A Gentleman’s view.

Rachel Maddow: How America’s Security-Industrial Complex Went Insane

If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?

 

The following is an excerpt from Rachel Maddow’s new book, “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power,” published by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. 

In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

The American taxpayers’ investment in my town’s security didn’t stop at the new safety complex. I can see further fruit of those Homeland dollars just beyond my neighbor’s back fence. While most of us in town depend on well water, there are a few houses that for the past decade or so have been hooked up to a municipal water supply. And when I say “a few,” I mean a few: I think there are seven houses on municipal water. Around the time we got our awesome giant new fire truck, we also got a serious security upgrade to that town water system. Its tiny pump house is about the size of two phone booths and accessible by a dirt driveway behind my neighbor’s back lot. Or at least it used to be. The entire half-acre parcel of land around that pump house is now ringed by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, and fronted with a motion-sensitive electronically controlled motorized gate. On our side of town we call it “Little Guantánamo.” Mostly it’s funny, but there is some neighborly consternation over how frowsy Little Guantánamo gets every summer. Even though it’s town-owned land, access to Little Guantánamo is apparently above the security clearance of the guy paid to mow and brush-hog. Right up to the fence, it’s my neighbors’ land and they keep everything trim and tidy. But inside that fence, the grass gets eye-high. It’s going feral in there.

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It’s not just the small-potatoes post-9/11 Homeland spending that feels a little off mission. It’s the big-ticket stuff too. Nobody ever made an argument to the American people, for instance, that the thing we ought to do in Afghanistan, the way we ought to stick it to Osama bin Laden, the way to dispense American tax dollars to maximize American aims in that faraway country, would be to build a brand-new neighborhood in that country’s capital city full of rococo narco-chic McMansions and apartment/office buildings with giant sculptures of eagles on their roofs and stoned guards lounging on the sidewalks, wearing bandoliers and plastic boots. No one ever made the case that this is what America ought to build in response to 9/11. But that is what we built. An average outlay of almost $5 billion a month over ten years (and counting) has created a twisted war economy in Kabul. Afghanistan is still one of the four poorest countries on earth; but now it’s one of the four poorest countries on earth with a neighborhood in its capital city that looks like New Jersey in the 1930s and ’40s, when Newark mobsters built garish mansions and dotted the grounds with lawn jockeys and hand-painted neo-neoclassic marble statues.

Walking around this Zircon-studded neighborhood of Wazir Akbar Khān (named for the general who commanded the Afghan Army’s rout of the British in 1842), one of the weirdest things is that the roads and the sewage and trash situation are palpably worse here than in many other Kabul neighborhoods. Even torqued-up steel-frame SUVs have a hard time making it down some of these desolate streets; evasive driving techniques in Wazir Akbar Khān often have more to do with potholes than potshots. One of the bigger crossroads in the neighborhood is an ad hoc dump. Street kids are there all day, picking through the newest leavings for food and for stuff to salvage or sell.

There’s nothing all that remarkable about a rich-looking neighborhood in a poor country. What’s remarkable here is that there aren’t rich Afghan people in this rich Afghan neighborhood. Whether or not the owners of these giant houses would stand for these undrivable streets, the piles of garbage, the sewage running down the sidewalk right outside their security walls, they’re not here to see it. They’ve moved to Dubai, or to the United States, or somewhere else that’s safer for themselves and their money. (Or our money.) Most of these fancy properties in Wazir Akbar Khān were built by the Afghan elite with profits from the international influx of cash that accompanied the mostly American influx of war a decade ago—built to display status or to reap still more war dollars from the Western aid agencies and journalists and politicians and diplocrats and private contractors who need proper places to stay in the capital. The surges big and small have been good to the property barons of Wazir Akbar Khān: residential real estate values were reportedly up 75 percent in 2008 alone. Check the listings under Kabul “villas” today and you’ll find properties priced from $7,000 to $25,000 a month with specs like this: four floors, a dozen rooms, nine toilets, three big kitchens, sleeps twenty.

No one sold the American people on this incarnation of Wazir Akbar Khān as one of the desired outcomes of all those hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent in Afghanistan. But it is what we have built at Ground Zero Afghanistan. Whatever we were aiming at, this is the manifest result.

Consider also the new hundred-million-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Fallujah, Anbar Province, Iraq, which provides only spotty wastewater treatment to the people of that city. In 2004, after the US military all but demolished Fallujah in the deadliest urban battle of the Iraq War, it was decided that the way to turn the residents of the recalcitrant Sunni Triangle away from Al-Qaeda and toward their country’s fledgling government would be to build a sewage system for all of Fallujah. The initial $33 million contract was let to a South Carolina company in June 2004, while the city was still smoldering. There was no time to waste. The Bush administration’s Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office identified the sewage system as a “key national reconciliation issue.” The goal was to have it up and running by the beginning of 2006.

Nearly five years after the deadline, having clocked in at three times its initial budget, there was still not a single residence on line. Accordingly, the plan was “descoped”—scaled down—to serve just a third of the city. In the midst then of doing a third of the work for triple the money, there was talk of walking away from the project without connecting even that one-third of Fallujah residences to the aborted plant. We had built a shit-processing plant that didn’t process shit.

And it gets worse. According to a 2008 report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, about 10 percent of the money paid to Iraqi subcontractors for the Fallujah project ended up in the hands of “terrorist organizations.” According to that same report, residents near two particular pump stations “[might] become angry” if the system ever did come on line, because “funding constraints” made “odor control facilities” impractical. Even households that were not part of the collection system would still be subject to what the Iraqi minister of municipalities and public works delicately called the “big stink.” The eighty-page report also noted, with dry finality, “The project file lacked any documentation to support that the provisional Iraqi government wanted this project in the first place.”

When, finally, late in 2011, seven years into the project, at a cost of $108 million, we managed to get a quarter of the homes in Fallujah hooked into that system, this partial accomplishment was not met with resounding huzzahs. “In the end it would be dubious to conclude that this project helped stabilize the city, enhanced the local citizenry’s faith in government, built local service capacity, won hearts or minds, or stimulated the economy,” the Special Inspector General said in 2011. “It is difficult to conclude that the project was worth the investment.” A hundred million American dollars, partially diverted to the groups fighting US troops, to build (poorly) a giant, unwanted wastewater-treatment project that provides nothing but the “big stink” for three-quarters of the city. No one would argue for something like this as a good use of US tax dollars. But it is in fact what we bought.

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Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.

The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay.

The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.

It is a big, big idea, and perhaps necessary—the financial commitment to it implies at least that we think it is. But it turns out Liberty Crossing is a bureaucratic haystack into which the now even more vast intelligence community tosses its shiniest needles. When a businessman relayed to CIA agents in Nigeria that his son seemed to be under the spell of terrorists and had gone to Yemen, perhaps for training, that duly reported needle got sucked into the fifty-thousand-reports-per-year haystack, only to be discovered after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to set off a bomb he’d stuffed into his underpants. “The complexity of this system defies description,” a retired Army lieutenant general and intelligence specialist told the Post reporters. “We can’t effectively assess whether it’s making us more safe.”

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If no one knows if it’s making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed? Liberty Crossing is slated to almost double in size over the next decade. Remember the fierce debate in Congress over whether or not it’s worth it to do that? No? Me neither. But we keep building it. We keep chugging along.

National security is a real imperative for our country—for any country. But the connection between that imperative and what we do about it has gone as frowsy as my hometown’s little pump station in high August. Our national security policy isn’t much related to its stated justifications anymore. To whatever extent we do argue and debate what defense and intelligence policy ought to be, that debate—our political process—doesn’t actually determine what we do. We’re not directing that policy anymore; it just follows its own course. Which means we’ve effectively lost control of a big part of who we are as a country. And we’ve broken faith with some of the best advice the founders ever gave us.

Our constitutional inheritance didn’t point us in this direction. If the colonists hadn’t rejected British militarism and the massive financial burden of maintaining the British military, America wouldn’t exist. The Constitutional Convention debated whether America should even have a standing army. The founders feared that maintaining one would drain our resources in the same way that maintaining the eighteenth-century British military had burdened the colonies. They worried that a powerful military could rival civilian government for power in our new country, and of course they worried that having a standing army around would create too much of a temptation to use it. Those worries about the inevitable incentives to war were part of what led to the division of government at the heart of our Constitution, building into the structure of our new country a deliberate peaceable bias.

But in the past generation or two, we’ve drifted off that historical course. The steering’s gone wobbly, the brakes have failed. It’s not a conspiracy, there aren’t rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It’s been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that.

The good news is we don’t need a radical new vision of post–Cold War American power. We just need a “small c” conservative return to our constitutional roots, a course correction. This book is about how and why we’ve drifted. It wasn’t inevitable. And it’s fixable.

 

Copyright © 2012 Rachel Maddow 

Deciphering Right-Wing Code: What Conservatives Are Really Saying When They Seem to Spew Nonsense By Sara Robinson

Did Rick Santorum just declare the next right-wing crusade?

Progressive commentators have been piling on Rick Santorum for a weirdly incoherent statement he made about the state of American history classes in America’s colleges. Here’s what he said:

“I was just reading something last night from the state of California. And the state of California universities — I think it’s seven or eight of the California system of universities — don’t even teach an American history course. It’s not even available to be taught. Just to tell you how bad it’s gotten in this country, where we’re trying to disconnect the people from the root of who we are….”

The derision Santorum has received is well-deserved. He messed up the facts badly: 10 of the 11 UC campuses do teach US history (the only exception is UC San Francisco, which is exclusively a graduate-level health sciences campus and offers no humanities classes at all).

It also misses the point. It’s not news when a conservative says something that was flat-out wrong, or when liberals take smug satisfaction in demonstrating that they are (as usual) factually right. But there was something else Santorum said in that statement that was newsworthy and important — and in our zeal to debunk the facts, many progressives are completely missing it.

It’s Not About the Facts

The thing to remember is this: Even though right-wing narratives are often factually wrong, they are absolutely never content-free. Stories like this are always about something. And the weirder and more factually challenged they sound to liberal ears, the more important it probably is for us to know what that something is. Too often, our obsession with the gobsmacking wrongness of these statements deafens us to clues to the right’s current motives and intentions that are frequently lurking in these strange declarations.

