If only the Democratic Party could be more like a megachurch.

An idea thrown out by Barack Obama, speaking on "the power of pluralism," at the Democracy Forum in Chicago last Thursday:

[M]ega churches understand that belonging precedes belief. If you show up at one of these churches, they don’t start off peppering you with questions about whether you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. They don’t quiz you on the Bible. They invite you in, introduce you around, give you something to eat, tell you all about the activities and groups you can be a part of from the young adult social club to the ballroom dance group to the men’s choir which for those of you not familiar that’s where they put folks whose voices aren’t quite good enough to be in the main choir.... The point is megachurches are built around ‘let’s get you if here, doing stuff, meeting people, and showing you how you can participate and be active.’ It is about agency and relationships, it is not about theology or handouts. And they’re trying to create a big tent where lots of different people can feel comfortable. Once that happens, then they can have a deeper conversation about faith in a way that folks aren’t spooked by....

The ideas are creepy and offputting, so hold off on the ideas and give people a place to sing and dance and socialize. 

Has an American President ever sung the national anthem into a microphone before a crowd?

I know President Obama sang "Amazing Grace" into a microphone — and "Let's Stay Together" — so we know he could sing into a microphone. Did any other President sing into a microphone? But what I really want to know is did any American President ever do this? — sing the national anthem into a microphone:

I found that because the Russian national anthem came up — 2 posts down — in the context of learning what lies in store for Brittney Griner if indeed she ends up serving her sentence in a Russian penal colony, where prisoners must sing the anthem, “Glory to Our Free Fatherland,” every morning at 6:05 a.m.

Brittney Griner, when she was a free woman in America, opposed the playing of the American National Anthem at basketball games. In 2020, she said: "I’m not going to be out there for the national anthem. If the league continues to want to play it, that’s fine... I’ll not be out there."

There's grisly irony, and I would not laugh at that harsh turn of fate. I've been thinking about the power of national anthems. Listening to a formal presentation of the Russian anthem, in spite of myself, I get chills. It's in the music. Look at the faces of the people, in that clip with Putin. It's reaching them deeply and merging them in shared resolve.

Resolve to do what? 

Would we Americans want a President who would sing our national anthem like that, or do we prefer our Presidents singing "Amazing Grace" and our anthem safely ensconced where it belongs, at basketball, baseball, and football games?

Treason talk.

Let's look back before this week, to "treason" as it has appeared within the lifetime of this blog. In chronological order:

April 27, 2005: Discussing the "blood" metaphor in constitutional law, I quoted Article III: "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

May 28, 2006: I wrote about the protest singer Phil Ochs declaring the Vietnam War over:

So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over

July 1, 2006: "The editors of The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times explain how they decide when to publish a secret... Baquet and Keller have written a lengthy defense of their behavior, behavior that they know has been severely criticized, even called 'treason.'"

September 20, 2006: "To me, that's treason. I call it treason against rock-and-roll, because rock is the antithesis of politics. Rock should never be in bed with politics," said Alice Cooper, indicting rock stars who were telling people to vote for John Kerry.

August 3, 2007: Markos Moulitsas says that in 2002, "Dissent against the president was considered treason."

August 11, 2007: A 9/11 truther criticizes me for declining to debate him, which he took to mean that I know I'm "complicit in covering up mass murder and high treason."

May 12, 2008: A scholar assures us that the Muslim world would view Obama, the son of a Muslim father, as guilty of apostasy, which has "connotations of rebellion and treason," which is considered "worse than murder."

September 12, 2011: I'm live-blogging a debate in which "treason" is thrown around casually: "Perry stands by his 'almost treasonous' remark, referring to the use of the Federal Reserve for political purposes... Huntsman accuses Perry of treason for saying we can't secure the border."

May 8, 2012: "Isn't it funny, this 'treason' incident?" Mitt Romney, running for President, failed to chide a woman who asked whether Obama should be tried for treason. I brought up (as I did today), the 1964 book "None Dare Call It Treason." I also quoted the casual use of "treason" by Chief Justice John Marshall  Cohens v. Virginia to refer to doing something unconstitutional. ("We have no more right to decline the exercise of jurisdiction which is given than to usurp that which is not given. The one or the other would be treason to the Constitution.") And a commenter brought up an even more venerable use of the word, Patrick Henry's "If this be treason, make the most of it." That made me say: "The country was founded on treason. We celebrate the treason we like."

