More from the harbingers...

More from the swirling abyss...

America's Holy Warriors
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig.com

Sunday 31 December 2006

The former New York Times Mideast Bureau chief warns that the radical Christian right is coming dangerously close to its goal of co-opting the country's military and law enforcement.

The drive by the Christian right to take control of military chaplaincies, which now sees radical Christians holding roughly 50 percent of chaplaincy appointments in the armed services and service academies, is part of a much larger effort to politicize the military and law enforcement. This effort signals the final and perhaps most deadly stage in the long campaign by the radical Christian right to dismantle America's open society and build a theocratic state. A successful politicization of the military would signal the end of our democracy.

During the past two years I traveled across the country to research and write the book "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America." I repeatedly listened to radical preachers attack as corrupt and godless most American institutions, from federal agencies that provide housing and social welfare to public schools and the media. But there were two institutions that never came under attack - the military and law enforcement. While these preachers had no interest in communicating with local leaders of other faiths, or those in the community who did not subscribe to their call for a radical Christian state, they assiduously courted and flattered the military and police. They held special services and appreciation days for all four branches of the armed services and for various law enforcement agencies. They encouraged their young men and women to enlist or to join the police or state troopers. They sought out sympathetic military and police officials to attend church events where these officials were lauded and feted for their Christian probity and patriotism. They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as "satanic." All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society.

One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.

And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.

"Contracting out security to groups like Blackwater undermines our constitutional democracy," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Their actions may not be subject to constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials and employees - including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers they are not trained in protecting constitutional rights and unlike police officers or the military they have no system of accountability whether within their organization or outside it. These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights."

The politicization of the military, the fostering of the belief that violence must be used to further a peculiar ideology rather than defend a democracy, was on display recently when Air Force and Army generals and colonels, filmed in uniform at the Pentagon, appeared in a promotional video distributed by the Christian Embassy, a radical Washington-based organization dedicated to building a "Christian America."

The video, first written about by Jeff Sharlet in the December issue of Harper's Magazine and filmed shortly after 9/11, has led the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to raise a legal protest against the Christian Embassy's proselytizing within the Department of Defense. The video was hastily pulled from the Christian Embassy website and was removed from YouTube a few days ago under threats of copyright enforcement.

Dan Cooper, an under secretary of Veterans Affairs, says in the video that his weekly prayer sessions are "more important than doing the job." Maj. Gen. Jack Catton says that his being an adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a "wonderful opportunity" to evangelize men and women setting defense policy. "My first priority is my faith," he says. "I think it's a huge impact.... You have many men and women who are seeking God's counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense."

Col. Ralph Benson, a Pentagon chaplain, says in the video: "Christian Embassy is a blessing to the Washington area, a blessing to our capital; it's a blessing to our country. They are interceding on behalf of people all over the United States, talking to ambassadors, talking to people in the Congress, in the Senate, talking to people in the Pentagon, and being able to share the message of Jesus Christ in a very, very important time in our world is winning a worldwide war on terrorism. What more do we need than Christian people leading us and guiding us, so, they're needed in this hour."

The group has burrowed deep inside the Pentagon. It hosts weekly Bible sessions with senior officers, by its own count some 40 generals, and weekly prayer breakfasts each Wednesday from 7 to 7:50 a.m. in the executive dining room as well as numerous outreach events to, in the words of the organization, "share and sharpen one another in their quest to bridge the gap between faith and work."

If the United States falls into a period of instability caused by another catastrophic terrorist attack, an economic meltdown or a series of environmental disasters, these paramilitary forces, protected and assisted by fellow ideologues in the police and military, could swiftly abolish what is left of our eroding democracy. War, with the huge profits it hands to businesses and right-wing interests that often help bankroll the Christian right, could become a permanent condition. And the thugs with automatic weapons, black uniforms and wraparound sunglasses who appeared on street corners in Baghdad and New Orleans could appear on streets across the U.S. Such a presence could paralyze us with fear, leaving us unable to question or protest the closed system and secrecy of an emergent totalitarian state and unable to voice dissent.

"The Bush administration has already come close to painting our current wars as wars against Islam - many in the Christian right apparently have this belief," Ratner said. "If these wars, bad enough as imperial wars, are fought as religious wars, we are facing a very dark age that could go on for a hundred years and that will be very bloody."

Our shared national shame... edited.

I feel somewhat dishonest about changing this after posting it... from the historian's perspective, it's bad juju. But in all honesty, what I write here I write for myself. So if I read it later and decide it doesn't capture the ideas I was entertaining, why shouldn't I change it? Besides, it sounded stupid :)

--

Blackwater has been in the news a lot lately. I'm not a serious student of the historical usage of mercenaries (excuse me, Private Security Forces), but I know that they've played a role in pre-1900 wars. I don't recall them being used by this country previously, but maybe I just haven't noticed it before. Or maybe their usage in this country is much more recent, perhaps not. The strategy of using mercenaries is certainly one way to work around getting the man power necessary to wage the kind of war we have in Afghanistan and Iraq today. I wonder how long the thin strand of support for this war would last if a draft were necessary to wage it. Would there be marches on Washington?

But all that "what it" doesn't really address our bloodied national treasure. I've read variously about the lower casualty rates in this war than ever before - and not by just a little. Battlefield triage and emergency care have increased the survival rate for veterans by huge percentages. So what about the survivors? de tocqueville noted in his travels that you could learn most of what you needed to know about a society by its prison system. I wouldn't want to argue with him, but I think you can tell a lot about a culture obsessed with war by how it treats its war survivors.

In war, I think you go in worried about dying. But I don't think most humans are built to kill. In fact, it is arguably one of the most traumatic event that could happen to a person. And I think that, in the best of circumstances, when all you care about is threatened, and the choice truly is "us or them", killing would still have a very lasting impact on most humans. I believe that one of the things that Vietnam demonstrated is that ambiguity about the national purpose can intensify the difficulties veterans experienced in transitioning back into society.

So what does it really mean when you say "I support the troops"? Does it mean that you support whatever taxes and sacrifices are necessary to ensure that they have the gear, the manpower to achieve a specific goal? Does it mean that what happens to individual soldiers matters? Or does it mean that we'll ask for no national effort - no victory gardens or gas stickers - no skin in the game from the folks back home? Instead of a draft, we'll use mercenaries to supplement our fighting forces. And we won't tax the folks back home to pay for it - we'll borrow against the future.

What about the survivors? What happens to them? How do we support the troops when they come home. How do we ensure that they are re-integrated into society after performing acts required of their circumstances? In the years following the end of America's military involvement in Vietnam, there was a host of literature about the walking wounded. The "walking bomb" mythology began to appear in literature and culture - John Rambo being the one that stands our vividly.

My question is what about this time around? I'm going to do a bit of research about combat troops in Vietnam and Iraq, but I suspect I will find that we will have a lot more veterans this time around, veterans that have spent time in Iraq. Veterans whose tours were extended. And folks that served as mercenaries. A lot of folks who have experienced a trauma that I really don't believe most people were built for. The evidence is already starting to mount...

