Media critic Charles Kaiser on CIA torture tapes and Mitt Romney's misplaced faith

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

A leading candidate for president makes one of the most offensive political speeches of modern times—and most of the nation shrugs.

Thursday night, ABC's World News Tonight did not even mention what made Mitt Romney's paean to Christianity so disturbing. Morally bankrupt pundits like Bill Bennett and Pat Buchanan rushed to praise it, while David Brooks reported that all the "serious religious thinkers" he had spoken to were "enthusiastic about the speech, some of them wildly so."


A MORMON AND A CATHOLIC WALK INTO AN ELECTION Romney defends his faith, à la John Kennedy in 1960
This was supposed to be Mitt Romney's version of Jack Kennedy's great speech about tolerance, delivered two months before Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960. The comparison between the two speeches is useful—but only as a measure of the collapse of public discourse in America in the years since Kennedy shattered an ancient glass ceiling of bigotry by becoming our first Catholic president.

This was a crucial passage of Kennedy's appeal to America's better self:

"While this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist. It was Virginia's harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson's statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril."

"I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end—where all men and all churches are treated as equal—where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice—where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind—and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood."

This was Kennedy at his very best—an ode to inclusiveness that explicitly included believers and nonbelievers alike. His speech was the prologue to a decades-long battle against all kinds of intolerance, hypocrisy, and exclusivity—a campaign that gradually transformed the way women and black people and gay people were treated in America.

Compare Kennedy's words with the crucial lines from Romney's speech last week:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone."

"In recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America—the religion of secularism. They are wrong."

"Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me."

So, if you're God-fearing like me, fear not; if you're anything else, you're something less than a real American.

Maureen Dowd grasped the essential differences between the two politicians: Romney "did not give a brave speech, but a pandering one. Disguised as a courageous, Kennedy-esque statement of principle, the talk was really just an attempt to compete with the evolution-disdaining, religion-baiting Huckabee and get Baptists to concede that Mormons are Christians." Jon Krakauer told Dowd: "JFK's speech was to reassure Americans that he wasn't a religious fanatic. Mitt's was to tell Evangelical Christians, 'I'm a religious fanatic just like you.'"

Richard Nixon is the cunning candidate Romney most resembles. Although he is dumber, richer, better looking, and possessed of many fewer core principles than his Quaker predecessor, Romney shares all of Nixon's inauthenticity. And here's the big advantage of not actually believing in anything: It frees Romney to pander to whomever he is speaking to at the moment. So it came as no surprise that Newsweek editor Jon Meacham was able to extract a modified limited retraction from Romney just hours after his speech was delivered.

Meacham told Romney that he was "struck that you did not explicitly extend the definition of religious liberty to those who believe nothing at all ..."

"I don't think I defined religious liberty," Romney replied. "I think it spoke for itself ... but of course it includes all, all forms of personal conviction."

"Or the lack thereof?"

"Yeah, the lack ... ," Romney paused. "But, well, the people who don't have a particular faith have a personal conviction. I said all forms of personal conviction. And personal conviction includes a sense of right and wrong and any host of beliefs someone might have. Obviously in this nation our religious liberty includes the ability to believe or not believe."

Meacham decided that "Romney's failure to make a noble public stand for the rights of atheists and skeptics is tactically understandable if intellectually disappointing." It fell to Sally Quinn—coincidentally the co-moderator with Meacham of a religious blog called On Faith—to explain to Meacham on the Charlie Rose show exactly why Romney's speech was so much worse than the way Meacham described it:

"I was absolutely stunned by how exclusive it was," said Quinn. "Certainly the line about you have a friend in me if you're on your knees praying was stunning. But the line that I was absolutely shocked by was when he said freedom requires religion just as religion required freedom. And then went on to say freedom and religion endure together or perish alone. He was basically recommending a theocracy. He was excluding anybody who might be a doubter, an agnostic, an atheist, free thinker—even a seeker. It was as though he were saying if you believe in God then that's the American way. And it seems to me that it was exactly the opposite of the American way. Which is, we are all Americans, whether we are believers or not."

Amen.

Hit: In the Los Angeles Times, the always-intelligent Thomas Powers explains that Bush was forced to make public the new, bombshell National Intelligence Estimate, which says Iran is no longer trying to make a nuclear bomb (the one Huckabee didn't notice)—because the only thing worse than having the White House announce it would have been for the Administration's enemies to leak it. "One of the basic laws of intelligence is that no big secret can be kept that can be written on the back of an envelope," Powers writes. "The fact that the NIE says what it says, and its release, both show that the White House has lost control over American intelligence. This good news probably needs a lot of hedging and qualification, but it is good all the same."

Hit: Keith Olbermann is beyond apoplexy over the the new NIE: "We have either a president who is too dishonest to restrain himself from invoking World War Three about Iran at least six weeks after he had to have known that the analogy would be fantastic, irresponsible hyperbole, or we have a president too transcendently stupid not to have asked—at what now appears to have been a series of opportunities to do so—whether the fairy tales he either created or was fed were still even remotely plausible."

