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Eight Men Out

The House Republican Conference had its candidates' forum yesterday, and eight men made their case that they're the guy to unify the conference and get 217 votes for speaker. One wonders if, one of these days, some voters will notice that no matter how many speaker candidates the Party runs through, there never seem to be any women in the running. That is slightly surprising because the #3 in the Republican caucus, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), acts Trumpy enough that the Trumpists could probably accept her. On the other hand, she was a moderate her whole career and is just faking it now, so the moderates could probably accept her too, since they know she is just an opportunist Trumper. Maybe she is not interested because she has a 2-year-old toddler at home and the speaker has to be away from home a lot raising money for the Party.

Anyhow, yesterday, we listed nine candidates. And yet, we just wrote that eight of them made a pitch to the Republican Conference. What happened? Well, Dan Meuser (R-PA) dropped out of the running. His official reason was that he's gonna be way too busy helping Donald Trump to win Pennsylvania to also be speaker. His real reason is surely that even some of his colleagues said "Dan who?" If there was one person among the nine who had absolutely no lane, it was Meuser, since there are plenty of other contenders who are Trumpy and are NOT backbenchers with no real relevant experience.

Meanwhile, the question of which candidates are election deniers has come up twice in the last 2 days on this site (with two different answers), and keeps coming up on other sites. Let's look at it as systematically as is possible. The two clear, objective criteria for labeling someone a 2020 election denier are: (1) if they voted to reject 2020 electoral votes from one or more states, and (2) if they signed the amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to declare the 2020 results to be phony. Here's a rundown of the eight still-standing candidates, and where they stood on each matter:

Candidate Voted to Reject? Signed Brief?
Jack Bergman (R-MI) Yes Yes
Byron Donalds (R-FL) Yes No
Tom Emmer (R-MN) No Yes
Kevin Hern (R-OK) Yes Yes
Mike Johnson (R-LA) Yes Yes
Gary Palmer (R-AL) Yes Yes
Pete Sessions (R-TX) Yes No
Austin Scott (R-GA) No Yes

In short, you have eight election deniers, including four who might be called double election deniers. And in case you are wondering, the now-withdrawn Meuser is also a double election denier.

The lesson here seems evident to us. Donald Trump cannot build up a candidate to the point that the candidate wins the speakership. If the former president had that power, then we'd be talking about Speaker Jim Jordan (R-OH) right now. What Trump can do is tear a candidacy down, which is why there's no non-election-denier even in the running (nor has there been, as Jordan; former speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA; and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-LA are all double deniers). Admittedly, with 139 members having voted to overturn the results and 126 members having signed the amicus brief, there is a shortage of members who are not election deniers of some stripe. But there are some.

The plan today is for the Conference to hold a series of votes; after each round the person with the fewest votes will be eliminated. They could save themselves some time by just using ranked-choice voting, but we guess that would be too close to an admission that RCV works. This pseudo-RCV system will nonetheless eventually produce a "majority" candidate although, as we've now seen several times, being able to get 113 Republican votes does not mean that a candidate is able to get 217 votes on the floor of the House. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said he was confident that the third time would be the charm. It's possible that he's got his finger on the pulse of the Conference, we suppose, so we'll pass it along, but it really just sounds like wishful thinking to us.

What we do know is that none of the eight candidates is going to get Democratic votes. First, "election denier" is a dealbreaker. Second, all eight have committed to the promise made by McCarthy to scuttle an omnibus budget bill. So, if any of the eight gets elected speaker, then we're looking at another messy budget fight. That is presumably a second dealbreaker.

In theory, there will be a floor vote today, but since it's up to the speaker-designate to make the final call, and since there is no speaker-designate right now, this is not certain. It's entirely possible that the member who wins today's secret balloting will insist on having 217 votes before going to the floor. So, the next floor vote could be today or... some other day in the next 3 weeks or so. (Z)

Trump Legal News: A Saucerful of Secrets

The plot of the Mar-a-Lago documents case has thickened, yet again. The Australian edition of 60 Minutes managed to lay hands on recordings of Aussie billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member Anthony Pratt, in which Pratt gives much detail about his many conversations with Donald Trump. You can watch the roughly 17-minute segment here, if you wish. Unfortunately, it does not include the famous 60 Minutes bumpers, so we are unable to verify whether or not it's true that in the Southern Hemisphere, the stopwatch runs counterclockwise.