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week
By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2007, Printed on November 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue. In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/68713/

Will the door bang us in the ass on the way out?

All empires have this fate, and I think that is as it should be. The question, in my mind, is whether you leave something behind that lasts and makes the world a better place. In our case, I think we'll leave a big skid mark, a few nice movies and a bit of literature. But I don't see there will be songs about our heroes or national adventures.

From the inside, it's always hard to tell what is really going on. You lack perspective. D and I were talking the other night and she mentioned that the country has outlasted a lot of bad leaders. It got me to thinking about when American really became an empire. I think it's less than 100 years, but it could be argued. I think the point is that, in total, the country is young in years. As someone once noted, however, it ain't the years, its the miles. And if you look at where we started to where we are now - pick your own sources - you'd have to agree that we're not in Kansas anymore.

So what's the point of all this? The truth is, there isn't a clean one in my head at present. I feel like I did as a kid in the backseat of the car on a family trip. I'm too short to see much - kind of an "above the horizon" view of the world. But I think we're going faster now, rushing headlong towards a place I think we'll discover is where they will bury us. Only we think we're going to get ice cream, so we can't wait to get there.

America in the Time of Empire
By Chris Hedges
Truthdig

Monday 26 November 2007
This column was originally published by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

All great empires and nations decay from within. By the time they hobble off the world stage, overrun by the hordes at the gates or vanishing quietly into the pages of history books, what made them successful and powerful no longer has relevance. This rot takes place over decades, as with the Soviet Union, or, even longer, as with the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires. It is often imperceptible.

Dying empires cling until the very end to the outward trappings of power. They mask their weakness behind a costly and technologically advanced military. They pursue increasingly unrealistic imperial ambitions. They stifle dissent with efficient and often ruthless mechanisms of control. They lose the capacity for empathy, which allows them to see themselves through the eyes of others, to create a world of accommodation rather than strife. The creeds and noble ideals of the nation become empty cliches, used to justify acts of greater plunder, corruption and violence. By the end, there is only a raw lust for power and few willing to confront it.

The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.

Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.

An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.

"There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders," retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been "derelict in their duties" and guilty of a "lust for power."

The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers' rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country's managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.

Philadelphia is a textbook example. The city has seen a precipitous decline in manufacturing jobs, jobs that allowed households to live comfortably on one salary. The city had 35 percent of its workforce employed in the manufacturing sector in 1950, perhaps the zenith of the American empire. Thirty years later, this had fallen to 20 percent. Today it is 8.8 percent. Commensurate jobs, jobs that offer benefits, health care and most important enough money to provide hope for the future, no longer exist. The former manufacturing centers from Flint, Mich., to Youngstown, Ohio, are open sores, testaments to a growing internal collapse.

The United States has gone from being the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor. As of September 2006, the country was, for the first time in a century, paying out more than it received in investments. Trillions of dollars go into defense while the nation's infrastructure, from levees in New Orleans to highway bridges in Minnesota, collapses. We spend almost as much on military power as the rest of the world combined, while Social Security and Medicare entitlements are jeopardized because of huge deficits. Money is available for war, but not for the simple necessities of daily life.

Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.

The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.

It all amounts to a tacit complicity on the part of a passive population. This permits the oligarchy to squander capital and lives. It creates a world where we speak exclusively in the language of violence. It has plunged us into an endless cycle of war and conflict that is draining away the vitality, resources and promise of the nation.

It signals the twilight of our empire.

The harbingers of Armageddon

My brother sent an article recently on the progress the Evangelicals are making with the Air Force. I find it not a coincidence that they chose the Air Force - individual pilots have the greatest kill potential of any single combat unit, and it wouldn't take many to bring about the end of days. This article, following closely on this article have led me down a slightly paranoid road.

I'm now coming around to the idea that, all things considered, there is an effort underway to bring about a holy war that - it is thought by some - will lead to the second coming. While I believe that we are getting exactly what we deserve in our current government, but I don't think that we deserve Armageddon... yet.

The Anti-Crusader
By Josh Harkinson
Mother Jones

Tuesday 20 November 2007
Mikey Weinstein fights those who push evangelical Christianity in the military - and draws decidedly unchristian responses.

At Mikey Weinstein's home in the suburbs of Albuquerque, the picture window in the living room has been twice shot out. Sometimes Weinstein opens his front door to find dead animals on his porch, feces smeared on his walls, or slashes in his tires. Men have called to threaten his daughter, women to chant rhymes about shooting him in the head, small children to inform him that he will burn in hell. To his critics, he says, "Take a number, pack a picnic lunch, and stand in line." He's not going anywhere, and neither is his 5'6" ex-Marine security guard, Shorty.

Weinstein is the middle rung in three generations of soldiers. A former Air Force JAG and White House attorney for Ronald Reagan, he has adopted a shock-and-awe approach to battling efforts by the military to impress Christianity upon American soldiers. "We have the Christian Taliban and the Christian Al Qaeda inside our military," says Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, "and they really have WMD, unlike Saddam."

An amateur pugilist with shoulders like a butcher block and a head like a cannonball, he several times challenged evangelical minister Ted Haggard to a boxing match. (Haggard declined.) His adversaries call him, to his great delight, "The Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan," though his friends prefer nicknames like "Ticktock" and "Motor Mouth." During one of his trademark rapid-fire, profanity-laced diatribes, he proclaimed, "Our job here is to kick ass, take names, and leave sucking chest wounds on the people who are trying to engage the machinery of the state to push their biblical worldview." To allies who suggest that perhaps Weinstein should appoint someone more diplomatic to lead the foundation, he offers, "First they will have to prove to me that what we are engaged in is a polite exchange of views" with right-wing Christians, "instead of a bloody battle that only ends with the last person standing."

Weinstein is certain that fundamentalists will stop at nothing to transform the United States military into an army of God. He notes that Officers Christian Fellowship, with chapters in every major U.S. military installation in the world, envisions-and here he quotes its mission statement-a "spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit." The group has helped boost fundamentalist Christianity among the armed forces from a negligible presence 20 years ago to a faith currently held by 30 percent of U.S. soldiers, according to Weinstein. He adds that many of those soldiers-hardcore end-timers and Dominionists-desperately want America to invade Iran, thereby triggering the biblical prophecy of the Rapture.

This summer he uncovered plans by the Pentagon to ship "freedom packages" to soldiers in Iraq that were to contain Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic, and Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a video game inspired by post-Rapture novels in which "soldiers for Christ" hunt enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers. Partly due to Weinstein's efforts, the packages were never sent. "It's not just the Holocaust or the inquisition or the pogroms or the nine-count 'em: nine-crusades," Weinstein cautions. "It's everything that's happened since then. Whenever a virulent form of any faith has engaged the machinery of the state, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court, we have ended up with tidal waves of blood."