I’m a native-born speaker of right-wing code. And what I heard in Santorum’s ramble was, frankly, hair-raising. To my ears, it was a very loud and clear tip-off that conservatives are gearing up an all-out frontal assault on funding for America’s public universities.

The Story Beneath the Story

Santorum’s brief comment, incoherent as it seemed, communicated a great deal to his audience by artfully triggering a vast universe of essential right-wing memes. Consider what got communicated here.

The University of California may have 11 campuses, but in the right-wing mind, “UC” is code for just one of them — UC Berkeley, the first and still-flagship campus, which holds a mythic position as Ground Zero for all of Dirty Hippiedom in the conservative imagination. If Satan is alive on earth, there is no doubt that his zip code is 94720. Everything conservatives loathe about the Evil 1960s is epitomized by the very word, “Berkeley.”

Oblique as this already is, invoking UC and Berkeley also calls forth the ghost of Ronald Reagan — always a good thing in conservative stories. Let it never be forgotten that Our Hero made his political bones by standing up to those Dirty Hippie brats while he was governor of California. He punished them by abolishing UC’s free tuition — which is still remembered by the faithful as the first historic salvo in the long war to defund all public services.

Furthermore: picking on UC was telling in another way. When conservatives seriously gather themselves to go after somebody, they always attack frontally, at their intended victim’s point of greatest strength. (See also: swiftboating.)  The University of California system has long been regarded as the best public university system in America, and Berkeley as the best single public university in the country. Santorum’s story’s focus on this particular system — the biggest, baddest exemplar of its type — is no random accident. It draws a bead on the strongest target on the field. This is almost always a clear sign that conservatives are lining up their artillery — in this case, for an open assault on America’s public colleges and universities.

The Crusade Begins

When wingnuts say stuff like this, it is never, ever offhand. This narrative is making the rounds on the right because somebody is laying the groundwork for an imminent, planned political action. Santorum’s screed is the first stage of this campaign. It’s a story that justifies the coming action, and puts the issue on the public table for discussion. It explains to right-wing followers that public universities, already well-understood as havens for liberal (!) public employees (!!) who exist only to corrupt the youth (!!!), are now also so blatantly unpatriotic (!!!!) that they no longer deserve taxpayer support.

Further inquiry bore this suspicion out. It turns out that Santorum’s weird claims about UC’s history departments were a garbled rendering of an op-ed that appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. (The article is behind a paywall; but the report it referenced, from the conservative Hoover Institution, is not.) The WSJ piece deplored UC’s history programs thusly:

This decline in the quality of education coincides with a profound transformation of the college curriculum. None of the nine general campuses in the UC system requires students to study the history and institutions of the United States. None requires students to study Western civilization, and on seven of the nine UC campuses, including Berkeley, a survey course in Western civilization is not even offered. In several English departments one can graduate without taking a course in Shakespeare. In many political science departments majors need not take a course in American politics.

The report goes on to point out that university faculties skew decidedly liberal (perhaps because the facts have a well-known liberal bias), and that nothing but partisan education happens behind those ivy walls.

You can kind of squint sideways and see how Santorum got from here to there.

For the record: it is true that a single “survey course on Western Civilization” isn’t offered at most UC campuses. That’s because Western Civilization courses are more typically offered in a multi-part series, because the professors don’t think it’s possible to effectively teach 3,000 years of history in a mere 10 weeks. So all of UC’s undergrad campuses offer plenty of courses in both US and Western history, and a lot of students take them to fulfill their general education requirements. However, it’s also true that many students choose to broaden their horizons by taking something they didn’t already cover in both elementary and high school — say, Asian or African history — instead.

Given how fast and loose the WSJ played with this point, it’s probably not wise to credit it with much accuracy on the other claims, either.

But the content of this Hoover report isn’t as important as the fact of its provenance, its existence, and its publication on the pages of the WSJ. Right-wing crusades almost always start with think-tank reports; and are issuized on the pages of conservative magazines and newspapers. From there, the ideas are picked up and disseminated by Fox, politicians, conservative ministers, and right-wing bloggers. If all goes well, within weeks, legislators will be paying attention, and lobbyists will be presenting them with ready-written legislation to propose to deal with this manufactured “problem.”

This is the path we’re on now. Santorum was setting the stage. He warned us, very clearly: Following the War on Public Employees and the War on Women, this will be the summer of the War on Public Universities. Whether the proposals will be to revoke their charters, close campuses, or sell off their facilities to for-profit colleges, you can bet that ALEC already has the bills in the can, and will be introducing them in state legislatures presently.

We can waste our time and energy marveling at Mr. Santorum’s lack of facticity — or we can hear the clear warning of real danger just ahead, and start getting ready to defend our public universities.

Robert Greenwald on the New Film “Koch Brothers Exposed” — the 1% at Its Very Worst

Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation debuts their feature-length film, an exposé of the right-wing brothers’ massive reach.

Robert Greenwald and his Brave New Foundation will tonight debut their feature-length film, Koch Brothers Exposed, in New York. (The DVD is available here.) Koch Brothers Exposed weaves together a series of short films produced over the course of the last year or so as part of an online video campaign of the same name. As principals of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held corporation in America and one of the nation’s top polluters, the Koch brothers have grown notorious for their funding of think-tanks and astroturf organizations that aim to deregulate business and scale back government programs such as Social Security, Medicare and the new healthcare reform law.

Koch Brothers Exposed zeroes in on several aspects of the Kochs’ impact by focusing on the people most affected by the brothers’ use of their billions to buy politicians and ignore regulators. In North Carolina, we meet high school students whose lives would have been gravely impacted had Koch-allied politicians succeeded in undoing the desegregation of the Wake County school system. In Arkansas, the filmmakers take viewers to a community that is riven with cancer, the likely result of toxic dumping by a Koch-owned paper plant. We meet voters in Missouri and Texas who find themselves disenfranchised by a voter-ID law pushed by an organization funded with Koch money.

 

Before becoming an activist filmmaker, Robert Greenwald enjoyed a long career in the world of commercial film and television, directing the feminist classic, The Burning Bed, and earning a Peabody Award for Sharing the Secret, a 2000 made-for-TV movie about a teenager with an eating disorder. He also directed the cult classic, Steal This Movie, about his late friend, Abbie Hoffman — which may speak to where his heart was all along. The advent of Fox News launched Greenwald into the role of an activist when his Brave New Films launched with Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. Since then Brave New Films and Brave New Foundation have produced a torrent of video shorts and films, including Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Rethinking Afghanistan and Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers.

 

AlterNet sat down with Greenwald to discuss the value of storytelling as an organizing tool — and to explore just what makes the Koch brothers “the 1 percent at its very worst.”

AlterNet: What drew your interest to the Koch brothers as a vehicle for a broader story? These guys are your poster boys, but they’re poster boys for something even larger than themselves. 

Robert Greenwald: What we always try to do with Brave New Foundation films is to connect the dots. I think it’s very important that people understand how whole systems work — and that it’s not a question of a rotten apple, be it Wal-Mart, or be it war profiteers, or be it the Koch brothers. In all these cases, they are representative of the fact that there are structural and systemic inequities in our society.

The Koch brothers, as you say today, are perfectly out of Central Casting [as typecasts for] rich, arrogant, conservative billionaires. But they’re not the only ones. What drew my attention to it was Jane Mayer’s brilliant piece in The New Yorker, and articles by Lee Fang and [AlterNet's] Addie Stan — and the realization that this was an opportunity to do what we do, which is build narratives. Now we can’t, and shouldn’t, do everything. There are certain issues that should absolutely remain in the hands of policy folks, or think tanks or position papers. But the Kochs are breathing, human representatives of the worst of the 1 percent — and it’s the way they use their money to advance their economic self-interest and their ideology. And that’s important.

It’s not just about having money; it’s the use of the money, the use of the power — it’s the use of the money and power to impress and take advantage of others. And it’s the fact that they are fighting tooth and nail to make sure that capitalism has absolutely no restraints on it. And capitalism without restraints is a very ugly beast.

A: You embarked on this initially as a series of shorter films. What led you to that approach? Each of these films dealt with very different aspects of the Koch brothers’ activities. When you set out to make these shorter films, did you have a longer film in mind?

RG: When we started the Koch Brothers Exposed campaign, we were not thinking — or I was not thinking — of a longer film. It was similar to our work around Afghanistan, were we learned — you know, one of the things that’s exciting about working in digital media is how quickly everything changes.

A: One of the challenges, too.

RG: Oh, my god! We could have a long session just on the changes on YouTube, which has been phenomenal in a short period of time. But we realized with the Afghanistan work — and there we did it because we really had no choice; we had no money and no funding at the beginning, so we were only able to do a couple of short pieces. But with each short piece, we found that we were building an online community, and so we used that same approach with the Koch brothers.

And so, one piece was around Social Security, one piece was around environment, one piece was around Wisconsin, one piece was around education — and what we were doing was we were reaching an audience with particular interests in that aspect of the Koch work. And, frankly, very strategically reaching out to audiences so they could see how the issue they care about most profoundly was being attacked by the Kochs. And then a couple of months into it, we realized that there was an opportunity for a full-length film here.

We fortunately were able to raise some money to allow us to take the short pieces — we went online, we asked people for help, we had a very strong response from thousands of our small donors and some wonderful larger donors and a foundation or two who said, We think this is important. We think it’s important because it’s talking about the structure, it’s talking about the way the system works, and it’s connecting the dots between these various issues: Social Security, resegregation, buying up politicians, buying up college professors. And, overall, it’s the money in politics frame. This is what you can achieve when you have money, when you have power, when you have access and you’re willing to use it for your own narrow self-interest.

A: By doing this film in these pieces that look at all different aspects of what these guys are up to because of their broad reach, do you inadvertently build a coalition? One piece of the film that is so moving is about an African-American community in Arkansas that is decimated by cancer because of the apparent dumping of toxic waste by a plant owned by Koch Industries. You have the environmental community galvanized by parts of your film. You have the voting rights community targeted by another part of the film. 

RG: Definitely. And as we realized the size and scope of what the Kochs were doing, it became very intentional. One of the problems in the progressive movement, all too often — and, you know, people have talked about this endlessly — the separate silos, the single-issue folks who are both focused and funded to do a single issue — but how do you encourage and work so that the issue people come together and see the importance of the fact that the people who are attacking the environment are attacking Social Security, are attacking public education, are attacking and buying politicians, are attacking an African-American community, etc., etc.