Also on May 8, 2012: "Obama supporters who express outrage over the use of the word 'treason' seem to think the word means nothing but to the crime defined in law — as if the woman Romney talked to wanted Obama tried and executed. It's as if people who say 'property is theft' are freakishly insisting that property owners be prosecuted for larceny. Think of all the words we use that have more specific legal meanings that do not apply: This job is murder... The rape of the land... Slave to love..."

June 17, 2013: Edward Snowden explains why he left the country: " [T]he US Government... immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it."

July 26, 2013: From a post about the death penalty: "Here's the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, which found the death penalty for rape (even rape of a child) to be unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. No one has been executed in the U.S. for a crime other than murder since the 1960s, though the Kennedy case leaves open the possibility of capital punishment 'for other non-homicide crimes, ranging from drug-trafficking to treason.'"

April 22, 2014 : Above the Law had hyperventilated, "Justice Scalia Literally Encourages People To Commit Treason," and I punctured it, saying Scalia was just giving his usual speech about the Constitution, which is always subject to the right of revolution explained in the Declaration of Independence. I bring up Patrick Henry's "If this be treason, make the most of it."

February 23, 2015: "'Edward Snowden couldn't be here for some treason,' said Neil Patrick Harris, the Oscars host, when the documentary about him won an award." I said: "I liked the joke, because of its language precision and because it seemed at least a tad risky in the context of Hollywood celebrating itself."

February 29, 2016: Trump hesitated to "unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election" after Duke it would be "treason to your heritage" for a white person not to vote for Trump.

October 14, 2016: "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree," said Ezra Pound, who was charged with treason in WWII. He was disaffected after WWI, moved to Italy, felt inspired by Mussolini, and went on the radio criticizing the U.S., FDR, and the Jews.

December 21, 2016: I quoted the official course description for "The Problem of Whiteness," a course offered in the African Cultural Studies department of my university, the University of Wisconsin–Madison: "In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, 'treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.'"

January 16, 2017: I quote someone talking about Chelsea Manning: "He is a member of the military who knowingly committed treason. His, or her, gender status has nothing to do with his conviction for treason."

February 10, 2017: I quoted Trump (before his election) talking about Edward Snowden: "I think he's a total traitor and I would deal with him harshly," "And if I were president, Putin would give him over," and "Snowden is a spy who should be executed." I wondered: "But maybe you think Trump will end up looking good forefronting the iniquity of treason."

February 7, 2018: Trump had used the word "treasonous" to describe the Democrats who didn't applaud during his State of the Union Address. Yeah, it was a joke, but: "He's President and in the position of enforcing the law, and from that position punching down. He really should not be joking about treason. And I get that he's punching back, and that's his style. But people aren't just idiots if they feel afraid of a President who isn't continually assuring us that he's aware of his profound responsibilities."

April 17, 2018: I quoted Neil Gorsuch, concurring — and voting with the liberals ‚ in a case about immigration: "Vague laws invite arbitrary power. Before the Revolu­tion, the crime of treason in English law was so capa­ciously construed that the mere expression of disfavored opinions could invite transportation or death. The founders cited the crown’s abuse of 'pretended' crimes like this as one of their reasons for revolution. See Declaration of Independence ¶21."

May 4, 2018: A conservative commentator sarcastically said he was "waiting for the Left to scream treason" over John Kerry's "quiet play to save Iran deal with foreign leaders."

July 17, 2017: I quoted Byron York: "Would it have been appropriate for the Trump campaign to try to find the [Clinton] emails?... What if an intelligence operative from a friendly country got them and offered them? And what about an unfriendly country? Would there be a scale, from standard oppo research on one end to treason on the other, depending on how the emails were acquired?"

I'm linking to this article because it's in The Washington Post and because I don't believe it.

"The quiet impact of Obama’s Christian faith/Why the president’s convictions led him to believe he could unite a divided country — and why he failed."