And so Weinstein is laying sand bags. He has fielded more than 6,000 complaints from soldiers who claim to have been persecuted by Christian evangelicals; 95 percent of the complaints come from mainstream Christians. Tipsters helped him catch uniformed military officers publicly endorsing an evangelical group and ferret out an anti-Semitic Bible study guide on an army base website. In September, he shunted many of the complaints into a massive lawsuit against the Department of Defense. His lead plaintiff, U.S. Army Specialist Jeremy Hall, alleges that a major at Iraq's Speicher base threatened to block his reenlistment in the Army in retaliation for organizing a meeting of atheists.

A then-Democrat, now-Republican who represented Reagan during the Iran-contra affair, Weinstein criticizes the former president for creating an opening for evangelical Christians in the military, but excoriates George W. Bush for dropping the floodgates. Bush, he says, is a "suboptimal human being." The Military Religious Freedom Foundation's supporters include refugees of the Bush years such as David Iglesias (one of the U.S. attorneys dismissed this year) and Ambassador Joe Wilson (husband of outed CIA operative Valerie Plame). "A lot of the anecdotal evidence that Mikey told me I found very troubling from a constitutional perspective," said Iglesias, who is an evangelical Christian. Wilson cites security implications: "They are proselytizing not on behalf of the Constitution of the United States and the national security interests of our country," he said, "but rather on behalf of some sort of fanatical view of end times. And they are using our army to affect that."

For Weinstein, the battle has been personal from the start. In 1973, during his freshman year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he repeatedly found anonymous anti-Semitic notes in his dorm room. He had nearly forgotten the experience when his son, Curtis, entered the Air Force Academy in 2003 and discovered that strains of anti-Semitism had metastasized. (By then Colorado Springs had come to be known as the "Vatican of the Religious Right" for its concentration of evangelicals.) Cadets and officers targeted Curtis Weinstein on eight or nine separate occasions during his freshman year with anti-Jewish remarks. During a football game, an upperclassman reportedly asked, "How does it make you feel to know that you killed Jesus Christ?"

That year Mikey Weinstein tried to work with the academy's leadership to reform its religious culture, but he faced disinterest from high-ranking Generals. That's when he gave up on diplomacy and launched the foundation. It began as a two-person operation in 2005 run out of his home. (He currently employs the equivalent of 25 full-time workers.) Due to his agitating that year, the air force investigated the Colorado Springs academy and substantiated many of the foundation's early findings: Football coach Fisher DeBerry had hung a "Team Jesus" banner in a locker room; Brigadier General Johnny Weida had taught a class a "J for Jesus" hand signal; and 250 faculty members and officers had signed a campus newspaper advertisement declaring, "We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope in the world."

Since then, the academy has created a mandatory training session on religious sensitivity, a cadet interfaith council, and a religious pamphlet for commanders. Still, Weinstein says, it has spawned a generation or more of evangelical Christians who promote their faith with impunity in the Air Force at large. Take the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, which he claims makes the academy look like the ACLU. Reportedly, at a mandatory retirement ceremony, a lieutenant colonel opened a Bible at the podium and used the occasion to conduct a sermon. (A spokesperson for the base did not respond to a request for comment.)

Weinstein continues his aggressive fight. In October, he returned to the Air Force Academy and delivered the invocation at his 30th class reunion. As he began speaking, a classmate stood up and screamed, "Jesus Christ!" Weinstein just kept talking. This month his foes discovered that he'd held a fundraiser for the foundation at the Los Angeles home of activist Jodie Evans. A few days after, Evans received a bomb threat in the mail. Weinstein long ago stopped believing that evangelicals in the military will grow more tolerant or less militant when faced with calm talk and logical reasoning. The Constitution is the only weapon there is against them, he says, and he has faith that it's a powerful one. "If you don't agree with me," he often scoffs, "then tell it to the judge."

--------

Josh Harkinson is a reporter for Mother Jones

Friday Night Video

Tom Petty must have earned some kind of longevity award by now... he's seldom at the top, but he has been turning out solid songs for 30 years. This one I stumbled across on an HD channel - keyboard guy is out of this world...

Waterboarding described

I don't know what to say about this. I'm astounded that we have permitted our government to perform this act in our name. It's not the shame, it is the abject horror that we believe so little in our stated values, that is the true crime. Our generation - the generation that permitted this - will be compared with the Vichy government as spineless, complicit partners in the destruction of what I grew up believing the United States stood for - life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

May god have mercy on our souls.

Things That Are Not Torture
by Hunter
Sun Nov 18, 2007 at 08:05:25 AM PST

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession...

-- United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

President Bush's nominee for attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that he does not know whether waterboarding is illegal. He pledged to study the matter and to reverse any Justice Department finding that endorses a practice that violates the law or the Constitution.

-- AP, October 30th, 2007


The first step is to firmly bind the prisoner to the table.

The ropes or straps should be tight enough to prevent any struggling that could injure either interrogators or the prisoner himself: arms, legs and torso should all be restrained. In addition to ropes or straps, it may also be desirable for several interrogators to physically restrain the prisoner using their own weight; use caution to prevent accidental suffocation, however. Proper restraint of the head is essential. The prisoner's head must be kept facing forward and immobile, using either bindings or physical effort by interrogators.

The table should be inclined backwards, so that the prisoner's head is below the level of his chest. In addition to allowing water to properly pool in the subject's throat and sinuses, and allowing water to be inhaled into, then drained from the lungs, this position enhances the sense of disorientation during the process. Ideally, it should be possible to quickly level the table and/or release the subject's head from restraints in the event that the prisoner vomits or aspirates excessive amounts of water.

Consider the setting: the interrogation should be done in a location chosen to elicit maximum fear from the prisoner. For some prisoners, a sterile, medical-like environment will create the greatest sense of terror; for others, a damp and dimly lit basement room will prove more alarming and disorienting. Interrogators may wish to wear hoods or masks, in order to increase this feeling and to prevent the prisoner from identifying his captors. The object of this technique is to strike irresistible panic into the prisoner, in order to best solicit information from the otherwise hostile subject: the more that sense of terror can be instilled before the physical process begins, the more quickly the prisoner will respond to the physical trauma, therefore lessening the duration of the technique, and in turn lessening the chances of physical damage or death. Creating an environment of extreme emotional stress and terror, then, is doing a distinct favor to your prisoner, sparing him from as much physical injury as possible.

At this point, it is important to note that, properly done, this technique is not torture. It has been carefully reviewed by the highest levels of the United States government, and found to be neither cruel or unusual, nor in violation of international law, but a reasonable "enhancement" of modern interrogation techniques.
::


Restrain the prisoner's head and begin pouring water into the prisoner's nose and mouth. The instinctive reaction, upon the sinuses becoming flooded with water, will be immediate panic, requiring the subject to be tightly restrained. Keep the head facing forward, tilted backwards, so that the water does not drain.