[The Koch brothers] are a perfect example of the interlocking interests of the 1 percent, and how they are using, again, their money, their power, their access on a series of issues. And woe unto us if we do not see that and if we do not connect those dots, and if we do not bring all of those communities together. I’m actually thrilled that we have more than 40 groups working with us on this — from the NAACP to Greenpeace to DFA (Democracy for America) to a whole series of unions. And it’s been very exciting to see and be a part of building and growing that coalition.

A: Social media has been your primary means of distribution, particularly on the short films. Koch Brothers Exposed is being made available on DVD, but how else do you plan to distribute it?

RG: There will be the 40-plus groups — and they’ve been critical to every undertaking we do. There will be progressive media, led by AlterNet, which have been, as on every single film, extraordinary partners. [Progressive] radio stations and televisions and the Huffington Post — there’s been all kinds of places where attention has been given to the specific campaigns [such as Rethinking Afghanistan and Wal-Mart]. Then there is the very, very active Facebook presence, and lots of work using Twitter, of course. And then in what’s gonna be a major breakthrough, we’re going to be in somewhere between 50 and 60 million homes with streaming and video-on-demand (via cable and satellite networks). That doesn’t mean that all 60 million people are going to watch it, but it’s going to be an option.

A: Are there times when you find yourself surprised by who you’re actually reaching? For instance, in Addie’s research, she stumbled upon an opera blog that featured your video on the North Carolina school board takeover by Koch-sponsored advocates of resegregating the school system. The link there is that David Koch is a significant patron of the New York City opera, and this blogger was issuing a warning to other opera buffs about tainted Koch money.

RG: One of the things that people often don’t understand about digital media online is that they’ll say, you know, you’re only reaching people who agree with you: You really should do an op-ed in the New York Times. And I kind of smile to myself and think, the only people who read an op-ed on a certain subject in the New York Times — and I love the New York Times — are a very self-selected group of people. But when you put narrative content on digital platforms the possibilities are limitless because — and the opera blog is a perfect example, because that’s gonna reach opera audiences. It’s not going to reach red, white or blue; it’s not gonna be defined by Republican or Democrat; t’s going to be defined by opera.

And similarly, with some of the health folks that we are reaching with this because of the cancer in Arkansas. The fact that religious communities are spreading these around because they see a moral and religious issue around the Kochs. The fact that older people are spreading and using some of the Social Security stuff, which, again, we know cuts across Republican or Democrat. So that’s the beauty of the potential with the digital platforms. And video is a perfect way to do that — video passed on by friends, relatives, even coworkers, is among — and the advertising agencies have tested this — the most effective and impactful ways [to convey a story].

Because people don’t trust 30-second [television] spots. You can show me all the data in the world about how many homes [are reached by] the 30-second spot. But the impact is the real key, because regardless how many homes it’s in, how many silence it? How many are watching on Tivo and fast-forward through it? And how many, particularly 35 and under, just don’t trust TV ads? Versus something forwarded to you from an opera blog, or from a member of your church.

A: Returning to the Arkansas segment of Koch Brothers Exposed — the story of a small town that is riven with cancer, apparently because of toxic dumping by a Koch Industries Georgia Pacific factory. The rest of the film — in very different ways and in very different circumstances — mostly highlights the Kochs’ involvement in government or politics, whether it’s the attempt to resegregate the Wake County school system in North Carolina, or the voter ID laws passed by state legislatures across the country, or attempts to scale back Social Security.

Then we go to this community in Arkansas, where way too many people are dying of cancer, and it’s a very poignant story. The scenes in the cemetery are just gut-wrenching. What made you decide to use that story, and how did you decide where to place it in the film?

RG: What I’ve tried to do in as many of the films as possible is to make the personal political, so that people understand it’s not them as individuals, and it’s not even their fault or a result of the alignment of the stars, but it’s the way the system works. Whether it’s the individuals in Wal-Mart, whether it’s the individuals in Iraq for Sale, it’s always important to find those people who exemplify what we’re talking about. Because otherwise the discussion is too abstract; it’s an abstract discussion about ideology and its consequences. But if you see people bleeding and hurting and paying a price, then it brings it home. So that’s the overview.

In this particular case, a couple of things that i read came together. One, that Koch [Industries] was one of the worst 10 polluters. Two, that David Koch was a cancer survivor himself. And, three, that [the Koch brothers] spend enormous amounts of money trying to fight regulations that would protect people from getting sick from their own factories and plants. So putting those three ideas together… [Brave New Foundation filmmakers] Jeff [Cole] and Natalie [Kottke]  spent five months on this — a story, by the way, just as an aside, one would hope the corporate media would be undertaking, but they’re not, partly because they don’t have the resources, and partly because they don’t care about a poor, black community somewhere getting screwed over. So, because we had the support from the people we did…Natalie was able to put months into finding the community and the people, building a level of trust, going and visiting,and then getting their agreement and encouragement and support for us to be able to go forward.

A: Progressives and liberals — we know our facts. We like to think we can convince the world to see things our way through reason and facts. But you can’t convey the facts without storytelling and narrative, and despite the great number of artists and creative people who identify themselves as either liberal or progressive, the right often does a better job at creating a narrative — often a narrative with which facts do not comport. What do you have to say to AlterNet readers about the importance of storytelling and narrative?

RG: This is a very important discussion; it’s very critical, because many wonderful, committed, passionate progressives really believe that if we can turn out one more white paper with 17 points about how to fix Problem X, the the world and the axis would shift. And they truly believe that because they are in a distinct minority of people who function primarily with their rational brain. But there’s all kind of scientific evidence, psychological evidence, that that’s not primarily the way you reach people; it’s not the way you move people. It’s not the way a great majority of people make their decisions. And what we do at Brave New Films and Brave New Foundation always, and this comes from my commercial background in storytelling, is, you reach the heart first. And if you reach the heart first, then you can access the brain — and you can access change and movement. But if you start with the multifaceted position paper, it’s very hard to move people.

So narrative becomes important, because that’s the way that you touch people, that’s a way that you get them feeling something, and then you open up their brain so that you can change their position, so that you can encourage them to think differently.

A: We’re in the throes of a political season that is one of the angriest we’ve seen in a good, long while. Given that context, how would you like to see people use Koch Brothers Exposed?

RG: Probably the most exciting thing of all in doing these films is that people find all kinds of ways of using them that we at the Brave New Foundation would never dream about. I mean, the most creative and inventive ways. People have shown them in bowling alleys, in church basements, on college campuses. I think the primary thing is that with the films, with the digital media, everybody can do something. Everybody can get a copy of the movie and do a screening. Or everybody can get a copy of the movie and donate it to the library. Or everybody can get a copy of the movie and give it to a church or a social group — or show it at any one of the many places today that have TV screens.

And that’s another reason that we do these films but do not focus on getting them into theaters, where the bar to entry is high — $9, $10, $11. No — put them in every possible place where people congregate, because where they congregate today, there’s almost always a TV screen. You know the ultimate goal is organize, organize — and then, organize.

But the Koch brothers don’t care about being taken seriously by the smart set in Washington. They care only about one thing: winning. And left to maneuver behind the scenes, they just might do it. Now, is everybody paying attention?

 

Leader’s Suicide Reveals Frightening, Violent, Organized Misogyny Movement

The suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists whose furies include the family court system, domestic violence laws and false rape accusations.

After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes.

In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see how committed they are to their cause. It is time, boys, to give them a taste of war.” Calling for all-out insurrection, he offered tips on making Molotov cocktails and urged his readers to use them against courthouses and police stations. “There will be some casualties in this war,” he predicted. “Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.”

For people who associate the men’s and fathers’ rights movements with New Age drum circles in the woods, the ferocity of Ball’s rhetoric, the horror of his act, and, in particular, the widespread and blatantly misogynistic reaction to it may come as something of a revelation. When the feminist Amanda Marcotte, a bête noire of the men’s rights movement, remarked that “setting yourself on fire is an extremely effective tool if your goal is to make your ex-wife’s life a living hell,” a poster at the blog Misandry.com went ballistic. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” he raged. “She is evil and such a vile evil that she is a disease that needs to be cut out of the human [consciousness] just like the rest of the femanazi ass harpies.”

It’s not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction.

 

Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations. There are literally hundreds of websites, blogs and forums devoted to attacking virtually all women (or, at least, Westernized ones) — the so-called “manosphere,” which now also includes a tribute page for Tom Ball (“He Died For Our Children”). While some of them voice legitimate and sometimes disturbing complaints about the treatment of men, what is most remarkable is the misogynistic tone that pervades so many. Women are routinely maligned as sluts, gold-diggers, temptresses and worse; overly sympathetic men are dubbed “manginas”; and police and other officials are called their armed enablers. Even Ball — who did not directly blame his ex-wife for his troubles, but instead depicted her and their three children as co-victims of the authorities — vilified “man-hating feminists” as evil destroyers of all that is good.

This kind of woman-hatred is increasingly visible in most Western societies, and it tends to be allied with other anti-modern emotions — opposition to same-sex marriage, to non-Christian immigration, to women in the workplace, and even, in some cases, to the advancement of African Americans. Just a few weeks after Ball’s death, while scorch marks were still visible on the sidewalk in Keene, N.H., that was made clear once more by a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik.

On July 22, Breivik slaughtered 77 of his countrymen, most of them teenagers, in Oslo and at a summer camp on the island of Utøya, because he thought they or their parents were the kinds of “politically correct” liberals who were enabling Muslim immigration. But Breivik was almost as voluble on the subjects of feminism, the family, and fathers’ rights as he was on Islam. “The most direct threat to the family is ‘divorce on demand,’” he wrote in the manifesto he posted just before he began his deadly spree. “The system must be reformed so that the father will be awarded custody rights by default.”

The manosphere lit up. Said one approving poster at The Spearhead, an online men’s rights magazine for the “defense of ourselves, our families and our fellow men”: “What could be more ‘an eye for an eye’ than to kill the children of those who were so willing to destroy men’s families and destroy the homeland of men?”