Sheer propaganda. Very long and earnest.

I think President Obama has some admiration for religious people, but mostly he's aware of how religion operates within the human minds that he seeks to influence. You could rewrite the article and title it: "The muffled impact of Obama's faith in religious faith/Why the president’s understanding of religious convictions led him to believe he could perform in the theater of Uniting a Divided Country — and why no government official ever really can or should bring us completely together."

The general rule in America is not to question the sincerity of claims of religious belief, but Obama revealed what religion is to him in his book, "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14. I'll just quote the summary of the text I wrote back in 2010:

While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Obama has a long conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson, who's got a new book, a set of essays, on topics like fear and politics.

Obama — who professes familiarity with and love for Robinson's novels — calls attention to the essay "Fear," which, as he puts it, looks "through the prism of Christianity and sort of the Protestant traditions that helped shape us." Basically, he's interviewing her. I can't think of a time when I've read a dialogue with a President where the President is the interviewer:

The President: Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

Robinson: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

The President: But you’ve struggled with the fact that here in the United States, sometimes Christian interpretation seems to posit an “us versus them,” and those are sometimes the loudest voices. But sometimes I think you also get frustrated with kind of the wishy-washy, more liberal versions where anything goes.... How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?

Robinson: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know. But Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge....him—that he was old, that he had a young son, and so on—they create the narrative.

From the essay "Fear":

Is Barack Obama a Christian? He adopted Christianity as an adult, true, having been unaffiliated with institutional religion until then, but the whole history of the Spanish Inquisition proves how hard some people find it to trust a convert. There was a time when we Calvinists felt the force of the terror and antagonism that can be raised against those who are not Christian in a sense other people are willing to accept. This doleful trait is being played upon in our current politics....

When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”...

"On the eve of Pope Francis’s arrival in the U.S., the Vatican has taken offense at the Obama administration’s decision to invite to the pope’s welcome ceremony..."

"... transgender activists, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop and an activist nun who leads a group criticized by the Vatican for its silence on abortion and euthanasia."

According to a senior Vatican official, the Holy See worries that any photos of the pope with these guests at the White House welcoming ceremony next Wednesday could be interpreted as an endorsement of their activities.

There are 15,000 invited guests so how could any sane person make an interpretation of endorsement?

Trump only snarked "We need this question? This is the first question?"...

... when a man in the crowd asked the first question like this: "We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he's not even an American. We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That's my question, when can we get rid of them?"

The failure to correct is now the subject of outrage. Is the outrage justified? Probably. Trump saw and used a tricky way to signal to a certain subgroup and to make them think he might be on their side. All the while, he preserved the ability to say I didn't agree. I made fun of him!

But Trump has fed on this kind of outrage. He's a clever communicator who knows how to work in a swirl of verbal energy. He lets other people talk and he says things that make for greater fun and excitement. Those who express outrage are just as useful in his game as the guy in the crowd who unleashed a torrent of crazy.

It's all good in Trumpworld.

Why did Hillary lift her face and say "Do what you feel" to a woman who, feeling "sick to [her] stomach," had just said "I’m not feeling it"?

The woman was Kriss Blevens, who did Hillary Clinton's makeup for one of the 2007 debates.

That evening, Clinton sat in Blevens’s chair just before taking the stage, and the candidate’s assistant...

Huma?

... handed Blevens a red lipstick.

“I felt sick to my stomach . . . and I said, ‘I’m not feeling it,’ ” Blevens, 51, remembered recently while inside her [Manchester, New Hampshire] Main Street studio, where the teal wall matched streaks in her hair. “Hillary Clinton just lifted her face and just said to me, ‘Do what you feel.’ ”

Imagine trusting the color advice of someone who chooses teal for a wall color and, worse, makes color choices against a background of teal.

According to Blevens, to this day, clients come to her to have their makeup done and request "The Hillary." For reference, here's how Hillary looked that night:



Maybe it's just the idea that the hands that touched the face of The Hillary are now touching my face... my lifted up face... the hands that Hillary implored to do what the hands of the assistant would have done only to a sickening effect. Oh, Kriss, do what you feel!