In the newly revealed recordings and documents, it is made very clear that Pratt used his money to cultivate a network of influential people, from former Australian PMs, to then-prince Charles, to Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. It is also clear that Trump often shared information that should not be shared with a civilian who has no security clearance. For example, the then-president reportedly divulged details of the attack on Iranian-linked forces in Iraq before that news was made public. Imagine if Pratt was an Iranian operative (he isn't); Trump's loose lips could have cost American lives, or allowed the Iranians to avoid the attack. Trump also allegedly bragged about his extortionist phone call to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, remarking: "You know that Ukraine phone call, that was nothing compared to what I usually do." Recall also previous reporting that Trump shared details about the United States' nuclear submarines with Pratt.

Pratt, of course, has already been interviewed by Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team. While 60 Minutes (Down Under) is being coy about where this new information came from, it presumably didn't come from Smith's office. That said, surely Pratt would have told Smith all of these things. It is not illegal, necessarily, for a president to share information with people not cleared to have it, as the occupant of the Oval Office has broad latitude to decide who can and cannot hear the nation's secrets. That said, nuclear secrets play by a different set of rules, thanks to the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (and subsequent, amending, legislation). So that part actually might be illegal. In addition, the whole narrative speaks to a cavalier attitude on Trump's part when it comes to classified information, which in turn serves to underscore the allegations made in the Mar-a-Lago case.

Consistent with his general strategy these days, when a former ally turns against him, Trump distanced himself from Pratt and also denigrated him, in this case as a "red-haired weirdo." While we see Trump's point that billionaires with obviously unnatural hair colors might not be trustworthy, the fact is that it's easy enough to prove that Pratt was a Mar-a-Lago member, while his accounts of his conversations with Trump include too many specifics to be phony. Plus, Trump just said nearly the same thing about Sidney Powell; there's no creativity to his excuse-making.

And speaking of Powell, we had an item yesterday about Trump's claim that she was never his attorney, and she could not possibly have been his attorney, since "she would have been conflicted..." We commented: "Who knows why she would have been conflicted, or why Trump would have cared, since he has no problem with conflicts of interest among the attorneys working on his documents case."

Readers D.E. in Lancaster, PA, and J.L.J. in San Francisco, CA, clued us in to the answer, which is also covered in this article from Newsweek. In short, Powell was representing Mike Flynn at the time, and Mike Flynn was angling for a presidential pardon (which he got).

The main point of our item yesterday was that disclaiming Powell did relatively little good for Trump, while undermining him in several ways on the legal front. His remark about conflicts of interest, now that we are reminded of the context, serves to expand that list. The Constitution places very few limits on the pardon power, but legal experts are in near-universal agreement that a quid pro quo—a pardon in exchange for money or other benefits—would be illegal. The fact pattern here is that Powell and Flynn lobbied for a pardon, Flynn got the pardon, and Flynn and Powell turned around and became outspoken, unpaid (or largely so) stop the stealers. And now Trump has made clear he was aware of the underlying ethical and legal dynamics of the situation. In other words, as D.E. puts it: "Could we be looking at some more indictments for Trump? Could he break 100?" He's certainly doing his best to make that a reality. (Z)

Presidential Field Is Minus One Johnson...

You would be forgiven for forgetting that businessman Perry Johnson was running for president. The only line on his political résumé is a run for governor in Michigan that was ended when his candidacy paperwork was rejected for having too many phony signatures. During his presidential "campaign," he rarely registered in polls, to the point that the pollsters stopped asking about him. This being the case, he also did not come within a country mile of making any of the debate stages. With the writing on the wall in giant, neon letters, he ended his campaign over the weekend.