‘The Homeland of Men’

The men’s rights movement, also referred to as the fathers’ rights movement, is made up of a number of disparate, often overlapping, types of groups and individuals. Some most certainly do have legitimate grievances, having endured prison, impoverishment or heartrending separations from genuinely loved children.

Jocelyn Crowley, a Rutgers political scientist and the author of Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America, says that most men who join real (as opposed to virtual) men’s rights groups aren’t seeking to attack the family court system so much as they are simply struggling to navigate it. What they talk most about when they meet face to face, she says, are strategies to deal with their ex-partners and have better relationships with their children.

But Molly Dragiewicz, a criminologist at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and the author of Equality With a Vengeance: Men’s Rights Groups, Battered Women, and Antifeminist Backlash, argues that cases in which fathers are badly treated by courts and other officials are not remotely the norm. The small percentage of divorces that end up in litigation are disproportionately those where abuse and other issues make joint custody a dubious proposition. Even when a woman can satisfactorily document her ex-husband’s abuse, Dragiewicz says, she is no more likely to receive full custody of her children than if she couldn’t.

The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.

Other movement adherents have forsworn sex altogether, or at least romantic relationships and marriage; the acronym they use for themselves is MGTOW, for “Men Going Their Own Way.” “If you are willing to marry a woman — any woman — in the West then you must also be willing to become the next murder-suicide story when she threatens to file for divorce, steal your kids out of your life and extort you for every current and future dollar you will ever earn,” wrote one commenter at The Spearhead. “If a man kidnapped your children, stole your home, your wallet and your bank account, you’d be more than willing to kill him in self defense. Why is it any different when ex-wives do it with the full force of the law behind them?”

 

Some take an inordinate interest in extremely young women, or fetishize what they see as the ultra-feminine (read: docile) characteristics of South American and Asian women. Others, who have internalized Christian “headship” doctrine, are desperately seeking the “submissive” women such doctrine celebrates. Still others are simply sexually awkward, and nonplussed and befuddled by society’s changing mores. The common denominator is their resentment of feminism and of females in general.

“It’s ironic,” the feminist writer Amanda Marcotte observes. “These [misogynist Web] sites owe their existence to feminism’s successes. At some point in the last couple of years, the zeitgeist hit a tipping point where female power — Hillary Clinton’s, Rachel Maddow’s, even Sarah Palin’s — stopped being questioned. Being sexist has become less acceptable than it used to be. This makes some men particularly anxious.” At the same time, of course, domestic violence and sex crimes are much more likely to be prosecuted than they were even a decade ago. Shelters, social services and legal aid are more available to most battered women than in the past.

But some experts argue that men’s rights groups have been remarkably successful. The groups, says Rita Smith, director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “have taken over the way courts deal with custody issues, particularly when there are allegations of abuse,” largely by convincing them that there is such a thing as “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS). (PAS is a supposed clinical disorder in which a child compulsively belittles one parent due to indoctrination by the other — frequently leveling false allegations of abuse. It is not recognized as a clinical disorder by either the American Psychiatric Association or the World Health Organization.) Citing studies that show that false domestic abuse accusations against men are far less common than men’s groups and PAS enthusiasts claim, Smith says the groups nevertheless have “been able to get custody evaluators, mediators, guardians ad litem and child protective service workers to believe that women and children lie about abuse.”

Threats and Abuse

One kind of abuse that is undeniable is the vilification of individual women on certain men’s group websites. The best example of that may be Register-Her, a registry of women who “have caused significant harm to innocent individuals either by the direct action of crimes like rape, assault, child molestation and murder, or by the false accusation of crimes against others.” The site was set up by Paul Elam, the blogger behind A Voice for Men, less than two weeks after Ball’s suicide. “If Mary Jane Rottencrotch decides to falsely accuse her husband of domestic violence in order to get the upper hand in a divorce,” Elam boasted on his Internet radio show, “we can publish all her personal information on the website, including her name, address, phone number … even her routes to and from work.”

Under a headline reading, “Why are these women not in prison?” the site features photos and information about some 250 alleged malefactors, including notorious women like Lorena Bobbitt and Tonya Harding, although Elam hasn’t made good on his threat to publish home addresses or phone numbers. Many of those listed received prison sentences for various crimes, but large numbers were acquitted in court, while others were never accused of any lawbreaking. A well-known feminist, for example, is listed for “anti-male bigotry,” which is compared to racism.

Elam’s site can be frightening to its targets. In one case, he offered a cash reward to the first reader to ferret out a pseudonymous feminist blogger’s real name. In another, Elam singled out a part-time blogger at ChicagoNow who describes herself as a “vegetarian park activist with two baby girls.” The woman’s mistake was to write about her discomfort with male adults helping female toddlers in the bathroom at her daughter’s preschool. The blogger conceded that she was being sexist, but wrote that “I’d rather be wrong than find out if I’m right.”

After the woman was listed, she was widely attacked on men’s movement sites. “I don’t always use the word ‘cunt’ to describe a woman,” one poster raged, “but when I do it’s because of reasons like these.” Shocked, the “Mommy blogger” took down her original post and apologized for her “demonization of men.”

It wasn’t enough. “You targeted fathers, and just fathers,” Elam rebuked her. “It strikes me that you have never really been held to account for any of your actions in life. It is quite likely that the concept of complete, selfless accountability is just completely foreign to you.” Over at the Reddit Mens Rights forum, another poster fumed: “This entire episode should be a warning to all those male hating feminists out there who believe that they are safe screaming their hate messages on the web. Finally, they are held accountable for their hate messages and finally the rest of the world will find out exactly what type of depraved people they really are.”

Amanda Marcotte, who is a prime Register-Her target, writes about men’s rights activists less than she used to. That’s not because she doesn’t take them seriously — they introduce too many “anti-woman, anti-child, pro-abuse, pro-rape ideas into the public discourse” not to — but because “they’re so doggedly mean. It becomes frightening after a while.” Marcotte says the registry may incite violence against its targets, especially because many angry male activists are active abusers. “They interact with their ideological adversaries online,” she says, “much as they do with their spouses and children: ‘I’ll give you something to cry about!’”

 

“I don’t know if Thomas James Ball ever visited this site,” Elam wrote on his blog when he started Register-Her. “What I do believe is, though, that he, if convinced to stay alive, would have been a hell of a soldier in this war.”

Soldiers in the War

The first shots in this so-called war on feminism were fired 22 years before Tom Ball’s suicide. On Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine, a troubled 25-year-old computer student, strolled into the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada, carrying a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife. He walked into a classroom, ordered the men to leave, and lined the women up against a wall.

“I am fighting feminism,” he announced before opening fire. “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.”

By the time he turned the gun on himself, 14 women were dead and 10 were wounded; four men were hurt as well. The suicide note in Lépine’s pocket contained a list of 19 “radical feminists” he hoped to kill, and this: “I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker. … They want to keep the advantages of women … while seizing for themselves those of men.”

Today, that kind of rage is often directed at all women, not only perceived feminists. “Women don’t need the powers-that-be to get them to hate and use men,” the blogger Alcuin wrote recently. “They have always used men; maybe they have always hated us too.” Added another blogger, Angry Harry: “There are now, literally, billions of dollars, numerous empires, and millions of jobs that depend on the public swallowing the idea that women need to be defended from men.”

“A word to the wise,” offered the blogger known as Rebuking Feminism. “The animals women have become want one thing, resources and genes. … See them as the animals they have become and plan … accordingly.”

And many are quick to endorse violence against women. “There are women, and plenty of them, for which [sic] a solid ass kicking would be the least they deserve,” Paul Elam wrote in an essay with the provocative title, “When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?” “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”

For some, it’s more than just talk. In 2006, Darren Mack, a member of a fathers’ rights group in Reno, Nev., stabbed his estranged wife to death and then shot and wounded the family court judge who was handling his divorce.

That kind of violence continues right up to the present.

In Seal Beach, Calif. last Oct. 12, a day after Scott Evans Dekraai and his ex-wife had been in court to fight over custody of their 8-year-old son (Dekraai had 56% custody but wanted full custody and “final decision making authority” on matters of the child’s education and medical treatment), Dekraai walked into the hair salon where his ex-wife worked armed with three handguns. There, he allegedly shot seven women, six of them fatally; he also is accused of killing two men — the salon’s owner, as he attempted to flee, and a man in a car outside.

Michelle Fournier, Dekraai’s ex-wife, had testified that Dekraai was not taking his bipolar medicine and that he was suicidal and dangerous. If she had survived his rampage, she might have enjoyed having the last word about his propensity for violence. But she did not, becoming instead the latest in a long, sad line of victims of women-hating men.

Beyond The Battlefield: Afghanistan’s Wounded Struggle With Genital Injuries

 

Before they went off to fight in Afghanistan, the guys of 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines talked quietly about their deepest fear. Not dying. Not losing a leg or an arm.

It was having their genitals ripped off, burned away or crushed in the fiery blast of an improvised explosive device.

This was no idle concern to young men bursting with testosterone. The makeshift bombs known as IEDs are taking a frightening toll in Afghanistan, the blasts shearing off arms and legs, ripping through soft flesh, crushing organs and bone, and driving dirt, rocks and filth deep into torn flesh — often leaving the genitals shredded or missing. Some guys said they’d rather be dead.

Mark Litynski, a 23-year-old rifleman with Lima Company, knew the odds. He’d been married to Heather for almost a year, and children were in the future they planned together.

I ought to freeze my sperm so we could still have kids if something happened, he thought.

The idea nagged at him. But in the rush of last-minute training before they packed their sea bags and weapons and then took a few days of boisterous leave, he kept putting it off. Where do you go to freeze your sperm, anyway? Who would you even ask?

By the time they loaded on the buses at Camp Pendleton, it was too late. Should have done it, Mark thought as they boarded the plane in September 2010.

Weeks later, Mark was on a combat patrol in Sangin, southern Afghanistan, walking behind an engineer sweeping for IEDs, marking their path with yellow spraypaint. IED detectors aren’t foolproof. There came a bright flash and searing heat, then the upward blast ripped off both of Mark’s legs and most of his left arm, slashing into his remaining arm, shattering his pelvis and driving a rock and other debris up into his abdominal cavity.

Amid the bloody carnage, all the skin was ripped from his penis and his testicles were gone.