Most typically, a wet cloth or towel is placed over the prisoner's head, or partially in the mouth, and the water poured onto the cloth, allowing it to soak through and into the mouth. In addition to preventing the prisoner from expelling any of the water, this technique further restricts the subject's ability to breathe, thus enhancing both the feeling and reality of imminent suffocation. Alternatively, plastic wrap may be used to create an airtight seal over the mouth after the mouth is filled, thus forcing the prisoner, upon his next breath, to inhale entirely through his water-blocked sinuses or -- since inhalation through the flooded passages will result in inhalation primarily of water, not air -- not at all.

Again, expect the flooding of the mouth and sinuses to create immediate and involuntary panic for the prisoner. The prisoner will struggle, cough, and in some cases possibly vomit: keep the head immobile and the cloth or plastic wrap firmly in place so that the prisoner cannot expel the water. This is the desired effect, placing the prisoner in the first stage of a drowning death.


Once the nose and mouth are filled with the requisite amount of water -- a very small amount -- that water will pool in the throat and sinuses, blocking the clear passage of air into the lungs. The amount of water to be used will vary according to prisoner and desired effect; the sensation can be tuned to allow the prisoner to experience any sensation from repetitive choking to painful aspiration to complete asphyxiation. Experimentation will be required; start with smaller amounts of water, to prevent accidental excessive aspiration, hypoxia, and death.

Soon after filling the throat and sinuses, and at the point which the prisoner can no longer consiously hold their breath, they will be forced to involuntarily inhale -- either through the heavy, wet cloth, or through the filled nose. Either way, the effect is the same; some of the pooled water will be drawn into the lungs, along with either some air or no air, depending on the amount of water and specific technique used.

This process has frequently been called simulated drowning. This is incorrect and crude terminology; in reality, a more accurate name would be controlled drowning or induced drowning. There is nothing simulated about the experience; it is actual water, flooding the breathing passages. It is actual water, being drawn into the lungs. The difference is that this method of drowning is one that can be controlled, "tuned" as necessary and prolonged, provided no errors are made, for an extended period of time.

It is commonly said that drowning is a fairly peaceful method of death; nonviolent, and in the final stages calm, due to the slow loss of consciousness upon oxygen deprivation. That may be true, but the initial stages of drowning are anything but peaceful: the human body involuntarily and quite violently rejects water or anything else from the air passageways, because any obstruction to those passageways will cause death within minutes.

Anyone who has had a drowning or near-drowning experience can immediately identify with the sensations involved. The shocking weight and pressure of the water as it enters the sinuses; the searing cold; the last moments of a previously inhaled breath, now entirely expired, constricting within the lungs, and the sensation of water pressing in from all directions. Panic and adrenaline surge forward, allowing a burst of power that is directed at the singular and primal goal of again finding the atmosphere, of finding any pocket of air whatsoever. The more prolonged the fight towards oxygen, the more disoriented the mind becomes; soon gravity fades entirely, and any sense of up or down is lost. Drowning victims have been known, in those last few seconds, to swim downward, away from their own salvation.

And then the oxygen is entirely gone, and the body rebels with finality against the brain, and the breath is taken, even though there is no air. Water flows into the lungs in excruciating, spattering, burning rivulets, and with surprising force. It is at that point that the victim is lost, and fully knows it; further breaths are impossible. No oxygen will be gleaned from the water, and no force, absent being plucked from the water by an unseen rescuer, can place air back in the lungs. The low oxygen levels in the blood prevent further struggling and dulls the functions of the brain, creating a sense of quiet, deathly peace. The body, having lost the reservoir of air within the lungs, loses buoyancy. The victim loses consciousness, and dies.


The goal of this interrogation technique is to recreate that experience in a controlled fashion. A normal drowning death lasts mere minutes: using this process, however, it is possible to prolong the experience almost indefinitely. It is possible to take the initial sensations of panic, of water flooding the body, of pain, of oxygen deprivation, and indeed of imminent death, and extend them over hours, or days. It is a God-given gift to the interrogator: can you imagine the abject terror of drowning, not just lived as a brilliant flash of memory set beneath the surface of unfamiliar water, but prolonged for breath after breath, repeated time and time again, in a small room, over an indefinite span? It is impossible to adapt to, or even to learn to tolerate.

The process can be controlled by adjustment of the amount of water pooled in the throat and nose. With a moderate amount, the prisoner may be allowed to take multiple breaths -- with each breath, a certain amount of the water will be aspirated into the lungs, causing intense pain and preventing those portions of the lungs from uptaking oxygen until they have drained. After the breath, much of the water will drain back out of the lungs, allowing the process to be repeated. In this fashion, the prisoner will experience the terrifying moments of the last drowning breath -- and repeat them, breath after breath, until such time as they lose consciousness or the interrogator deems it necessary to stop. In practice, the choking reflex so wracks the subject as to render him incapable of uncontrolled breaths of any sort, and should be closely monitored for asphyxiation.

Alternatively, more water may be used, thereby forcing more water to be aspirated into the lungs upon the first breath, or a very small amount, allowing the prisoner to take many breaths before enough water is aspirated to cause lack of consciousness.

The goal of the interrogation is to gain information, not death, and so fully drowning the prisoner is not acceptable practice. Only enough water to produce the physical and mental sensations of imminent death should be used; with greater amounts of water or increased duration, the chance of accidental death is increased. In order to create the proper effect, however, the sensation of imminent death must be reached, and repeatedly: the object of the session is not to inconvenience or irritate the prisoner, but to place him in a situation in which absolute terror is involuntary, and in which the prisoner is of the belief that he is indeed in immediate danger of being killed, if he continues to defy the will of his captors. It is absolutely essential to take each event past_ the point where the prisoner can tolerate it, or control his reaction to it: if the prisoner can hold their breath for ten seconds, then the duration of each event should last twenty. If the prisoner is able to take multiple breaths of air and water and remain conscious, the next event should use more water, or a longer duration, in order to escalate to increasing levels of panic.

I repeat: in order for this technique to be effective, the prisoner must believe that he is entirely unable to control the situation, that you, his interrogators do control the situation, and that you are willing to be reckless with the technique, to point of death, in order to gain compliance. In order to create this belief, you must ensure that the situation reaches far beyond the point of physical and mental tolerance -- not difficult to do, with drowning.

It is important to again note that this technique, as described, is not torture. It has been permitted by the government, and legal reviews by the government have determined that it does not fall in the purview of prohibited activities. This opinion has been upheld by the previous Attorney General of the United States, and an opinion on the matter carefully avoided by the newly nominated one: when the technique is done correctly, therefore, it is at most unclear whether bound, controlled drowning of prisoners constitutes torture. It may be possible that, upon further review, the technique may be reclassified as cruel, unusual, or "severe pain or suffering", but as of yet the legal landscape is publicly unsettled.