Johnson was running what you might call a "gimmick" campaign. Actually, "double gimmick" would probably be a better description. The first gimmick was his policy angle; he was basically a single-issue candidate, and his issue, as laid out in his self-published book Two Cents to Save America, was to cut discretionary spending by 2% every year. The intro to that book was written by Arthur Laffer, who was the intellectual force behind Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics, so that gives you some sense of how realistic Johnson's ideas are.

The second "gimmick" was Johnson's plan for getting some attention and creating some buzz. After all, anyone can publish a book on Amazon; you still have to get people to buy it, read it, and then decide you might be worth voting for. So, he used his personal fortune to buy "influence" at various right-wing conferences, coming in third in the most recent CPAC conference straw poll (behind Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-FL) and second in the most recent Turning Point USA conference (behind Trump). It is not a secret that a "respectable" finish can be arranged for at these conferences in exchange for a generous donation ($50,000-$100,000, which is pocket change for a fellow with a reported net worth in the low nine figures). His clear hope was that his "success" would cause people to look into his campaign and his ideas, and decide he was someone worth backing.

Clearly, neither gimmick worked, and so Johnson came up short. Sometimes gimmick candidacies do gain traction; Steve Forbes' 1996 and 2000 campaigns (flat tax), Ron Paul's 2008 and 2012 campaigns (isolationism) and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign (build the wall) were all gimmicky, at least at the start. Perhaps it says something that this is more likely to work on one side of the aisle than the other; readers can decide for themselves about that. What we can say for certain is that it did not work for Johnson. (Z)

...Meanwhile, Pence, Scott Go Where Campaigns Go to Die

In the last week, we've had one item (see here) about how Mike Pence's presidential "campaign" has reached walking corpse status, and two items (see here and here) about how Sen. Tim Scott's (R-SC) presidential campaign has gotten there as well.

To put a finer point on it, Politico has an article right now headlined: "Inside Mike Pence's Sad, Dwindling Presidential Campaign." Actually, that's the main page headline; on the article page it's "He Was Once a Favorite of the Right. Now, Mike Pence Can't Get a Crowd of 15 to a Pizza Ranch." And between them, those two headlines really tell the story. The former VP has basically taken up residence in Iowa, and he'll go anywhere willing to give him a microphone. That means doing guest appearances as a play-by-play announcer for high school football games, appearances at drug stores where he's lucky to draw 30 people, and speeches at restaurants (like Pizza Ranch) where the attendance is in the dozen (note lack of plural).

Pence is clearly making his campaign stops with "his people" (i.e., rural voters in the reddest parts of Iowa) in mind. This being the case, despite the poor attendance at most of his events, there are plenty of would-be Pence voters who have met him between three and ten times. And yet, they are not moving off their preferred candidate (usually Donald Trump). Even the people wearing Pence '24 stickers while listening to him speak admit to reporters that they're just doing it to be polite. The former VP wants so badly to be the future P, but no matter how hard he works, he gains no traction, while looking kinda pathetic. If not for the hateful and harmful policies he's championed, you'd feel sorry for him.

Yesterday, meanwhile, Scott announced that he was going all-in on Iowa as well. So, he'll soon be on the Pizza Ranch-drug store-HS football circuit as well, although we suspect there are some establishments in the more rural parts of the state where Pence is welcome but folks like Scott are not.

There have been a total of 25 Iowa caucuses, 13 Democratic (dating back to 1972) and 12 Republican (dating back to 1976). Across those 25 occasions, there is only one real case of a candidate shocking the world with a good showing, and then going on to win his party's nomination. That would be Jimmy Carter in 1976, when the caucuses were still new. Since then, fringy candidates have tried to replicate what Carter did, with no success. What happens is that a fringy candidate (Dick Gephardt, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, etc.) wins, and then gets crushed when the nomination process moves on to more heterogeneous states, or else the fringy candidate just gets crushed in Iowa and has to drop out. And that's the real role of the Iowa caucuses: They don't propel second-tier candidates to the first tier, they just serve to identify which candidates have absolutely no chance of winning. The only question is whether Pence and Scott spend the next three months tilting at hog castration mills, or if they interpret a failure to make a debate stage as a sign it's time to go home. (Z)