Days later, after trauma surgeons in Germany finished trimming and suturing his stumps and temporarily closing his abdominal wounds, he managed to say a few words to Heather on the phone.

“I’m so sorry,” he croaked.

“I love you,” she told him, blinking back tears. “We will pull through this together, as a team.”

‘THEY WEREN’T PREPARED FOR THIS’

The decade of U.S. combat in Afghanistan has left Afghans and Americans with a seemingly endless series of woes. But among the most devastating are the blast wounds that have left more than 16,000 young Americans severely wounded.

Several hundred have suffered genital injuries in addition to amputations and burns, leaving them unable to father children and struggling to engage in something resembling the sex they used to have, often without the aid of what many view as the primary symbol of their manhood.

“Who’s going to want to be with me now?” wondered Marine Staff Sgt. Glen Silva, 39, after an IED blast shattered his leg, ripped open his lower torso and severed most of his penis.

It was a legitimate concern. Silva’s girlfriend stayed with him at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., through many of his 42 surgeries. But one day he was wheeled back to his room to find she had gone, leaving a nine-word handwritten note: “I can’t take this any more. I’m outta here.”

Silva, the Litynskis and others agreed to share the painful and intimate details of their ordeals in order to spotlight what they feel is a life-altering but often hidden wound, one that is frequently given inadequate attention and care within the military health care system. Those who cannot regain their sexual function or drive are given little understanding or aid, they say. In Mark and Heather’s case, it took the intervention of The Huffington Post to get them an appointment with Walter Reed’s specialist in sexual dysfunction.

“They weren’t prepared for this,” Silva said of the Walter Reed staff.

Since 2005, more than 1,500 soldiers and Marines have been carried off the battlefield with genital wounds. But since late 2009, when President Barack Obama ordered a “surge” of 30,000 combat troops into Afghanistan and approved a new tactic of increased foot patrols, the pace of genital injuries has accelerated.

In the year before the surge, 170 combat troops suffered genital wounds, mostly from IED blasts. In 2010, according to Pentagon data, that number leapt to 259. Last year, the Defense Department counted 299 cases of genital wounds that James Jezior, a urologist who does genital repair surgery at Walter Reed, characterizes as “devastating.”

“I remember lying on my side, dust everywhere, and I looked down and saw my arms were split open and squirting blood and I had just two bloody stumps above my knees,” said Marine 1st Lt. James Byler, 26, who was blown up a few weeks before Mark Litynski. “My first coherent words to my Marines were, ‘Hey! check my nuts!’” His genitals were severely damaged, but intact.

“It’s the male instinct, the first thing you care about,” Byler said. “In past wars, guys didn’t live if they got injured as badly as me, but we’ve gotten so good at the medevac process now that guys who are catastrophically wounded are surviving. Now you have all these further complications — like, you know, what’s going to happen with my genital wounds?”

Military surgeons and specialists acknowledge that they often don’t know the answer, because, until recently, they had little or no exposure to such injuries.

‘I AIN’T GOING TO NO SEX-CHANGE DOCTOR’

In past wars, most casualties were head and chest wounds caused by shrapnel from mortars and artillery or from bullets. Walter Reed, the nation’s premier military hospital, attracts some of the best talent in military medicine. But doctors there say their only relevant experience with sexual dysfunction had long been with older prostate cancer patients, who obviously have vastly different medical and psychological needs than young men with severe battle injuries.

During the past decade, IED blasts have become the primary cause of U.S. battle casualties, killing or wounding 34,360 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the most recent Pentagon data. One reason for the increasing incidence is that modern body armor protects the chest but leaves the lower torso exposed to the upward blast of buried bombs, a vulnerability that insurgents have exploited.

Many victims end up at Walter Reed, where surgeons are able to repair some damage to the penis. Jezior uses tissue he cuts from inside the patient’s cheek or lip to rebuild the urethra, which carries urine through the penis from the bladder. Oral tissue is used because it is hairless and used to being wet, Jezior explained, and is rolled into a tube to replace the damaged urethra. He grafts skin from the patient’s thigh or groin to rebuild the outer layer of the penis.

But for guys like Staff Sgt. Silva whose penises have been partly or totally destroyed, options are few. Expertise within the military on penis replacement, or phalloplasty, is so limited that some Walter Reed patients have been referred to civilian surgeons who specialize in sex-change operations. It’s an option not well received in the ranks.

“I ain’t going to no sex-change doctor,” Silva growled. Besides, he had seen photos of the penises they had made with surgical flaps from patients’ forearms. “I could do better with Silly Putty,” he snorted.

But there is hope that doctors may soon be able to regrow a penis from the smooth muscle and endothelial cells of patients like Silva. Advances in regenerative medicine have surged during the past decade. At the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a team led by Anthony Atala reported last year that they had regenerated the penises of 12 New Zealand white rabbits. Once they healed, the rabbits were placed in cages with female rabbits. All attempted copulation within one minute and four females became impregnated.

Can he grow a penis for Silva? “We are always cautiously optimistic. This still requires a lot of work to make sure it works well,” Atala said in an interview. “As much as it works in the laboratory, it may not work in the human.”

“But,” he added, “we have a good history. Hopefully this holds some promise for the future.”

Atala is seeking regulatory approval to begin experimental penile regeneration in humans. He has met with Silva to discuss the procedure and said he wants to move forward “as expeditiously as possible,” though he declined to provide a more specific timeframe.

Still, even if surgeons can physically rebuild genitals, making them work effectively and pleasurably is vastly more challenging. Achieving erection, orgasm and ejaculation involves a complex interplay of sensory nerves, muscles and blood-vessel functions, any or all of which may have been damaged by an IED blast.

“Even if you can regenerate tissue, it doesn’t mean you can make that tissue function exactly the way it did before — mostly because of nerve function,” said Robert Dean, an andrologist who is Walter Reed’s lone specialist in sexual dysfunction.

‘WHO’S GOING TO WANT TO BE WITH ME?’

A genital wound doesn’t mean the end of pleasurable or productive sex, however, according to Dean and other specialists. It’s a common misconception, Dean said, that sex must include an erection, orgasm and ejaculation. “After an injury, the ejaculation function may be gone, but orgasm isn’t,” he said. “Erections may be difficult to achieve, but orgasms are still possible.”

That’s the theory. But predicting how well individual genital-wound patients will recover is nearly impossible, doctors admit.

Much is unknown about the secondary effects of a powerful blast on human organs. Apart from the obvious physical damage, the concussive blast wave seems to affect sexual function in ways that are not clear. Byler, for instance, suffered little visible physical damage to his genitals, but his testosterone levels and sperm count dropped alarmingly after he was injured.

He and many other genital-wound patients are given replacement doses of testosterone. Low testosterone levels can depress sex drive and decrease energy levels, but the treatment often requires precise dosages and a lengthy process of trial and error. And often, its effects are masked, as many patients are also taking a cocktail of other drugs for pain and anxiety or to control swelling and fight infection.

It’s a situation that breeds intense frustration. Genital-wound patients are anxious to know what their sexual future looks like. But doctors at Walter Reed often are unable to reassure them that their sexual functions will ever return in whole, in part or at all. It can take a year, even two, for answers to begin to emerge, Jezior said.

Even then, he said, “We absolutely do not know how well their reactions will be with what they have remaining, how functional they will be. It takes a lot of time to heal, a lot of recovery, every part of the body has to heal before your erections become what will be their end-state.”

Some patients, he added, “will not get back to a functional state.”

But it can be difficult to determine who will recover, and how much, medical officials said, largely because there is a relative paucity of data on the long-term medical and psychological effects of the available treatments and the wounds themselves.

That uncertainty can add yet another crushing psychological burden for young men already struggling with the loss of arms and legs.

“You hear a lot of, ‘This is the best we can do, but the fact of the matter is, we have never seen this type of injury before, so we [doctors] really don’t know what to tell you,’” said Byler, speaking of his experience as an amputee and genital-injury patient at Walter Reed.

Byler said he never even saw a urologist until four or five months after he was wounded. “There’s a lot of things they can do for limbs that are lost, like my legs — but no one really addresses the genitalia,” he said. “You need someone to come look at the damage and give you an honest assessment of what they think it’s gonna be. Because otherwise you’re left wondering, who’s going to want me? Who’s going to want to be with me?”

Doctors at Walter Reed acknowledge having long failed to recognize that while young men may accept the loss of a limb, even the loss of several limbs, they are often far more devastated by damage to their genitals.

“There certainly was a disconnect,” said Jezior. “It was an eye-opener for us that there is a grieving when it comes to significant injury to the genitalia that needs to be dealt with.” Still, he insisted that the care provided to genital wound patients at Walter Reed is “pretty incredible, with a lot of support.”

‘WE SAVED HIS PENIS’

Mark and Heather Litynski, however, did not feel supported after Mark was wounded. Their experience was bitter, frustrating and far from the future they had imagined.

They grew up two miles apart in the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope. When Mark shipped out to Afghanistan in September 2010, Heather went home to wait for his return.

She was holding down a temporary job at Starbucks in November when two Marines arrived, accompanied by her mother and sister. Mark was alive, they told her, but in critical condition with “severe lower torso injuries.” They handed her a terse medical report describing his wounds. When she read “bilateral [both legs] above-knee amputations,” Heather collapsed to the ground in shock.

It was far worse than she had feared. But he was alive.

“When I found out, I started crying, but very quickly I got over it because you’re just so glad they’re alive and doing well,” Heather said.

Two days passed, an agony of waiting, before doctors could talk to Heather about the extent of Mark’s injuries. There were a lot of other things to worry about — the potential for deadly infection, of possible brain damage, the trauma of losing two legs and his arm. But one thing the doctors said hit home: “We saved his penis!”

“‘Saved his penis!’ Got something!” Heather recalled with a chuckle.

Mark has also accepted his wound, just as he has gotten used to his wheelchair, his prosthetic legs and mechanical arm. “When I found out about it [his testicle loss] I was kind of … you know, ‘Should have done the sperm-freeze thing,”’ he said. “But … we’re making it through. It’s not the end of the world.”

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that.

As surgeons at Walter Reed were working to repair Mark’s abdominal wounds and shape his leg and arm stumps, they also began reconstructive work on his penis. They prescribed doses of Viagra or Cialis to see if he could get an erection. A duty nurse administered the first dose while Mark had a full-length catheter inserted in his penis. His erection was painful.