“I always pray before I do makeup,” she said.... The most memorable moment in her 28-year-career, she said, came when she held hands with Barack Obama and prayed.... The candidate looked tired and drawn, and she remembers saying to him “Are you prayed up?”

“He looked at me, and he said, ‘I could sure use more,’ ” she recalled.... The prayer’s exact words are lost to time but one phrase, she said, remains: “Remember the moment you were called to great purpose.” 

Amazing Grace.

"Over the course of centuries, black churches served as 'hush harbors' where slaves could worship in safety..."

"... praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah... rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement," said President Obama in his eulogy for Clementa Pinckney.

... We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin.

Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas.  He didn’t know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace....

The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley... how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond — not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.

Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Reverend Pinckney so well understood -- the power of God’s grace.... As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. We may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other — but we got it all the same. He gave it to us anyway. He’s once more given us grace. But it is up to us now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove ourselves worthy of this gift....

I've highlighted the most religious part, including the brief exploration of the notion that God used Dylann Storm Roof pursuant to his famously "mysterious" ways. I've left out the material that was more specific to the individual man, Clementa Pinckney, and the various policy proposals — take down the Confederate battle flag, improve the schools, deal with possible racial bias in prison systems and in policing and job hiring, restrict guns. You can read all that at the full transcript at the link.

"You know, I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office."

Said Barack Obama, according to David Axelrod. Context: "For people to say that I am anti-Israel, or, even worse, anti-Semitic, it hurts."

ADDED: New York Magazine got there first, with this cover from September 18, 2011:



The story, by John Heilemann, was "The Tsuris/Barack Obama is the best thing Israel has going for it right now. Why is that so difficult for Netanyahu and his American Jewish allies to understand?" From the article:

In the last days of the 2008 campaign, the former federal judge, White House counsel, and Obama mentor Abner Mikva quipped, “When this all is over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president.” And while that prediction has so far proved to be wildly over-optimistic, there is more truth in it than meets the eye....

The irony is that Obama—along with countless Israelis, members of the Jewish diaspora, and friends of Israel around the world—seems to grasp these realities and this choice more readily than Netanyahu does. “The first Jewish president?” Maybe not. But certainly a president every bit as pro-Israel as the country’s own prime minister—and, if you look from the proper angle, maybe even more so.

"Being president is never easy. I still have to fix the broken immigration system. Issue veto threats. Negotiate with Iran. All while finding time to pray five times a day."

President Obama at the White House correspondents' dinner.

Obama's Easter photo.

"Mark Zuckerberg, Arsen Avakov, Embajada de Estados Unidos en Argentina and 248,497 others like this."

"There has been much discussion about a media double standard where Republicans are covered differently than Democrats, asked to weigh in on issues the Democrats don't face."

"As a result, when we refuse to take the media's bait, we suffer. I felt it this week when I was asked to weigh in on what other people said and did and what others' beliefs are. If you are looking for answers to those questions, ask those people. I will always choose to focus on what matters to the American people, not what matters to the media."

Writes Scott Walker (in USA Today).

ELSEWHERE: In Politico, Jack Shafer purports to give advice on how to answer the "gotcha" question. He holds up LBJ as a model: "Here you are, alone with the president of the United States and the leader of the free world, and you ask a chicken-shit question like that." Oh, yeah, wouldn't you just love for the Midwestern son of a preacher man to suddenly emit an LBJ-style outburst full of Texas swagger and farm excrement?

And Ron Fournier has a "Defense of Gotcha Questions." He begins:

Years ago, an Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton walked into the state Capitol media room at the end of a hectic legislative session and asked the journalists if we needed anything else from him.  We had asked Clinton questions all day. We were tired. We wanted him to shut up and go home.

So I said, "Yes, governor. I know you don't know much about baseball, but when there's a pop-up behind the third baseman, whose ball is it?" The other reporters snickered. Finally, they figured: a gotcha question Clinton wouldn't answer.

Bill came up with an answer that seemed amiable and made him look good. But I don't think that's a gotcha question. It's just a casual, irrelevant question that might bring out some personality. It's the sort of question Barbara Walters used to be associated with.... What kind of tree are you?