As with any physically coercive interrogation, steps must be undertaken to ensure the prisoner does not suffer from accidental harm or death during the procedure. At minimum, a medical team should be among the interrogators, and should monitor the blood oxygen levels of the prisoner to ensure hypoxia does not result in loss of consciousness or death. Upon any such loss of consciousness, the interrogation should be immediately halted, the prisoner's head should be released and turned, allowing water to drain from the nose, throat and lungs. Oxygen should be administered as necessary. Note that because of the position of the prisoner, vomiting may pose a particular problem, as bile can easily be aspirated into the lungs: aspiration pneumonia may be an occasional side effect of aggressive interrogation.

Panic and physical duress may cause cardiac arrest or respiratory failure, especially if sessions are prolonged. The medical team should be prepared to deal with these accidental circumstances, and should be prepared to revive the prisoner immediately upon any such events: prisoners with existing respiratory or circulatory conditions are especially prone to such accidents.

Careful attention to the welfare of the prisoner is important, during interrogation sessions. Your professionalism, and that of your fellow interrogators, will be reflected by your ability to avoid such outcomes.


This technique of interrogation has been developed, of course, to obtain required information from the prisoner. Among enhanced techniques, controlled drowning is one of the better options. It is repeatable, and leaves relatively little physical damage. Compare this with the crude techniques of torturers: cutting off a thumb or finger is repeatable, at most, ten times. Drowning can be repeated indefinitely, or at least until the information is obtained, the interrogator deems the sessions worthless, or the prisoner accidentally dies. Furthermore, the involuntary reaction to drowning is not controllable, as it may be with other forms of physical duress: even the most stubborn prisoner cannot withstand the mental effects, nor steel himself to the wracking, choking panic.

This technique, indeed, is effective enough to oblige the compliance of most prisoners, but be aware of the inherent limitations of coercive interrogations. The information given by the prisoner, in order to stop the event, is not necessarily truthful, and false confessions or manufactured information is commonplace. This is especially true if the prisoner truly does not know the answers to the questions asked: in this event, the prisoner has no method of release from repeated, indefinite sessions except to fabricate information. Be aware that innocent prisoners, therefore, are likely to be especially unreliable.

Known guilty prisoners, however, are also extremely prone to give false information during these sessions. This is especially true when making claims that are unverifiable to the interrogator, or at least which require a long period of time to verify: the prisoner gains respite, because he has given seemingly truthful information, and it may be weeks, months, or even years before the fabrication is discovered. Be careful, then, about trusting any information gained coercively, and be especially cautious in allocating resources or forming policy from coerced information.

On the other hand, verifying an untruth by the prisoner should be considered a potential learning experience for that prisoner: use the opportunity to increase the enhanced interrogation events, in order to demonstrate to the prisoner the costs of misinformation. The prisoner must not be allowed to think that true information and false information is equally acceptable to the interrogator, or only false information will be offered. Punishment for known mistruths must be severe.


The United States does not torture. This has been definitively stated at all levels of government, including by the President of the United States. The United States may perform techniques of enhanced interrogation; it may engage in coercion; it may inflict suffering akin to that experienced at the moment of death; it does not, however, torture. The United States clearly follows the Geneva Conventions in all circumstances in which it has deemed the Geneva Conventions to apply. The United States unambiguously follows its own laws regarding the rights of prisoners in all instances in which the United States has deemed those prisoners to have rights. It does not treat prisoners in a cruel or inhumane fashion. The Vice President of the United States has explicitly endorsed the legality and reasonable nature of this technique.

The United States may have enhanced interrogation techniques, borrowing methods of methodical drowning used by the Khmer Rouge, the Spanish Inquisitors, and various others that populate the cruelest edges of history.

But we are the United States, and that is the difference: the United States does not torture.



Some information for this post comes from waterboarding.org.

Article on Obama response to Novak article

My Letter to the Editor-in-Chief of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Greetings,

I read Ms. Marinucci's recent article regarding a published Novak claim that Sen. Clinton was sitting on a story on Sen. Obama. Her distortion of Sen. Obama's response was severe. The quote I found the greatest offense to the truth was:

"Still, the Novak piece prompted an aggressive response from Obama, who - in an unusual move - released a six paragraph statement that flatly accused Clinton of political hypocrisy and dirty tactics."

In the actual statement issued by Sen. Obama, he called on Sen. Clinton to respond to Novak's claim by making public any information she has or "concede the truth: that there is none". I have reprinted the statement below, available at http://www.barackobama.com/2007/11/17/obama_statement_on_reports_of.php. Sen. Obama's statement was not an attack on Sen. Clinton in any way, shape or form. The editor that wrote or allowed the headline, "Clinton using dirty tactics, Obama says", should receive whatever reprimand is appropriate for tarnishing the reputation of the San Francisco Chronicle.

I don't know what motivated Ms. Marinucci's blatant distortion of a printed statement, but I do believe the credibility has never been more important for either candidates or those that report on them. Our country is suffering from a flood of inaccurate and distorted information by those that thrive in chaos and doubt. I would encourage Ms. Marinucci to take greater pride in her work and increase her diligence in reporting. I will continue to read her work and offer what assistance I can when the need arises.

Sincerely,

Matt Phillips
Cottage Grove, Oregon

Statement from Sen. Obama:

"Chicago, IL | November 17, 2007

"During our debate in Las Vegas on Thursday, we heard Senator Clinton rail against the politics of 'throwing mud.'

"At the very same time, in Washington, Robert Novak was publishing a column in which he reported the following: 'Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party's presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama...'

"The item did not identify these 'agents,' nor did it reveal the nature of the charge. It was devoid of facts, but heavy on innuendo and insinuation of the sort to which we've become all too accustomed in our politics these past two decades. If the purpose of this shameless item was to daunt or discourage me or supporters of our campaign from challenging and changing the politics of Washington, it will fail. In fact, it will only serve to steel our resolve.

"But in the interest of our party, and her own reputation, Senator Clinton should either make public any and all information referred to in the item, or concede the truth: that there is none.

"She of all people, having complained so often about 'the politics of personal destruction,' should move quickly to either stand by or renounce these tactics.

"I am prepared to stand up to that kind of politics, whether it's deployed by candidates in our party, in the other party or by any third party.

"The cause of change in this country will not be deterred or sidetracked by the old 'Swift boat' politics. The cause of moving America forward demands that we defeat it."

Galen's "scary scene"

Galen had an assignment for school to write a "scary scene". I may suffer from some bias, but I think he shows promise...

The Night Shack

One unused shack lay forbidden at the edge of the shadowy woods. A simple tire swing rocks gently back and forth; shadows swaying with its motion. The grimy rope strains at the heavy tire it is enslaved to. Pine needles lay scattered on the floor of the shack; dead spiders hidden among them. Legs like broken branches. Click Click of the locking door screams "beware beware". Sad faces of stone angels covered with moss and damp mud. Their faces look down on their locked hands in a silent prayer. Even the wind, once a mighty fist of nature, dies as it comes within the shack's unblinking stare. No creeping rats, or stuttering mice, or even a ghostly presence of a cat. But a wolf-like dog limps eerily around the shack with no motive, home, or master. During the sunlight time of day the night shack retreats to itself and waits for the night to fright again.