But stimulation is necessary and common early therapy for genital-wound patients, said Dean, the hospital’s sexual-dysfunction specialist. “Even though they are not really close to wanting to use it, because they have physical therapy to go through and pain issues, we start rehab therapy to see what effect that has, because we don’t want the [penile] tissues to atrophy,” he said.

Severely wounded patients like Mark typically spend a few months in intensive care at Walter Reed. Then they transfer to an apartment in one of the comfortable new housing units at the hospital and continue their physical and occupational therapy as outpatients. Once Mark got a set of prosthetic arms and learned to walk on his new prosthetic legs, he joined other wounded patients on fishing trips, even a snowboarding in Vail, Colo., just over a year after his injury.

Things weren’t easy, though. “He was very affectionate before, he used to always have his arm around me, hold my hand, just come by and kiss my head,” said Heather. “That’s how he was.” But as his physical wounds healed, the couple’s sense of intimacy did not return. Nor did Mark’s sex drive. He was lethargic. He had ”zero” desire, she said.

Mark was taking testosterone to replace the hormone normally produced by his testicles. Heather suspected the dosage was wrong, but she couldn’t get anyone at Walter Reed to listen.

“Every time we’d go to the doctor, it was always kind of awkward and embarrassing,” she said. “I’d have to bring it up and ask them — they never asked us. I was always given a vague answer — ‘Oh, well, he’s still on some medications that can decrease the libido …’ And I’m thinking having sex once every couple of months with your spouse is more than a little ‘decrease’ in libido.”

Heather started wondering if Mark was suffering from traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress, but she felt there was no one who had answers or even seemed to care. The frustration inevitably strained their marriage. Out of guilt, Mark began fiddling around with his testosterone patches, trying to adjust the dosage, desperately hoping to find a way to help.

“All of our complaints to his primary care doctors, his urologist — nothing got us anywhere,” Heather said. Then, as a result of an interview with The Huffington Post, they made contact with Dean.

In a January interview, Dean had enthusiastically described his work with genital-wound patients and their spouses. “We address how you are going to walk and dress yourself, how you’re going to have sex in the future and how you’re going to have children in the future, if possible,” he said.

A few weeks later, I mentioned Dean and his work to Mark and Heather, and was astonished to learn that they had never heard of him, despite having lived in his hospital for 15 months. Before they heard about Dean, Heather said, “I was never referred to any doctor that could really help us.”

Within days, they met with Dean, who ran some tests and ordered a change in Mark’s testosterone therapy. He expects dramatic improvement.

But the Litynskis’ disappointments haven’t ended.

‘IT JUST DOESN’T SEEM RIGHT’

The Pentagon, alarmed at the rising incidence of genital wounds, has rushed $19 million worth of protective garments to Afghanistan, including 165,000 pairs of blast-resistant briefs and 45,000 diaper-like garments to protect the genitals from upward blast..

For those who have already suffered genital wounds, there is less help.

Couples like Mark and Heather, who want the option of natural childbirth, can turn to in vitro fertilization, using donor sperm. But the process is expensive, well beyond the means of typical enlisted soldiers and Marines. At Walter Reed, the cost of a single in vitro procedure runs from $4,800 to $7,000, and success may require many attempts.

Yet the military’s medical insurance program, Tricare, specifically excludes coverage for the procedure, even in cases where the husband’s reproductive organs have been destroyed in combat.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has added to the frustration. Through its insurance program, the VA pays up to $100,000 to the severely wounded to compensate for loss of income and to help finance cars adapted for their use and other new needs. Late last year, the VA also agreed to pay up to $50,000 for damage to or loss of genitals in combat, but its $100,000 lifetime cap on such compensation does not account for veterans who have been wounded as catastrophically as Mark Litynski.

Along with many others severely wounded in combat, Mark has been awarded the full $100,000 for the loss of both legs. Because of the cap, however, he will not receive the additional $50,000 for his genital wounds — money that could help pay for fertility treatment or adoption.

Defense Department officials repeatedly refused, over a period of several months, to respond to The Huffington Post’s questions about the limits on compensation or gaps in care for those with genital wounds. Finally, Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said in a statement that the department is “working to provide” reproductive services “to severely injured service members without additional costs to them.”

Smith was unable to provide details. Heather Litynski said she has not been contacted by anyone in the Defense Department offering to help pay for fertility procedures.

Considering that Mark volunteered to serve his country and was severely injured in that duty, “it seems like it should be up to the government” to compensate them, Heather said, for not being able to have their own children together.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” added Heather, a registered nurse who typically has a sunny disposition and a quick smile. She and Mark had long planned to have children. But adoption is expensive. And apart from being costly, there are some aspects of artificial insemination or in vitro fertilization that can be hard for some couples to accept.

“It may be difficult using another man’s sperm,” she said. “The idea does bother me sometimes.” And having their insurance refuse to pay for it “is pretty disappointing,” she added.

Last year, the U.S. Army’s surgeon general commissioned a study of blast injuries, including genital wounds, and concluded that military care has lagged behind. “These are complex problems that are not commonly seen in civilian life,” said Army Col. Jonathan Jaffin, a trauma surgeon who directs the Army’s Dismounted Complex Blast Injury Task Force, which was established to improve the treatment of the severely wounded.

Like many others, Jaffin acknowledged that the military has fallen short, that it cannot fully answer the questions of couples like Mark and Heather Litynski, let alone resolve their problems. “We’re trying to gather data but we don’t have a good answer as to all of the problems we’re seeing,” he said. Genital wounds, he said, are “a very difficult problem, not just a physical problem but one that involves the family, the social dynamics, psychological and spiritual aspects.”

“We are doing everything we can to provide the very best care” for the severely wounded, Jaffin added. “I don’t think any of us will ever say we have the complete solution. We’re going to have to keep pushing, keep making it better.”

‘I WOULDN’T CHANGE IT FOR ANYTHING’

Mark and Heather are still living at Walter Reed, hoping Mark’s new hormone treatments will help ease the strain in their relationship. Yet despite their ordeals, they both seem determinedly upbeat and ready to take on the next phase of their life. Soon they’ll move back to New Hope, Minn. Heather will look for work as a nurse while Mark goes back to school to study business.

And they are weighing the costs and benefits of in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and adoption.

“We definitely want to have children. It’s going to be a big expense for us,” Heather said. “It is disappointing to me — so much has been done and given to us because of his combat injuries, which is wonderful. I feel the care and concern from the public and different charities and organizations — it’s so much, it is overwhelming.

“But there is the huge gap in alternative family planning. There’s no compensation, no help. There are charities that offer to help but I’m thinking it should be the responsibility of the government.”

They will struggle ahead, she said. But their lives will be different from what they had anticipated just two years ago. “Yes, it is different, but it’s still livable, still very positive,” she said.

“Like anything else, you move on,” Mark said. As for life ahead? “Looks pretty good. It’s disappointing, but we will still have kids — some way we will have kids, and I will look at them as if they had my DNA. It’s not that traumatic to me, as long as we’re still able to raise kids, it doesn’t necessarily matter where they came from.”

And despite the traumatic turns his life has taken, Mark said he doesn’t for a moment regret his decision to enlist in the Marines.

He served, he said, “to make a difference, not just for the United States, our citizens, but over there — we were making a difference for the people of Afghanistan.

“I wouldn’t change it for anything,” he said.

David Wood’s ebook, “Beyond the Battlefield: The War Goes on for the Severely Wounded.”

 

Soldier Allegedly Murdered For Being An Atheist

The remains of US Army Specialist Jose Ramirez, missing since 2007, were found early last month near Petrolia, TX. Authorities believe he was killed shortly after he went missing. From the Associated Press:

According to a criminal complaint, authorities found bullet holes in a bedroom wall and blood stains in a hallway. A day later, they searched the area around the home and found a human skull with bullet marks as well as a pair of shorts with the word “Army,” the complaint said.

Authorities charged 30-year-old Justin Green with first-degree murder in February. Green, who once lived in the home where the bullet holes were found, remains in jail on $1 million bond and will appear in court Monday. His attorney did not return a phone message.

Brittany Green (the defendant’s sister) allegedly told authorities that her brother said he had shot Ramirez twice because he “did not believe in God and alleged that Ramirez reached for a gun,” the complaint said. Terri Green helped her son move Ramirez’s body from the home’s garage to the shallow grave, the complaint said.

In a somewhat related story, atheists in the military have organized a concert called, “Rock Beyond Belief,” on March 31st at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. The event, according to organizers, “will highlight ”free thought” — atheism, humanism and skepticism — on a U.S. military base and will lead to broader recognition and support of non believers in the armed forces, where they say they receive little support and often discrimination from an overly Christianized military.”

 

 

 

Only about 1% of military personnel claim to be atheist, but 23% claim no religious affiliation. Christians, on the other hand, make up about 68%, leaving just 8% to be Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhism or any other religion.

Is discrimination toward atheists a trend in the military? The non-religious think so. From USA Today:

Many military nontheists report being the unwelcome targets of proselytism, sometimes by superiors, and complain of compulsory religious prayers and practices at official events. One area of growing concern is the mandatory assessment of soldiers’ “spiritual fitness,” which they say is both unconstitutional and an attempt to proselytize.

“If you are a nonreligious soldier, you are a third-class citizen in the U.S. military,” said Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a military watchdog group, who will attend the event in Fayetteville, N.C.

“You are basically told that you lack intellectual integrity, courage, character and honorability . … Rock Beyond Belief is an attempt to stick a fist up in the sky and say, ‘We have our rights.’”

There is an expression, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” and it seems that the military, or at least many in the military, prefer that soldiers enter the foxholes as believers.

 

A year ago, NPR reported that soldiers were required to take a “spiritual fitness” test, arguing that religious people are more resilient.

 

“Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping and on mental health,” says Cornum, who is director of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.

 

Justin Griffith, a sergeant at Ft. Bragg, is one of the 1% of the military, a self-described atheist. He told NPR that he grew angry at the survey, which asked him to rank himself on questions such as, ”I am a spiritual person. I believe that in some way my life is closely connected to all of humanity. I often find comfort in my religion and spiritual beliefs,” or, “In difficult times, I pray or meditate.”