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "Christian" is.

That's my idea of how to answer the question whether any given person is a Christian. I'm basing my answer on the famous old Bill Clinton answer...



... which always made sense to me. In the case of whether someone is a Christian, the answer could easily vary based on whether your definition of Christian is just someone who consistently asserts that he's a Christian — which was apparently Dana Milbank's definition, causing him to insist that it's easy and obvious to say that Obama is a Christian — or whether you think a Christian is someone with a particular set of sincerely held beliefs — which could have been what caused Scott Walker to say he didn't know whether Obama is a Christian.

I would suggest that there is a definition of Christianity within which it is possible to assert that no one is a Christian and another that gets you to the answer that everyone is a Christian.

Should politicians get into the activity of defining Christianity? Consider that Obama seems to have decided he can and should define Islam. (He has a pragmatic reason for saying that ISIS is perverting Islam and therefore only lies in saying it is Muslim.) But is there any good reason for any American politician to tread into the territory of saying what Christianity is?

Accusing Scott Walker of winking insidious messages, Dana Milbank shows his frustration at the disciplining effect of Walker's no-response response.

I'm reading Dana Milbank's new WaPo column "Scott Walker’s insidious agnosticism," which doubles down on his recent "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him," which I dealt with 4 days ago in "Non-Wisconsinites, I need to explain something about Scott Walker to you that you are missing."

I'm overcoming my basic urge to ignore Milbank. Isn't he just repeating what I've already addressed? Why feed him with attention? But he's got high profile whether I pay attention to him or not. That column has upwards of 5,000 comments, and Milbank is actively shaping Walker's image right as Walker is getting national attention.

Walker — with his hardcore on-message approach — does not respond to the usual efforts to entice Republicans to make damaging remarks about sex, race, religion, and other things that aren't part of his message. Another strategy is needed, and Milbank seems to think he's found it. (I put "seems to" in that sentence in honor of Walker's dogged refusal to make statements about what's inside another person's head.) Milbank's idea is to make Walker's restraint into a horrible flaw that disqualifies him from serious consideration.

In the first column, Milbank used the label "cowardice." In the new one, it's "agnosticism." But what's wrong with agnosticism? Is he knocking one of the world's great religions? Oh, it's "insidious agnosticism." Insidious, really? Why not invidious? Or perfidious?! Milbank uses the religion-related word as he attempts to crucify Walker for saying that he doesn't know whether President Obama is a Christian:

This is not a matter of conjecture. The correct answer is yes: Obama is Christian, and he frequently speaks about it in public....

Milbank (who is probably not a Christian) is missing something about Christianity that is quite glaring to me (whose possible Christianity is an enigma). To many Christians, claiming to be a Christian doesn't make you a Christian.

As I child, I often found myself in a Christian church with a congregation singing "Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart." Dana Milbank, do you understand why that lyric is experienced as profound, or would you scoff "Why are these idiots pestering God about wanting to be something that they obviously are? The correct lyric is 'Thanks, Lord, for making me a Christian'"?  Why are you the arbiter of what is correct in Christianity? Why aren't you more of an agnostic? Your non-agnosticism here is insidious, invidious, and perfidious.

Milbank says that Walker's idea that he would need to talk to Obama about Christianity is an "intriguing standard," and then he lets loose with the snark:

I’ve never had a conversation with Walker about whether he’s a cannibal, a eunuch, a sleeper cell [sic] for the Islamic State, a sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome or a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By Walker’s logic, it would be fair for me to let stand the possibility that he just might be any of those — simply because I have no personal and direct refutation from him.

No. Walker's logic is that if anyone were to ask a bad question like that, he would turn the spotlight back on the questioner and expose the defectiveness of the question. And that would be a better response, because it doesn't treat the question as serious. That is, it's better to say "That's a clown question, bro" than to treat it like a real issue by saying no. Walker doesn't say "That's a clown question." He's more polite. But it's the same idea.

Walker is engaged in the enterprise of disciplining the press, and I can see why they don't like it. Milbank reveals his frustration:

Walker justifies his agnosticism on grounds that he is avoiding gotcha questions.... This is insidious... because it allows Walker to wink and nod at the far-right fringe where people really believe that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya who hates America. 