The War in Israel, Part I: The Future of the World Is in the Hands of 8 or 10 People

We've got a bunch of Israel-related content today and tomorrow. To start, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are two of the most plugged-in journalists in the country, at least among those not named Maggie Haberman. And they are worried. Very worried. VandeHei and Allen say that they have talked to many top government officials and they are worried about there being so many overseas conflicts and flashpoints all at once. The officials say this has been the scariest week since Joe Biden took office.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates—who ran the Pentagon under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama—told the reporters that the country is facing more crises now than any time since the end of World War II. He said that there is a gigantic funnel over the table in the White House Situation Room and all the world's problems come down the funnel to the same 8 or 10 people sitting there. And there is only so much they can handle at once. Among other things that have come down the funnel are these:

What really scares the folks in the Situation Room is that these threats could all fuse into one, with the U.S. and Israel facing Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all at once. And while all this is going on, the House can't elect a speaker and half of all Americans don't believe anything the government says. All these people believe is what they see on social media, little of which is true. In the event of a real emergency, could the country unite, the way it did after Pearl Harbor and 9/11? Who knows? (V)

The War in Israel, Part II: The Buck Stops Here

Now it's time to talk about the domestic political puzzle that Joe Biden is grappling with. As we have noted in previous posts, skillful management of a foreign affairs crisis can be a real boon for a president. In Biden's case, however, it's going to take something of a miracle for things to work out that way.

There are, at the moment, two major problems the President has when it comes to building support and consensus at home. The first is that we are in a political era where the opposition reflexively opposes, 100% of the time. Even the most popular foreign policy moves in U.S. history (say, entering World War II) engendered some domestic opposition. However, at the moment, about 40% of the population will not support any foreign policy move by Biden or any other Democrat, no matter how justified, or how well-executed, or how much it advances the Republican Party's agenda (e.g., protecting Israel).

The response of Tim Scott is representative. His brand is that he's a conservative, but a laid-back, genial conservative. And yet, he's been full of venom for Biden ever since Hamas launched its war against Israel. The Senator asserted that the President has "blood on his hands" shortly after the first atrocities were made public, basing that on the $6 billion in Iranian funds that were unfrozen in exchange for the release of hostages.

This weekend, Scott was asked if he regrets saying that, given that the $6 billion remains untouched (and is now re-frozen), and that there's no public evidence that Iran was involved in spurring Hamas to action. "I don't, actually," Scott said. "I'm a happy warrior, without any question. But we are now in the midst of a conflict, and so the warrior in me requires responsibility to start at the top." Despite this, Scott struggled to explain exactly how Biden bears responsibility for the conflict; the only thing that's certain is that Biden is somehow at fault. Needless to say, the Senator is also unwilling to give any credit for anything that the President might have done correctly. Meanwhile, none of these interviewers ever think to ask: "How can you be sure that Iran is not being motivated, instead, by Donald Trump's order to kill Qasem Soleimani?"

The other problem for Biden is that this particular foreign policy situation is rather far removed from a melodrama. By that, we mean that it really helps, in terms of domestic politics, if one side in a foreign policy crisis is a mustachioed villain and the other side is a damsel in distress. People like to fight evil and they like to come to the rescue of those who cannot rescue themselves.

In the case of Israel and Hamas, it's not so simple (also see below). Broadly speaking, the government of Israel is led by a deeply problematic man in Benjamin Netanyahu, and he has been responsible for deeply problematic things (including tacit encouragement of Hamas). Meanwhile, the people of Israel, on the whole, bear relatively little responsibility for their government's actions, given the parliamentary system and given Netanyahu's ability and willingness to do whatever it takes to stay in power.

The situation in Gaza has a similar dynamic. Hamas is not just deeply problematic, it's terroristic and dictatorial. If you are looking for evil on Earth, Hamas would be a good place to start. The people of Gaza, by contrast, are largely innocents. Undoubtedly some of them are pro-Hamas, but most are stuck, since the Israeli government won't let them leave, and Hamas persecutes (and often executes) any "voter" who does not give their "support."