Hit: Writing on the same subject in the New Yorker, Steve Coll reminds us that Sy Hersh first reported one year ago that the CIA was "challenging the White House's assumptions about how close Iran might be to building a nuclear bomb." Coll says the new estimate proves that "the Cheney regency persists, and that the vice president and his neoconservative protégés in the Administration have continued to exaggerate and misuse intelligence to advance preconceived policies—in this case, a policy of militant confrontation with Iran, salted by public misstatements of what was known or knowable about the Iranian nuclear threat."

Hit: In Salon, Mark Follman speaks with Flynt Everett, a former senior director on Bush's National Security Council, who says, "I think the president knew this was coming, and I think he was deliberately shifting his rhetoric ... I think they were trying to redefine the problem with the idea that they could kind of blunt the impact of the NIE by doing this. I think they miscalculated."

Hit: Worried that the good news about Iran will reduce America's chances to start a new war because of nuclear proliferation? Worry not! A series of fascinating articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian details American fears about who would control Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if President Musharraf is deposed. According to the Times, after much debate, we decided not to share PALS—"permissive action links," which are designed to prevent a weapon from detonating without proper codes and authorizations—with the Pakistanis. Instead of PALS, according to the Journal, the Pakistanis are using the "Personnel Reliability Program," which includes "a battery of checks aimed at rooting out human foibles such as lust, greed, or depression that might lead one to betray national secrets." The new Pakistani program delves into personal finances, political views, and sexual histories." Still don't feel safe?

Good News: "The U.S. has long had contingency plans in place under which American Special Forces operatives would deploy to Pakistan to secure nuclear-weapons sites in the event of an Islamic takeover."

Bad News: "Some U.S. military and intelligence personnel fear that there may be additional weapons sites that the U.S. doesn't know about."

Best News of All: The Guardian says we have contingency plans for a full-scale occupation of Pakistan, including sending U.S. and British troops to steal Pakistan's nukes and take them to a secret storage depot in New Mexico or a "remote redoubt" inside Pakistan; sending U.S. troops to Pakistan's northwestern border to fight the Taliban and al Qaida; and initiating a U.S. military occupation of the capital, Islamabad, and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan if asked for assistance by a fractured Pakistan military, so that the U.S. could shore up President Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani.

Now there's a foolproof solution.

Your Tax Dollars at Work: The New York Times estimates that up to one-third of U.S. spending on Iraqi contracts and grants goes missing.

Hit: On the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Michel Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending, managed to cut through all of the palaver about the subprime mortgage crisis. The salient points:

* Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson exaggerated the number of borrowers who might benefit from the Administration's plan of private relief by a factor of almost 10. Paulson said the program would help 1.2 million people. Calhoun said the real number is closer to 145,000.

* The typical family who got a subprime loan was not out speculating on some investment property: "The typical subprime loan is a borrower simply refinancing their existing home to help pay off some credit card debts, get money for tuition."

* This crisis was created largely by bad lending practices that were at the time very profitable for the lending industry.

* A typical subprime borrower would see their payments go from like $1,500 to $2,200 a month, even with no change in market interest rates, "And that's why we're seeing all these foreclosures, and that's why the crisis is here."



Winner (??): Fallen media baron Conrad Black sounds cavalier as he awaits sentencing for his role in pilfering millions of dollars from shareholders. Just before he was sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison, the 63-year-old gave the rhetorical finger to the prosecution, telling the Canadian Broadcasting Company that "prison would be a bore, but quite endurable. But Tony Holden, like many others, finds Black's new biography of Richard Nixon to be an unholy mess:

"His exasperating prose style throbs with such phrases as the 'boosterish scatology' of Nixon's school and the 'rubesville environment' of his hometown. When the Watergate tapes become public, the 'shrieks of outrage' that greet the expletives deleted from the President's tape-recorded conversations amount to 'another herniating levitation of pandemic hypocrisy.'"

Sinners: The one-third of the American people whom the Los Angeles Times identified as xenophobes, because they favor the denial of social services to undocumented workers, including emergency room care. The Times followed the thread with a story that described an Iowa town—with only 50 foreign-born citizens—where immigration has become a hot issue.

More of the Same: Ryan Lizza's colorful New Yorker piece on the increasingly extremist approach to immigration in the Republican primary.

Winner: Kevin Drum, for telling us everything we need to know about the CIA's destruction of its torture tapes, including the fact that George ("We do not torture") Bush was personally responsible for persuading the CIA to torture al Qaeda operatives.

	Meet the Press (NBC–Russert)	Face the Nation (CBS–Schieffer)	This Week (ABC–Stephanopoulos)
White Men	2	4	15
White Women	0	4	4
Black Men	0	4	0
Black Women	0	0	1
Gay People	0	0	0

Research assistance: Thomas Rogers, Richard Vanderford
Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.