Only because the question was asked! Stop asking questions like that and you'll be disabling Walker's insidious winking. Face it: Those who are putting these questions to Walker are trying to elicit material that they can used to serve the audience on the left. They have the power to turn off the Walker winks, but they hate to do it. They want to generate material on hot subjects like sex, race, and religion because it works so well to draw in normal, ordinary Americans who know that economics and national security are what really matters in a President but who find these topics boring and difficult.

If only something like "legitimate rape" would drop out of Walker, they'd be in business.

... Walker’s technique shuts down all debate, because there’s no way to have a constructive argument once you’ve disqualified your opponent as unpatriotic, un-Christian and anti-American.

Disqualified? Dana Milbank used that word in the previous column, "Scott Walker’s cowardice should disqualify him." You declared him disqualified, and now you accuse him of shutting down all debate because he won't debate with you about a subject that isn't constructive. You know it's not constructive, that it's a trick, and he's not playing the game. So what do you do? You switch to accusing him of playing a game through silent signalling — unpatriotic, un-Christian and anti-American. Of course, you're frustrated that you can't lure him into the conversation you want, and you'd like to deprive him of the power to discipline you into staying on his message.

At this point, Milbank's column sinks into madness:

On the Internet, Godwin’s Law indicates that any reasonable discussion ceases when the Nazi accusations come out; Walker is essentially doing the same by refusing to grant his opponent legitimacy as an American and a Christian.

What? Walker didn't say those things. (Also, that's not even what Godwin's Law is.) And Walker isn't doing the equivalent of bringing up the Nazis. He's not talking about the things you wish he'd talk about, so you're saying it for him. You know you're doing that, so you toss in the word "essentially" to patch up the mess of that sentence... that sentence that purports to long for reasonable discussion.

Milbank ends the column with an imagined Q&A in which a Walker opponent supposedly gets questions like those Walker has received and answers them the way Walker has answered those questions. The first 2 questions are not in the form of the questions Scott Walker has been asked: "Why does Scott Walker hate America?" and "When did he stop beating his wife?" Those are questions that assume a fact, a notoriously improper form of question. There's a prior unasked question in both cases that could be answered "I don't know" — Does Scott Walker hate America? and Did Scott Walker ever engage in wife-beating?

So, right off, we can see that Milbank is doing something insidious and invidious. Milbank hasn't shown us an example of Walker's failing to acknowledge the problem of an assumption inside a question.

Milbank proceeds to some questions that don't have that problem: "Does Walker love his children?" and "Does he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?" And Milbank seems to think that he's demonstrated that the answers should just be "yes" and "no," but I think a better answer to those questions would be to refuse to accept those questions as appropriate and to turn the spotlight onto the questioner, which is the Scott-Walker-press-disciplining technique.

I’ll go out on a limb and stipulate that Walker loves his country and his family, and I have no reason to think he isn’t a good Christian and a decent man. But he’d be a better man if he didn’t insinuate with his demurrals that his political opponents are not.

And you'd be a better man, Dana Milbank, if you didn't pose as if you were saying something nice about Scott Walker and inviting him to a higher level of civil discourse.

"Scott Walker feeling the heat" — says Politico, but how does Politico know what Scott Walker feels?

Ironically, the assertion is that he feels the heat over his statements that he doesn't know how Barack Obama feels — doesn't know whether Obama feels love for his country and doesn't know whether Obama feels in his heart that he is a Christian.

It's easy for me to see the simple accuracy of Walker's statement that he doesn't have access to the interior sensations of another human being's body, and I'm having difficulty understanding why Politico imagines it knows that Scott Walker is feeling heat.

Maybe MSM are feeling the heat as the kind of questions that used to generate heat aren't heating things up like they used to. They've been hoping to have some fun watching Republicans self-incinerate, after all these years dutifully admiring the cool character they call "No Drama Obama."

ADDED: "Scott Walker feeling the heat" resembles the schoolyard bullying that comes in the form of taunts like: "Oh, the little baby got his feelings hurt! He's going to cry! He wants to run home to mommy!"