Olbermann - A professional political rant as only he can do...

Part I


Part II

Andrew Sullivan's piece on Obama from Atlantic Monthly

I sort of run hot and cold on Sully, but I think he makes some interesting and insightful points in those one. I find his comments on the baby-boomer's fear of the right, and how this fear acts as a catalyst of distortion very illuminating. Anyway, moving on...


Is Iraq Vietnam? Who really won in 2000? Which side are you on in the culture wars? These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics. One candidate could transcend them.

by Andrew Sullivan
Goodbye to All That

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.

Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.

A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard. He has more experience in public life than his opponents want to acknowledge, but he has not spent much time in Washington and has never run a business. His lean physique, close-cropped hair, and stick-out ears can give the impression of a slightly pushy undergraduate. You can see why many of his friends and admirers have urged him to wait his turn. He could be president in five or nine years’ time—why the rush?

But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.

Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

The traces of our long journey to this juncture can be found all around us. Its most obvious manifestation is political rhetoric. The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.

Take the biggest foreign-policy question—the war in Iraq. The rhetoric ranges from John McCain’s “No Surrender” banner to the “End the War Now” absolutism of much of the Democratic base. Yet the substantive issue is almost comically removed from this hyperventilation. Every potential president, Republican or Democrat, would likely inherit more than 100,000 occupying troops in January 2009; every one would be attempting to redeploy them as prudently as possible and to build stronger alliances both in the region and in the world. Every major candidate, moreover, will pledge to use targeted military force against al-Qaeda if necessary; every one is committed to ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb; every one is committed to an open-ended deployment in Afghanistan and an unbending alliance with Israel. We are fighting over something, to be sure. But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground.

On domestic policy, the primary issue is health care. Again, the ferocious rhetoric belies the mundane reality. Between the boogeyman of “Big Government” and the alleged threat of the drug companies, the practical differences are more matters of nuance than ideology. Yes, there are policy disagreements, but in the wake of the Bush administration, they are underwhelming. Most Republicans support continuing the Medicare drug benefit for seniors, the largest expansion of the entitlement state since Lyndon Johnson, while Democrats are merely favoring more cost controls on drug and insurance companies. Between Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan—individual mandates, private-sector leadership—and Senator Clinton’s triangulated update of her 1994 debacle, the difference is more technical than fundamental. The country has moved ever so slightly leftward. But this again is less a function of ideological transformation than of the current system’s failure to provide affordable health care for the insured or any care at all for growing numbers of the working poor.

Even on issues that are seen as integral to the polarization, the practical stakes in this election are minor. A large consensus in America favors legal abortions during the first trimester and varying restrictions thereafter. Even in solidly red states, such as South Dakota, the support for total criminalization is weak. If Roe were to fall, the primary impact would be the end of a system more liberal than any in Europe in favor of one more in sync with the varied views that exist across this country. On marriage, the battles in the states are subsiding, as a bevy of blue states adopt either civil marriage or civil unions for gay couples, and the rest stand pat. Most states that want no recognition for same-sex couples have already made that decision, usually through state constitutional amendments that allow change only with extreme difficulty. And the one state where marriage equality exists, Massachusetts, has decided to maintain the reform indefinitely.

Given this quiet, evolving consensus on policy, how do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics? The answer lies mainly with the biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby Boomers. The divide is still—amazingly—between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn’t, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought but never dissented at all. By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades. And with time came a strange intensity.

The professionalization of the battle, and the emergence of an array of well-funded interest groups dedicated to continuing it, can be traced most proximately to the bitter confirmation fights over Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, in 1987 and 1991 respectively. The presidency of Bill Clinton, who was elected with only 43 percent of the vote in 1992, crystallized the new reality. As soon as the Baby Boomers hit the commanding heights, the Vietnam power struggle rebooted. The facts mattered little in the face of such a divide. While Clinton was substantively a moderate conservative in policy, his countercultural origins led to the drama, ultimately, of religious warfare and even impeachment. Clinton clearly tried to bridge the Boomer split. But he was trapped on one side of it—and his personal foibles only reignited his generation’s agonies over sex and love and marriage. Even the failed impeachment didn’t bring the two sides to their senses, and the election of 2000 only made matters worse: Gore and Bush were almost designed to reflect the Boomers’ and the country’s divide, which deepened further.

The trauma of 9/11 has tended to obscure the memory of that unprecedentedly bitter election, and its nail- biting aftermath, which verged on a constitutional crisis. But its legacy is very much still with us, made far worse by President Bush’s approach to dealing with it. Despite losing the popular vote, Bush governed as if he had won Reagan’s 49 states. Instead of cementing a coalition of the center-right, Bush and Rove set out to ensure that the new evangelical base of the Republicans would turn out more reliably in 2004. Instead of seeing the post-’60s divide as a wound to be healed, they poured acid on it.

With 9/11, Bush had a reset moment—a chance to reunite the country in a way that would marginalize the extreme haters on both sides and forge a national consensus. He chose not to do so. It wasn’t entirely his fault. On the left, the truest believers were unprepared to give the president the benefit of any doubt in the wake of the 2000 election, and they even judged the 9/11 attacks to be a legitimate response to decades of U.S. foreign policy. Some could not support the war in Afghanistan, let alone the adventure in Iraq. As the Iraq War faltered, the polarization intensified. In 2004, the Vietnam argument returned with a new energy, with the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry’s Vietnam War record and CBS’s misbegotten report on Bush’s record in the Texas Air National Guard. These were the stories that touched the collective nerve of the political classes—because they parsed once again along the fault lines of the Boomer divide that had come to define all of us.

The result was an even deeper schism. Kerry was arguably the worst candidate on earth to put to rest the post-1960s culture war—and his decision to embrace his Vietnam identity at the convention made things worse. Bush, for his part, was unable to do nuance. And so the campaign became a matter of symbolism—pitting those who took the terror threat “seriously” against those who didn’t. Supporters of the Iraq War became more invested in asserting the morality of their cause than in examining the effectiveness of their tactics. Opponents of the war found themselves dispirited. Some were left to hope privately for American failure; others lashed out, as distrust turned to paranoia. It was and is a toxic cycle, in which the interests of the United States are supplanted by domestic agendas born of pride and ruthlessness on the one hand and bitterness and alienation on the other.