 

After answering that he believed none of those things, he received a response that said, ”Spiritual fitness may be an area of difficulty.”

It continued: “You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and to others around you. You may not feel connected to something larger than yourself. You may question your beliefs, principles and values.”

It concluded: “Improving your spiritual fitness should be an important goal.”

What Griffith took away from the survey was that the Army was calling him unfit to serve.

For years now, the military has had a large evangelical bent. Specialist Jeremy Hall, who was serving in Iraq complained that a Major, Freddy J. Welborn, berated troops about atheism, saying, “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Welborn also reportedly threatened them with refusal to reenlist them and even with bringing charges against them.

Hall sued the military, saying, “They don’t trust you because they think you are unreliable and might break, since you don’t have God to rely on,” Specialist Hall said of those who proselytize in the military. “The message is, ‘It’s a Christian nation, and you need to recognize that.’ ”

He even complained of death threats. He also said he was denied a promotion. He has since dropped his lawsuit, but only because he left the military.

Two years ago, it was reported that rifle sites were being manufactured with New Testament inscriptions. A giant cross was posted at a pagan site of worship at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Harper’s Magazine did an expose on the view that our soldiers are Christian soldiers, fighting Islam.

Efforts to teach diversity in the military have shown little success. Some simply lie to fit in. A retired Army Staff Sergeant I spoke to wishes to remain anonymous to this day.

“I spent 20 years in the military and overall, I have few complaints, but that’s only because I realized early on that there were certain aspects of my life that had to be secret.”

The retired Staff Sergeant is a Wiccan. “These days,” he said, “I’d much rather come out as gay than tell them who I really am.”

When asked if he thought he’d get death threats, his answer was simply, “oh, yeah.”

Bigotry toward atheists isn’t limited to the military. In Louisiana, a high school student had the gall to object to the graduation prayer. From the Daily Kos:

On the eve of his graduation, the atheist student contacted the school superintendent to let him know that he opposed the inclusion of a prayer at the graduation ceremony. He pointed out that government-sponsored prayer in the public schools was unconstitutional and legally forbidden – and that he would be contacting the ACLU if it went ahead. The school agreed to substitute it with a moment of silent reflection, which was subsequently scuppered by a Christian student.

Then Fowler’s name, and his role in this incident, was leaked. As a direct result:

1) Fowler has been hounded, pilloried, and ostracized by his community.

2) One of Fowler’s teachers has publicly demeaned him.

3) Fowler has been physically threatened. Students have threatened to “jump him” at graduation practice, and he has received multiple threats of bodily harm, and even death threats.

4) Fowler’s parents cut off his financial support, kicked him out of the house, and threw his belongings onto the front porch.

Atheists, despite what many Christians believe, don’t hate God or even Christianity. They simply don’t believe. It’s impossible, they say, to hate something that doesn’t exist. The US Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state, yet it would be next to impossible for a non-Christian to be elected to the Presidency. There are 27 atheists in Congress, but they feel that they have to keep their non-belief secret to stay in office.

I wish I could feel that the tragic death of Jose Ramirez was an isolated case, but I fear that we’ll be seeing more and more cases of violence against atheists. For some, it seems, even violence and murder are lesser sins than the simple sin of not believing.

Breaking: Wikileaks Discovers That Israel Might Have Already Destroyed Iran’s Nuclear Facilities By Wendy Gittleson

 

In a story that is starting to sound more and more like the build up to the Iraq war, emails have been leaked which indicate that Israel already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program.

Yesterday, Wikileaks released a barrage of alleged emails from Stratfor, a computer security/counterterrorism firm. They are dated as far back as July of 2004 and as recently as December of last year.

Perhaps the most significant, given the almost universal Republican campaign promise of “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” is the fact that there might be nothing left to bomb.

In November of last year, Israel launched a military strike against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, who are in charge of guarding Iran’s missile program. Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak lauded the strike.

One of the emails leaked by Wikileaks says,

I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago. The current “let’s bomb Iran” campaign was ordered by the EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home
financial problems. It plays also well for the US since Pakistan, Russia and N. Korea are mentioned in the report.

Another email provides a possible motive for all the saber rattling: high oil prices, which could definitely be beneficial to Republicans come November.

I agree. The argument here is that the proponents of conventional war are ones that want the oil prices–but is it really that simple? What about other economic effects? For
Israel, by this argument, it doesn’t matter what method as long as it sets Iran back—-I agree with this. However, the confidence that this guy has does not show publicly. By that, I mean look at what Dagan was saying a year ago, and how quiet Israeli leaders have been. Suddenly they are really pushing the issue, and while Dagan isn’t it, his line is that conventional war would be a mistake, not that Iran doesn’t need to be dealt
with. I don’t really like trying to interpret public statements, but I think there is something here, and that’s why I keep pushing this.

Stratfor isn’t the only agency doubting the existence of Iran’s nuclear program. American spy agencies are finding little evidence. From the New York Times:

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

As you might recall, in 2002, during the buildup of the Iraq war, the Bush administration sold the war to the American people on the supposed “fact” that Iraq had weapons of mass destructions. It turns out that there were no such weapons and that the war was sold on a lie.

As you know, we did go to war. It cost us $802 billion, 100,000 American soldiers injured or dead and arguably, it put the country into the worst economic state since the Great Depression. The Republicans want to do it again, only this time with Iraq’s neighbor, Iran.

What is the motivation to go to war with Iran? During the George W. Bush administration, the word “neocon” was bandied about. In short, neocon refers to an ideology that is free market oriented, pro-Israel, imperialist and centered around the acquisition of oil. The Bush administration was full of neocons, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton and others. Bush was a neocon, as are John McCain and Joe Lieberman.

Neocons are not socially conservative, but they have found that their agenda is an easier sell to social conservatives, who tend to be very pro-Israel, hence the two ideologies seeming to morph in the last decade.

Out of the current batch of GOP Presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich is probably most closely identified with the neocon movement, but with the exception of Ron Paul, they are all trumpeting the neocon “bomb Iran” mantra.

An argument can be made that it won’t matter which GOP candidate gets elected. On the surface, Romney, Gingrich and Santorum might be very different people, but modern Republican Presidents are nothing but figureheads. Their movements are being controlled by behind the scenes men like the Koch brothers and neocon (zero tax) Grover Norquist, who told the CPAC convention that they were only looking for a President who could sign the legislation that was put in front of him, not a free thinker.

Not only has Norquist forced nearly every Republican in Congress to sign a no tax pledge, Norquist is at the head of the bomb Iran movement. It’s looking more and more like Norquist would be the de facto President, should a Republican, no matter which Republican, win.

If a Republican wins, I have no doubt that we will go into another decade-long war that might actually bankrupt the country, even if it turns out that it’s true that Iran has no nuclear weapons. Of course, the financial collapse of the US would suit the neocons very well. Full privatization of all government services is toward the top of their agenda. There’s no better way to make that happen than to spend all of our taxpayer dollars in another futile war.

 

By Stephen D. Foster 

1. “Given the increasing diversity of America’s population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers. And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount – a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let’s read our bibles. Folks haven’t been reading their bibles.”
~Barack Obama, Speech, November 2008

2. “It’s been funny to watch some of these politicians completely rewrite history now that you’re back on your feet. These are the folks who said if we went forward with our plan to rescue Detroit, “You can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Now they’re saying they were right all along. Or worse, they’re saying that the problem is that you, the workers, made out like bandits in all of this; that saving the American auto industry was just about paying back unions. Really? Even by the standards of this town, that’s a load of you-know-what. About 700,000 retirees saw a reduction in the health care benefits they had earned. Many of you saw hours reduced, or pay and wages scaled back. You gave up some of your rights as workers. Promises were made to you over the years that you gave up for the sake and survival of this industry, its workers, and their families. You want to talk about values? Hard work — that’s a value. Looking out for one another — that’s a value. The idea that we’re all in it together — that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper — that is a value. But they’re still talking about you as if you’re some greedy special interest that needs to be beaten. Since when are hardworking men and women special interests? Since when is the idea that we look out for each other a bad thing? To borrow a line from our old friend Ted Kennedy: What is it about working men and women they find so offensive?”
~Barack Obama, addressing United Auto Workers in Washington DC, February 2012

3. “I reject the idea that asking a hedge fund manager to pay the same tax rate as a teacher or a plumber is class warfare. I think it’s just the the right thing to do. Both parties agree that we need to reduce the deficit by the same amount, by $4 trillion. So what choices are we going to make to reach that goal? Either we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share in taxes or we ask seniors to pay more for Medicare. We can’t afford to do both. Either we gut education and medical research or we’ve got to reform the tax code so that most profitable corporations have to give up tax loopholes that other companies don’t get. We can’t afford to do both. This is not class warfare, it’s math.”
~Barack Obama, during a speech, September 19, 2011

4. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
~Barack Obama, speech, February 5, 2008

5. “Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market.”
~Barack Obama, Business Roundtable, February 24, 2010

6. “A good compromise, a good piece of legislation, is like a good sentence; or a good piece of music. Everybody can recognize it. They say, ‘Huh. It works. It makes sense.’”
Barack Obama, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004

7. “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”
~Barack Obama, Cairo University, June 2009

8. “We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get a tax break I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income, or a student trying to get through school, or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know that’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to the future of their country, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel the same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That’s an America built to last.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

9. “As a nuclear power – as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon – the United States has a moral responsibility to act.”
~Barack Obama, Speech in Prague about reducing nuclear arsenals around the world, April 2009

10. “I don’t oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war.”
Barack Obama, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004

11. “I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we’ve struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We’ve made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions. But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived – at great cost and great sacrifice – to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom – indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us – what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America’s shores – is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.”
~Barack Obama, Berlin Speech, July 24, 2008

12. “I think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out. I think we’re moving in a direction of greater equality and — and I think that’s a good thing. And we have done more in the two and a half years that I’ve been in here than the previous 43 Presidents to uphold that principle, whether it’s ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” making sure that gay and lesbian partners can visit each other in hospitals, making sure that federal benefits can be provided to same-sex couples.”
~Barack Obama, Presidential News Conference, June 2011

13. “In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.”
~Barack Obama, Remarks by the President Announcing the President’s Export Council, July 7, 2007