So you have something of a mustachioed villain on both sides, and something of a damsel in distress on both sides. And, as a result, the Democratic Party is highly divided. There are two cleavages where this is particularly evident. The first is that the Democratic Party includes some voters who are Muslim, or of Middle Eastern descent, or both, and who see any support for Israel as, in effect, aiding and abetting the enemy. There are a couple of swing states, most obviously Michigan, where these voters are large enough in number to potentially flip the state if they vote third-party or stay home on Election Day.

The other cleavage is between younger and older Democrats. Broadly speaking, the older a Democratic voter is, the more likely they are to see Israel as a victim in the current crisis. The younger a Democratic voter is, and thus the more likely they are to have grown up in a world where Netanyahu and Israel are synonymous, the less likely they are to see things that way. A new poll from CNN lays it out in black and white. In response to the question "Do you think the Israeli government's military response to the Hamas attacks is fully justified?" 81% of respondents 65+ said "yes" but just 33% of respondents under 45 and just 27% of respondents 18-34 agreed.

It is true that the CNN poll surveyed a sample representing all Americans, but there's no way to get to that big a gap without a big-time divide between Democratic respondents. And the newest poll from CBS/YouGov confirms that. While Americans, including Democrats, are broadly supportive of humanitarian aid to Israel (76% support) and diplomacy (72% support), they are much more divided on arms for Israel and aid for Gaza. When it comes to the arms for Israel, 48% of all respondents and just 47% of Democrats like that idea. When it comes to humanitarian aid for Gaza, 57% of all respondents and 70% of Democrats are in favor. The latter sets of numbers are made possible because Republican respondents tend to like the idea of arming the Israelis (57% support) and tend to dislike helping the Palestinians in Gaza (59% say the U.S. shouldn't do it).

The upshot is that Biden has a plausible course of action right now—diplomacy and humanitarian aid for both sides—that isn't going to get him FDR-like popularity, but that won't harm him TOO much. If the war turns hotter, and if other hotspots flare up (see above), then at that point finding a politically acceptable course of action is going to require Solomon-like wisdom. We may soon learn if Biden has that within him. The good news is that, as we understand it, Biden and Solomon were playmates as children. So maybe the President picked up a few pointers. (Z)

The War in Israel, Part III: Readers Weigh In

The running leitmotif here, if we may use an extremely pretentious ivory-tower kind of word, is that the Israel-Gaza situation is a sticky one. We've gotten some good letters from readers that help to illustrate that, and we're going to run a handful of them today and another handful tomorrow. We think this helps give a broader perspective, ideally free of the spin that might show up on some other sites.

Leading off is a correspondent whose views do not always align with ours, but who can always be counted on to give thoughtful and well-reasoned takes. We give you J.K. in Short Hills, NJ:

I am a Jew. I also stand for Israel. I wanted to read the small sample of e-mails from readers before writing. I was not surprised by the range of responses to E-V.com, given the presumed typical purveyor of the site.

I am disturbed by Israel's current government. The country's parliamentary system has allowed outsized power from the religious right. I am terrified that Israel in 50 years, thanks to current demographic trends, will become a theocracy like so many of its neighbors. In the interim, I will always defend the Jewish Homeland's right to exist. I. Am. A. Jew.

If I were to debate someone about the situation in the West Bank, I would assume that after I explained the checkpoints, the wall, the countless rejections of land for peace by the Palestinians, etc., that my counterpart and I would walk away rationally with an agreement to disagree, for the history in the area is assuredly complicated and nuanced. For Gaza, however, it is much simpler and quite linear.

Israel captured the land from Egypt in 1967 in the Six Day War. Realizing the challenges of maintaining a handful of settlements, the country exited the enclave in 2005. The Palestinians had complete self-rule for the first time in history. The economic infrastructure of the departing settlers, most notably working greenhouses, was left behind to help transform Gaza into the "Singapore of the Mediterranean." It and they were instead immediately destroyed. In 2006, Hamas, a designated terrorist organization by the U.S. for some time and which already had been launching rockets into Israel proper, won a significant majority of the Palestinian legislature with overwhelming support in Gaza. In 2007, Hamas completely took over the area. Many more rockets ensued. Israel and Egypt enacted the blockade that exists today.