This is the critical context for the election of 2008. It is an election that holds the potential not merely to intensify this cycle of division but to bequeath it to a new generation, one marked by a new war that need not be—that should not be—seen as another Vietnam. A Giuliani-Clinton matchup, favored by the media elite, is a classic intragenerational struggle—with two deeply divisive and ruthless personalities ready to go to the brink. Giuliani represents that Nixonian disgust with anyone asking questions about, let alone actively protesting, a war. Clinton will always be, in the minds of so many, the young woman who gave the commencement address at Wellesley, who sat in on the Nixon implosion and who once disdained baking cookies. For some, her husband will always be the draft dodger who smoked pot and wouldn’t admit it. And however hard she tries, there is nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. She and Giuliani are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes.

In normal times, such division is not fatal, and can even be healthy. It’s great copy for journalists. But we are not talking about routine rancor. And we are not talking about normal times. We are talking about a world in which Islamist terror, combined with increasingly available destructive technology, has already murdered thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands of Muslims, and could pose an existential danger to the West. The terrible failures of the Iraq occupation, the resurgence of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, the progress of Iran toward nuclear capability, and the collapse of America’s prestige and moral reputation, especially among those millions of Muslims too young to have known any American president but Bush, heighten the stakes dramatically.

Perhaps the underlying risk is best illustrated by our asking what the popular response would be to another 9/11–style attack. It is hard to imagine a reprise of the sudden unity and solidarity in the days after 9/11, or an outpouring of support from allies and neighbors. It is far easier to imagine an even more bitter fight over who was responsible (apart from the perpetrators) and a profound suspicion of a government forced to impose more restrictions on travel, communications, and civil liberties. The current president would be unable to command the trust, let alone the support, of half the country in such a time. He could even be blamed for provoking any attack that came.

Of the viable national candidates, only Obama and possibly McCain have the potential to bridge this widening partisan gulf. Polling reveals Obama to be the favored Democrat among Republicans. McCain’s bipartisan appeal has receded in recent years, especially with his enthusiastic embrace of the latest phase of the Iraq War. And his personal history can only reinforce the Vietnam divide. But Obama’s reach outside his own ranks remains striking. Why? It’s a good question: How has a black, urban liberal gained far stronger support among Republicans than the made-over moderate Clinton or the southern charmer Edwards? Perhaps because the Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism. It isn’t about his policies as such; it is about his person. They are prepared to set their own ideological preferences to one side in favor of what Obama offers America in a critical moment in our dealings with the rest of the world. The war today matters enormously. The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has in facing the world and our enemies is his record on the Iraq War. He is the only major candidate to have clearly opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, negotiating with neighboring states, engaging America’s estranged allies, tamping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives toward Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

This latter point is the most salient. The act of picking the next president will be in some ways a statement of America’s view of Iraq. Clinton is running as a centrist Democrat—voting for war, accepting the need for an occupation at least through her first term, while attempting to do triage as practically as possible. Obama is running as the clearer antiwar candidate. At the same time, Obama’s candidacy cannot fairly be cast as a McGovernite revival in tone or substance. He is not opposed to war as such. He is not opposed to the use of unilateral force, either—as demonstrated by his willingness to target al-Qaeda in Pakistan over the objections of the Pakistani government. He does not oppose the idea of democratization in the Muslim world as a general principle or the concept of nation building as such. He is not an isolationist, as his support for the campaign in Afghanistan proves. It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war:

I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

The man who opposed the war for the right reasons is for that reason the potential president with the most flexibility in dealing with it. Clinton is hemmed in by her past and her generation. If she pulls out too quickly, she will fall prey to the usual browbeating from the right—the same theme that has played relentlessly since 1968. If she stays in too long, the antiwar base of her own party, already suspicious of her, will pounce. The Boomer legacy imprisons her—and so it may continue to imprison us. The debate about the war in the next four years needs to be about the practical and difficult choices ahead of us—not about the symbolism or whether it’s a second Vietnam.

A generational divide also separates Clinton and Obama with respect to domestic politics. Clinton grew up saturated in the conflict that still defines American politics. As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove her deeper into her political bunker. Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

Obama, simply by virtue of when he was born, is free of this defensiveness. Strictly speaking, he is at the tail end of the Boomer generation. But he is not of it.

“Partly because my mother, you know, was smack-dab in the middle of the Baby Boom generation,” he told me. “She was only 18 when she had me. So when I think of Baby Boomers, I think of my mother’s generation. And you know, I was too young for the formative period of the ’60s—civil rights, sexual revolution, Vietnam War. Those all sort of passed me by.”

Obama’s mother was, in fact, born only five years earlier than Hillary Clinton. He did not politically come of age during the Vietnam era, and he is simply less afraid of the right wing than Clinton is, because he has emerged on the national stage during a period of conservative decadence and decline. And so, for example, he felt much freer than Clinton to say he was prepared to meet and hold talks with hostile world leaders in his first year in office. He has proposed sweeping middle-class tax cuts and opposed drastic reforms of Social Security, without being tarred as a fiscally reckless liberal. (Of course, such accusations are hard to make after the fiscal performance of today’s “conservatives.”) Even his more conservative positions—like his openness to bombing Pakistan, or his support for merit pay for public-school teachers—do not appear to emerge from a desire or need to credentialize himself with the right. He is among the first Democrats in a generation not to be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary. He does not smell, as Clinton does, of political fear.

There are few areas where this Democratic fear is more intense than religion. The crude exploitation of sectarian loyalty and religious zeal by Bush and Rove succeeded in deepening the culture war, to Republican advantage. Again, this played into the divide of the Boomer years—between God-fearing Americans and the peacenik atheist hippies of lore. The Democrats have responded by pretending to a public religiosity that still seems strained. Listening to Hillary Clinton detail her prayer life in public, as she did last spring to a packed house at George Washington University, was at once poignant and repellent. Poignant because her faith may well be genuine; repellent because its Methodist genuineness demands that she not profess it so tackily. But she did. The polls told her to.

Obama, in contrast, opened his soul up in public long before any focus group demanded it. His first book, Dreams From My Father, is a candid, haunting, and supple piece of writing. It was not concocted to solve a political problem (his second, hackneyed book, The Audacity of Hope, filled that niche). It was a genuine display of internal doubt and conflict and sadness. And it reveals Obama as someone whose “complex fate,” to use Ralph Ellison’s term, is to be both believer and doubter, in a world where such complexity is as beleaguered as it is necessary.

This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics. As humankind abandons the secular totalitarianisms of the last century and grapples with breakneck technological and scientific discoveries, the appeal of absolutist faith is powerful in both developing and developed countries. It is the latest in a long line of rebukes to liberal modernity—but this rebuke has the deepest roots, the widest appeal, and the attraction that all total solutions to the human predicament proffer. From the doctrinal absolutism of Pope Benedict’s Vatican to the revival of fundamentalist Protestantism in the U.S. and Asia to the attraction for many Muslims of the most extreme and antimodern forms of Islam, the same phenomenon has spread to every culture and place.

You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps. This, surely, is where Bush has failed most profoundly. By aligning himself with the most extreme and basic of religious orientations, he has lost many moderate believers and alienated the secular and agnostic in the West. If you cannot bring the agnostics along in a campaign against religious terrorism, you have a problem.