14. “It was not a religion that attacked us that September day. It was al-Qaeda. We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust.”
~Barack Obama, commemoration remarks, September 11, 2010

15. “It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today. The 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of the middle-class security all bear the union label.”
~Barack Obama, Labor Day Speech, September 7, 2010

16. “On every front there are clear answers out there that can make this country stronger, but we’re going to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling. Our job is to make sure that even as we make progress, that we are also giving people a sense of hope and vision for the future.”
~Barack Obama, Remarks at DSCC fundraiser, October 16, 2010

17. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and a latino America and an Asian America – there’s the United States of America.”
~Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, 2004

18. “This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many.”
~Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 2009

19. “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”
~Barack Obama, Berlin Speech, July 2008

20. “We didn’t become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn’t come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn’t do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.”
~Barack Obama, Labor Day Speech, September 2010

21. “We have an obligation and a responsibility to be investing in our students and our schools. We must make sure that people who have the grades, the desire and the will, but not the money, can still get the best education possible.”
~Barack Obama, during a speech, April 2011

22. “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”
~Barack Obama, Planned Parenthood Conference, July 2007

23. “When I heard that BP was not moving fast enough on claims, we told BP to set aside $20 billion in a fund – managed by an independent third party – to help all those whose lives have been turned upside down by the spill.”
~Barack Obama, remarks at Xavier University, August 2010

24. “Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.”
~Barack Obama, speaking about international cooperation in 2008

25. “One of the great strengths of the United States is… we have a very large Christian population – we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.”
~Barack Obama, press conference in Turkey, April 2009

26. “With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.”
~Barack Obama, speech to Congressional Black Caucus, September 2011

27. “That is the true genius of America, a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles. That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. That we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe or hiring somebody’s son. That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — or at least, most of the time.”
~Barack Obama, speech at Democratic National Convention, 2004

28. “Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause. Hope is what led me here today–with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be.”
~Barack Obama, speech, January 3, 2008

29. “The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart — not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.”
~Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 2009

30. “In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity – it is a pre-requisite.”
~Barack Obama, Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 24, 2009

31. “The best judge of whether or not a country is going to develop is how it treats its women. If it’s educating its girls, if women have equal rights, that country is going to move forward. But if women are oppressed and abused and illiterate, then they’re going to fall behind.”
~Barack Obama, Ladies’ Home Journal, September 2008

32. “For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”
~Barack Obama, Inaugural Address, January 2009

33. “With the magnitude of the challenges we face right now, what we need in Washington are not more political tactics — we need more good ideas. We don’t need more point-scoring — we need more problem-solving.”
~Barack Obama, press conference, March 17, 2009

34. “There’s something about the American spirit -– inherent in the American spirit — we don’t hang on to the past. We always move forward…. We are going to leave something better for our children –- not just here in the United States, but all around the world.”
~Barack Obama, speech during DNC fundraiser, October 2009

35. “You know, there’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the steelworker who’s been laid-off, the family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town. When you think like this – when you choose to broaden your ambit of concern and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers – it becomes harder not to act; harder not to help.”
~Barack Obama, speech, August 2006

36. “When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.”
~Barack Obama, speech at Democratic National Convention, 2004

37. “I trust the American people to realize that while we don’t need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren’t liberal values or conservative values – they’re American values.”
~Barack Obama, speech, May 2008

38. “Acts of sacrifice and decency without regard to what’s in it for you create ripple effects. Ones that lift up families and communities, that spread opportunity and boost our economy.”
~Barack Obama, Arizona State Commencement Speech, 2009

39. “There’s new energy to harness, new jobs to be created, new schools to build, and threats to meet, alliances to repair. The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there. There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.”
~Barack Obama, Election Night Speech in Chicago, November 4, 2008

40. “Everyone here knows that we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over this country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. This is inexcusable. Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us an economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America?”
~Barack Obama, speaking about infrastructure during jobs plan speech to Joint Session of Congress, September 2011

41. “I trust the American people to realize that while we don’t need big government, we do need a government that stands up for families who are being tricked out of their homes by Wall Street predators; a government that stands up for the middle-class by giving them a tax break; a government that ensures that no American will ever lose their life savings just because their child gets sick. Security and opportunity; compassion and prosperity aren’t liberal values or conservative values – they’re American values.”
~Barack Obama, speech, May 2008

42. “We have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

43. “I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity. For history tells a different story. History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas. In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history. And a twilight struggle for freedom led to a nation of highways, an American on the moon, and an explosion of technology that still shapes our world. In each case, government didn’t supplant private enterprise; it catalyzed private enterprise. It created the conditions for thousands of entrepreneurs and new businesses to adapt and to thrive.”
~Barack Obama, Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 2009

44. “What I’ve tried to do since I started running for President and since I was sworn in as President, is to communicate the notion that America is a critical actor and leader on the world stage, and that we shouldn’t be embarrassed about that, but that we exercise our leadership best when we are listening; when we recognize that the world is a complicated place and that we are going to have to act in partnership with other countries; when we lead by example; when we show some element of humility and recognize that we may not always have the best answer, but we can always encourage the best answer and support the best answer.”
~Barack Obama, press conference, April 2009

45. “The only way to fully restore America’s economic strength is to make the long-term investments that will lead to new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete with the rest of the world. The only way this century will be another American century is if we confront at last the price of our dependence on oil and the high cost of health care; the schools that aren’t preparing our children and the mountain of debt they stand to inherit.”
~Barack Obama, Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 2009

46. “Hostility and hatred are no match for justice; they offer no pathway to peace.”
~Barack Obama, speech, February 2009

47. “If we neglect or abandon those who are suffering in poverty … not only are we depriving ourselves of potential opportunities for markets and economic growth, but ultimately that despair may turn to violence that turns on us.”
~Barack Obama, press conference, April 2009

48. “I know that there are some on Wall Street and in Washington who’ve said that we should only focus on the banking crisis and one problem at a time. Well, we’re spending a lot of time focusing on this banking crisis, and we will continue to do so because until we get liquidity flowing again, we will not fully recover. But the American people don’t have the luxury of just focusing on Wall Street. They don’t have the luxury of choosing to pay either their mortgage or their medical bills. They don’t get to pick between paying for their kids’ college tuition and saving enough money for retirement. They have to do all these things. They have to confront all these problems. And as a consequence, so do we.”
~Barack Obama, press conference, March 2009

49. “The state of our union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m president, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

50. “I know some have argued that brutal methods like water-boarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence, I bear responsibility for keeping this country safe, and I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counter-terrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.”
~Barack Obama, speech, May 2009

51. “Discrimination cannot stand — not on account of color or gender; how you worship or who you love. Prejudice has no place in the United States of America.”
~Barack Obama, speech, July 2009

52. “We should all want a smarter, more effective government. And while we may not be able to bridge our biggest philosophical differences this year, we can make real progress. With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow. But I can do a whole lot more with your help. Because when we act together, there is nothing the United States of America can’t achieve.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

53. “I don’t believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security. I don’t think they want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship. I don’t think they want more obstruction. They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. That’s not what they want. They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they’re grappling with every single day.”
~Barack Obama, remarks to GOP House Issues Conference, January 2010

54. “I know that there are those who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change. But here’s the thing — even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy-efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future -– because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2010

55. “I believe in a strong financial sector that helps people to raise capital and get loans and invest their savings. That’s part of what has made America what it is. But a free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s what happened too often in the years leading up to this crisis. Some — and let me be clear, not all — but some on Wall Street forgot that behind every dollar traded or leveraged there’s family looking to buy a house, or pay for an education, open a business, save for retirement. What happens on Wall Street has real consequences across the country, across our economy.”
~Barack Obama, speech, April 2010

56. “We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

57. “We need to give consumers more protection and more power in our financial system. This is not about stifling competition, stifling innovation; it’s just the opposite. With a dedicated agency setting ground rules and looking out for ordinary people in our financial system, we will empower consumers with clear and concise information when they’re making financial decisions. So instead of competing to offer confusing products, companies will compete the old-fashioned way, by offering better products. And that will mean more choices for consumers, more opportunities for businesses, and more stability in our financial system. And unless your business model depends on bilking people, there is little to fear from these new rules.”
~Barack Obama, speech, April 2010

58. “We’ve been fighting about the proper size and role of government since the day the Framers gathered in Philadelphia…. But what troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad…. When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people — we, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny. Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities, and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that kept you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”
~Barack Obama, speech at University of Michigan, May 1, 2010

59. “There’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well tonight, I will. I’m directing my administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes.”
~Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, January 2012

60. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. It was nearly 10 years ago that a bright September day was darkened by the worst attack on the American people in our history. The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory — hijacked planes cutting through a cloudless September sky; the Twin Towers collapsing to the ground; black smoke billowing up from the Pentagon; the wreckage of Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where the actions of heroic citizens saved even more heartbreak and destruction. And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts…. For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda’s leader and symbol, and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and allies. The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda. Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us. We must –- and we will — remain vigilant at home and abroad. As we do, we must also reaffirm that the United States is not –- and never will be -– at war with Islam. I’ve made clear, just as President Bush did shortly after 9/11, that our war is not against Islam. Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda has slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries, including our own. So his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity…. Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.
~Barack Obama, announcement of the death of Osama Bin Laden, May 1, 2011

Americans are lucky to have a man like President Obama in the Oval Office. He cares about the future of our country more than the Republicans, who only care about political power, corporate greed, and domination over others. President Obama has made every effort to create jobs, improve health care, protect the environment, develop clean energy, and protect the rights of everyone in this country. He has restored the reputation of America around the globe and has executed a responsibly sound foreign policy that has kept America safe. His progress on all of these fronts have been hindered by Republicans who seek to sabotage his policy goals, all in an effort to seek revenge for their heavy loss in 2008. Despite his incredible and serious efforts to compromise, Republicans refuse to work with the President out of sheer hatred. It doesn’t matter what President Obama tries to do, Republicans will always oppose him and are willing to destroy the country to get their way. And since President Obama supports everything that has made America great, Republicans will only seek to wipe out all of those things and have admitted as such. That is not true leadership. It’s treason. President Obama is the only true leader in the 2012 Election and it’s time to take his words seriously and give them more respect than the Republicans have shown him.