Hamas has only two goals: Killing Jews and maintaining political power over the Palestinian Authority, which governs areas of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinians. I suspect that the reason Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has not called for elections in 18 years is that he knows he would likely lose to a challenger from Hamas. I ask those who are critical of Israel, what do you think would have happened if Egypt and Israel opened the border? Sadly, Hamas must be destroyed for any two-state solution to prevail.

As for the American response, I give Joe Biden an "A." I am politically to the right of center, but his support and empathy has been welcomed by most in the Jewish community. The Republicans trying to lay blame on the President for his "release" of the still-frozen $6 billion of funds to Iran is ludicrous. They would probably get more mileage with me complaining about Barack Obama's Iran deal in 2015, which unfroze at least $50 billion to the Islamic Republic. At the time, I, along with many Jews, was worried that the funds would be funneled to Hamas. Well, here we are. We will never know if Hamas would have attacked in the manner they did if Donald Trump were president. They were quiet during those 4 years. I suspect they were afraid that Trump would have given Israel the green light to do anything and everything to level Gaza. We will, of course, never know, and anyone trying to make an educated guess is wasting time and energy. The terrorism on October 7 happened and is still ongoing, with so many hostages still not home.

I encountered the hatred for Israel among some on the far left about a decade ago and was shocked by it. Many in my community, most of whom are lifelong Democrats, are now distraught. For so long, the rising tide has been ignored with only the obsessives on Fox News making much noise about it. Obama's praying with Jeremiah Wright and smiling in a photo with Louis Farrakhan; Bill Clinton standing on stage at Aretha Franklin's funeral with Farrakhan; Nancy Pelosi sitting down with Jeremy Corbyn. Do I think any of these three giants in the Democratic Party are antisemitic? Of course not. However, if a politician were sharing a moment with a virulent racist opposed to any other marginalized community, it would rightfully never be tolerated.

As a parent of a college sophomore on an Ivy League campus, I am concerned by the rise of antisemitism but am not surprised. Somehow, the Jews did not earn a spot on the Circle of Intersectionality. Palestinians are considered Brown while Israelis are white and colonizers despite a majority of its citizens coming from somewhere other than Europe or America. As my brilliant 87-year-old mother would tell you, "the far left believes that the Jews benefit from white privilege while those on the far right believe we are not white, so we can't win." In 2015, a Yale faculty member and her husband who were associate master and master of one of the school's colleges (dormitories), respectively, felt compelled to resign when the university effectively left the former out to dry (they made a tepid statement in support her but championed the importance of diversity far more) when she merely asked the question of whether "there is room" to wear an "obnoxious" Halloween costume. In the past two weeks, Yale, on the other hand, has reiterated its commitment to the freedom of expression from one of their professors who vigorously and disgustingly defended Hamas and its tactics on a Twitter post.

I have encountered antisemitism throughout my life, albeit more so these days. Recently, my congregation, the largest and oldest Reform synagogue in New Jersey, received a bomb threat in the opening five minutes of our Erev (evening) Rosh Hashana service. We exited the sanctuary in an orderly fashion and said our prayers for the New Year in the parking lot. I am encouraged, though. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) gave the best speech I have ever heard in person at our Temple at last week's Shabbat service. I have known Cory for over 30 years; he, my wife, and I were college classmates and my wife and he subsequently attended law school together. Like many in the Jewish community, I was disappointed for his vote for Obama's Iran deal but always believed the President used his leverage over Cory and his ambition to make his own run for the White House for his support. I urge you all to listen to his words. I promise you it will be the best thirty minutes of your week.

Next up, B.C. in Phoenix, AZ:

I guess it's up to me to offend absolutely everyone who has an opinion about the war in the Middle East, thereby diverting their attention to focusing their ire on me rather than attacking and arguing with each other. That's okay, I've been putting on big boy pants for decades and am well up to the task.

