, Darfur and pre-9/11 Afghanistan? Is Kristol actually using that statement to posit the evils that Sen. McCain didn’t deal with over the last 15 years is somehow a measure of his abilities?

Sen. McCain’s response, again selected by Kristol, is like a checklist of what’s so wrong with those who blindly campaign and spew the three pillars of fear. I’ll break down McCain’s response…let me know if I miss anything in the paraphrase:

1. Defeat evil
2. Radical Islamic extremism
3. Men and women in uniform

If that is considered a nuanced response to what was a very good question, and if that is an answer that Kristol and his ilk find winning or in-depth, then there’s little hope in reaching into the conservative movement or McCain supporters come November.

t

i know! i know!

This morning the Eleven was gabbing and X cross exams me by asking how many of Ten Commandments I can name. My first thought is that I’ve done something wrong and need to think about the commandments and/or get some religion. I stumble through what gets classified as “four, maybe four-and-a-half.” I know, I don’t know what ‘half a commandment’ might be but it had something to do with wondering if coveting and adultery were the same commandment or not. Between us we eventually got to eight, maybe eight-and-a-half. What this led to was a gathering of categories that would be indicative of what Americans know and don’t know – in particular, what we think is very important versus what’s actually more like trivia and how it is we might sort them in our dusty brain cabinets. We argue, debate, and rage on certain topics yet we aren’t particularly well versed in knowing some of the details, such as what they actually include. So, we give you a herd of things to ponder while staring up at the corner of the ceiling and wondering why you haven’t vacuumed out the cobwebs.

Name the Ten Commandments
Ten hit songs by Madonna
Ten U.S. Presidents
The Bill of Rights
The original Rolling Stones and all the Beatles
Ten African nations
Sing at least one verse of “American Pie” by Don McLean
Supreme Court justices

You get the point, I think. We did laugh heartily at the fact that neither of us can name, or sing, even one of Mariah Carey’s 19 #1 songs – she now trails only the Beatles.

This won’t qualify as sport, per se, but I was trying to explain the other night how seeing a playoff game between the Capitals and Flyers is very different than games between the Caps and the Thrashers (or Lightning, or Hurricanes, or Panthers). The Flyers aren’t some Johnny-come-lately band of southern hockey franchises; they’re an original. What symbolizes this place in sport hierarchy are the uniform design and colors: a strong “P” symbol on the chest and the block orange and white jerseys with black pants. No mauves, purples, taupes, or horrible greens. As I was explaining this I got the perfect response from the her-listener, “So they’re like stormtroopers.” Exactly. The Flyers are like stormtroopers.