Here again, Obama, by virtue of generation and accident, bridges this deepening divide. He was brought up in a nonreligious home and converted to Christianity as an adult. But—critically—he is not born-again. His faith—at once real and measured, hot and cool—lives at the center of the American religious experience. It is a modern, intellectual Christianity. “I didn’t have an epiphany,” he explained to me. “What I really did was to take a set of values and ideals that were first instilled in me from my mother, who was, as I have called her in my book, the last of the secular humanists—you know, belief in kindness and empathy and discipline, responsibility—those kinds of values. And I found in the Church a vessel or a repository for those values and a way to connect those values to a larger community and a belief in God and a belief in redemption and mercy and justice … I guess the point is, it continues to be both a spiritual, but also intellectual, journey for me, this issue of faith.”

The best speech Obama has ever given was not his famous 2004 convention address, but a June 2007 speech in Connecticut. In it, he described his religious conversion:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

To be able to express this kind of religious conviction without disturbing or alienating the growing phalanx of secular voters, especially on the left, is quite an achievement. As he said in 2006, “Faith doesn’t mean that you don’t have doubts.” To deploy the rhetoric of Evangelicalism while eschewing its occasional anti-intellectualism and hubristic certainty is as rare as it is exhilarating. It is both an intellectual achievement, because Obama has clearly attempted to wrestle a modern Christianity from the encumbrances and anachronisms of its past, and an American achievement, because it was forged in the only American institution where conservative theology and the Democratic Party still communicate: the black church.

And this, of course, is the other element that makes Obama a potentially transformative candidate: race. Here, Obama again finds himself in the center of a complex fate, unwilling to pick sides in a divide that reaches back centuries and appears at times unbridgeable. His appeal to whites is palpable. I have felt it myself. Earlier this fall, I attended an Obama speech in Washington on tax policy that underwhelmed on delivery; his address was wooden, stilted, even tedious. It was only after I left the hotel that it occurred to me that I’d just been bored on tax policy by a national black leader. That I should have been struck by this was born in my own racial stereotypes, of course. But it won me over.

Obama is deeply aware of how he comes across to whites. In a revealing passage in his first book, he recounts how, in adolescence, he defused his white mother’s fears that he was drifting into delinquency. She had marched into his room and demanded to know what was going on. He flashed her “a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry.” This, he tells us, was “usually an effective tactic,” because people were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.

And so you have Obama’s campaign for white America: courteous and smiling and with no sudden moves. This may, of course, be one reason for his still-lukewarm support among many African Americans, a large number of whom back a white woman for the presidency. It may also be because African Americans (more than many whites) simply don’t believe that a black man can win the presidency, and so are leery of wasting their vote. And the persistence of race as a divisive, even explosive factor in American life was unmissable the week of Obama’s tax speech. While he was detailing middle-class tax breaks, thousands of activists were preparing to march in Jena, Louisiana, after a series of crude racial incidents had blown up into a polarizing conflict.

Jesse Jackson voiced puzzlement that Obama was not at the forefront of the march. “If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” he remarked. The South Carolina newspaper The State reported that Jackson said Obama was “acting like he’s white.” Obama didn’t jump into the fray (no sudden moves), but instead issued measured statements on Jena, waiting till a late-September address at Howard University to find his voice. It was simultaneously an endorsement of black identity politics and a distancing from it:

When I’m president, we will no longer accept the false choice between being tough on crime and vigilant in our pursuit of justice. Dr. King said: “It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.” We can have a crime policy that’s both tough and smart. If you’re convicted of a crime involving drugs, of course you should be punished. But let’s not make the punishment for crack cocaine that much more severe than the punishment for powder cocaine when the real difference between the two is the skin color of the people using them. Judges think that’s wrong. Republicans think that’s wrong, Democrats think that’s wrong, and yet it’s been approved by Republican and Democratic presidents because no one has been willing to brave the politics and make it right. That will end when I am president.

Obama’s racial journey makes this kind of both/and politics something more than a matter of political compromise. The paradox of his candidacy is that, as potentially the first African American president in a country founded on slavery, he has taken pains to downplay the racial catharsis his candidacy implies. He knows race is important, and yet he knows that it turns destructive if it becomes the only important thing. In this he again subverts a Boomer paradigm, of black victimology or black conservatism. He is neither Al Sharpton nor Clarence Thomas; neither Julian Bond nor Colin Powell. Nor is he a post-racial figure like Tiger Woods, insofar as he has spent his life trying to reconnect with a black identity his childhood never gave him. Equally, he cannot be a Jesse Jackson. His white mother brought him up to be someone else.

In Dreams From My Father, Obama tells the story of a man with an almost eerily nonracial childhood, who has to learn what racism is, what his own racial identity is, and even what being black in America is. And so Obama’s relationship to the black American experience is as much learned as intuitive. He broke up with a serious early girlfriend in part because she was white. He decided to abandon a post-racial career among the upper-middle classes of the East Coast in order to reengage with the black experience of Chicago’s South Side. It was an act of integration—personal as well as communal—that called him to the work of community organizing.

This restlessness with where he was, this attempt at personal integration, represents both an affirmation of identity politics and a commitment to carving a unique personal identity out of the race, geography, and class he inherited. It yields an identity born of displacement, not rootedness. And there are times, I confess, when Obama’s account of understanding his own racial experience seemed more like that of a gay teen discovering that he lives in two worlds simultaneously than that of a young African American confronting racism for the first time.

And there are also times when Obama’s experience feels more like an immigrant story than a black memoir. His autobiography navigates a new and strange world of an American racial legacy that never quite defined him at his core. He therefore speaks to a complicated and mixed identity—not a simple and alienated one. This may hurt him among some African Americans, who may fail to identify with this fellow with an odd name. Black conservatives, like Shelby Steele, fear he is too deferential to the black establishment. Black leftists worry that he is not beholden at all. But there is no reason why African Americans cannot see the logic of Americanism that Obama also represents, a legacy that is ultimately theirs as well. To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. Obama expresses such a conflicted but resilient identity before he even utters a word. And this complexity, with its internal tensions, contradictions, and moods, may increasingly be the main thing all Americans have in common.

None of this, of course, means that Obama will be the president some are dreaming of. His record in high office is sparse; his performances on the campaign trail have been patchy; his chief rival for the nomination, Senator Clinton, has bested him often with her relentless pursuit of the middle ground, her dogged attention to her own failings, and her much-improved speaking skills. At times, she has even managed to appear more inherently likable than the skinny, crabby, and sometimes morose newcomer from Chicago. Clinton’s most surprising asset has been the sense of security she instills. Her husband—and the good feelings that nostalgics retain for his presidency—have buttressed her case. In dangerous times, popular majorities often seek the conservative option, broadly understood.

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do. And a Clinton-Giuliani race could be as invigorating as it is utterly predictable.

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.