My understanding is that as far back as the late Roman Empire there has been a phrase drawn from Matthew 1:23 that Christian armies have used to inspire their troops. From World War I through World War II it was inscribed on the belt buckles of German soldiers: Gott mit uns ("God with us").

Any time you and your group subscribe to the belief that some great, unseen, unknowable, all-powerful entity or entities are on "your side" in a dispute with your fellowman, you give license to some dirtbag members of your group to perpetrate unspeakable acts of violence against others. History testifies to the fact, and these vile individuals exist in every religious group, including, but not limited to, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Hindis, Shintoists and Buddhists. People should not be fooled by the idea that since their particular cult has a philosophy of nonviolence, no one in their entire group will commit a hateful act as a result of believing in their righteousness.

Granted, despicable individuals oftentimes use the religious concept of "God is with us" as an excuse to do harm (see: Hitler, Adolf), but thinking human beings should not allow some unsupportable mystical concept of theirs to pave the way for the evildoers.

I have little hope that the human race will at some time universally cast off these beliefs, at the same time I have little patience with people when a great surge of whataboutism occurs after an incident of religious infamy gives rise to further acts of retaliatory violence.

And now, A.J. in San Francisco:

I don't know how many people here have really considered the atheist POV on these religious wars.

Most wars are not truly religious at their inner core, but some are.

As an atheist watching this, I feel like I am locked in an insane asylum with an overwhelming number of religious cult-member crazies who are slaughtering each other over an imaginary sky daddy. It almost feels like a school shooting. There's a barking insane murderer with a gun shooting innocent people over the delusions in their head.

Yes, I have heard the extremely heated arguments, and highly convoluted histories, and well-justified motivations for each side. I don't care. Not an excuse for inhumanity. It is bad enough that you are flushing your own time and potential down the toilet by wasting your life worshiping a primitive superstition whose only purpose was to explain what iron-age peoples did not yet understand. You also have to waste someone else's life because they're so different from you.

"Oh wow," you say, "this guy sounds full of anger and contempt." Correct. Seems a proper response to deluded killers, to me. I might like you better if you didn't murder innocent people?

This is what is so toxic and evil about religion. It turns people against one another when, in fact, all you need to band together is empathy and a conscience. Every person is born with them, but religion burns them out of you.

And just in case anyone thinks their religion is exempt: No such luck, I mean all religions. Yeah, that one, too. It's keeping you from seeing others as your fellowman. A very bitter irony, if you ask me.

I have an utterly hopeless fantasy that an agnostic government which favors no religion but lets them each have their freedom to worship, but not to oppress their next-door neighbors, will organically grow over the Middle East. Christians could live next to Jews and next to Muslims and maybe exchange recipes instead of gunfire.

This would never work because it would require deluded brainwashed cult members to lay down their emotional crutch and actually do what their religious texts tell them to do.

Love one another.

And finally R.T. in Andalusia, TX:

Our broader readership is searching for a just and righteous perspective. For many years, I shrugged at the Palestine-Israel situation with a "there they go again" perspective because neither side has attained or maintained the moral high ground. Anyone who has taken a side has picked a point in history to use as their zero point for analyzing and understanding the situation, ignoring the older past. Is your zero point last month, last year, last decade, last 50 years, or last century? The same applies to relations between the U.S. and the Middle East in general.

I've never been a fan of vengeance because it usually costs more than the original losses. After 9/11, there were more American casualties from the wars of vengeance than from the original attack. I observe that the only times peace has been achieved without conquest has been when the parties agree to let the past remain in the past. For U.S. foreign policy, this means letting go of the guilt of being a bystander when Nazi Germany annihilated Jews, and it means not treating countries with autocratic or corrupt governments, or past Soviet affiliations, as automatic enemies and threats. People are complicated, and it is good to be clear-eyed about it.

Thanks to all four correspondents. And please note these letters were chosen such that #4 flowed from #3 which flowed from #2 which flowed from #1. Please do not interpret any of them as a "response" to any of the others, because that was not the intent. In fact, we largely regarded them as four different ways of saying the same thing: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Z)


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