"Bad acts may rise from good causes: faith may never be the enemy; fanaticism is always the enemy."

"But faith has always been the first seedbed of fanaticism. That’s why, when people commit acts of horrible cruelty for political purposes, we say that they’ve made a 'religion' out of their politics, or have succumbed to a mad ideological dogma. Fanaticism is the belief that a single faith or ideology contains all the truth of the world, and that others should at best be tolerated. Liberalism is the belief that toleration is not enough, that an active, affirmative pluralism is essential to social sanity. Pluralism is the essence of liberalism—including the possibility of self-reproach for things that liberalism has done badly. America is not responsible for My Lai only to the degree that America renounces the self-righteous 'exceptionalism' that put those murders in motion and then prevented those who caused them from being blamed. Excessive scruples—liberal guilt—are as sure a sign of sanity as excessive sanctimony is a sign of the opposite."

Writes Adam Gopnik, contemplating Obama's recent statement, at the National Prayer Breakfast, in the context of the recent ISIS atrocities: "During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ."

"Why is it assumed that atheists need to fill a void that religion somehow answers?"

"I find this column, and the many like it which the Times has published over the years, to be more than a little bit mystifying.... I feel no such void, and I rather doubt that many other atheists do, either. It has always seemed to me that the question should be reversed: why do religionists need to fill a perceived void that the rest of us don't feel? This life, this world, the values I hold, are quite sufficient for me; I feel no need to turn to some community professing belief in the supernatural to find meaning in life. I respect those who feel differently, but I do wonder why those professing belief need such an external reassurance of their own worth."

Top-rated comment at a NYT column "Religion Without God," by Stanford anthroprof T. M. Luhrmann. Let me extract from the column what I think answers the commenter's question:

[T]he British Humanist Association... sponsors a good deal of anti-religious political activity. They want to stop faith-based schools from receiving state funding and to remove the rights of Church of England bishops to sit in the House of Lords. They also perform funerals, weddings and namings. In 2011, members conducted 9,000 of these rituals.

So there are 2 (entirely divergent) needs : 1. anti-religion political activism, 2. rituals.

ADDED: I think many of the people who don't believe but want ritual in their lives simply continue to attend a traditional house of worship, perhaps keeping within the religious sect of their parents or grandparents or moving into the sect of their spouse. One might also enter a traditional place of worship that is nearby and seems beautiful in some way, perhaps because of the liturgy or the music, perhaps because of an eloquent minister and a compelling congregration.

And people with political needs also choose traditional religion without necessarily believing the metaphysical aspects. President Obama is the best example of that. As I wrote a few years ago, citing "Dreams from My Father," chapter 14:

While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

Of course, if your political agenda is anti-religion, you're not going to take this path. And you're not going to get elected to much of anything.

"'The support of Pope Francis and the support of the Vatican was important to us, given the esteem with which both the American and Cuban people hold the Catholic Church...'"

"'... and in particular Pope Francis who has a substantial history in Latin America and is the first pope to be chosen from Latin America,' a senior administration official said."

Obama also discussed the issue at length with the pope during his public visit to the Vatican in March....

Obama is determined that the pincer movement of economic modernisation and regional and spiritual cajoling will help bring about the longer-term breakthroughs in human rights and democracy that he concedes are largely absent from the existing deal so far.

The pincer movement of economic modernisation and regional and spiritual cajoling...

A "pincer movement" is "a military maneuver in which forces simultaneously attack both flanks (sides) of an enemy formation.... [O]pposing forces advance towards the center of an army that responds by moving its outside forces to the enemy's flanks to surround it. At the same time, a second layer of pincers may attack on the more distant flanks to keep reinforcements from the target units."

So picture economic modernization and and spiritual cajoling closing in and attacking like that.

By the way, "pincer movement" has 2 layers of metaphor, since the military term is itself a metaphor.



"Pincers, often red-hot, have been used as an instrument of torture since ancient Roman times or earlier."

Torture ≈ cajoling.

By the way, Samuel Johnson called "cajole" "a low word." The OED defines it as "To prevail upon or get one's way with (a person) by delusive flattery, specious promises, or any false means of persuasion."