As Barack Obama and the Democrats wrap up a successful lame-duck session of Congress, Republicans are howling in outrage that Congress dared do the job for which it collects a paycheck.  Then there is the allegation that the Democrats tried to cram stuff at the last minute.  Of course the last minute cramming was caused by the record number of filibusters that the Democrats had to overcome in the Senate the past two years.

Another thing the Republicans seem to forget when howling about passing lame duck legislation is their impeachment of Bill Clinton in the 1998 lame-duck session after LOSING seats (something that almost never happens to the opposition party in the sixth year of a presidency).  Enjoy the achievements of the most productive Congress in a generation.  The next two years will not be pretty.

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Because it was passed by a Democratic president.

Ezra Klein notes the history of Republican Senators who had no problem with a health care mandate in the past and actually sponsored legislation containing one  This has been one of the tragedies of the health care debate.  Barack Obama passed a bill that Bill Clinton could have passed in 1993 with the blessings of the Republicans in Congress.  But today that is portrayed as a socialistic power grab, even though it did not contain the public option that most of the left and a majority of the country wanted.  The question now is whether the conservatives on the Roberts court will have a similar change of heart.

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The maxim above is one that the American devotees of torture often forget.  This article by Glenn Greenwald is worth reading because it captures right wing hypocrisy on torture and prisoner conditions when Americans or co-religionists are involved.  Greenwald’s column was triggered by recent hand-wringing from usual torture supporters at the plight of the American Baptists arrested in Haiti for smuggling children out of Haiti.  It also gave him the opportunity to revisit this article from 2006 where Michelle Malkin fretted about the quality of legal protections awarded to alleged (Christian) terrorists in Indonesia.

This double standard was of course predictable.  The uniformed military many former officers (including then Secretary of State Colin Powell and Arizona Senator John McCain) and many JAG officers (including South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a former JAG officer) opposed the Bush administration’s eagerness to torture (somehow magically transformed by calling it enhanced interrogation) for exactly such reasons.  Once America tortures it does not have much standing to grouse about similar treatment to its own citizens and soldiers.  When America uses fear to toss away the rule of law and the right to a fair trial it is much harder to claim such rights for its citizens, let alone sermonize about the denial of rights to others.

What the torture loving elements of the right also fail to appreciate is that when America eschews torture, it can actually enhance security.  While Republicans have been up in arms lately that the Obama administration did not torture the underpants bomber, they ignore the point raised by Fareed Zakaria in his recent column.  See link.  The underpants bomber and the five American Muslims arrested in Pakistan when they went for jihad training were turned in by their parents.  Zakaria is right to observe that this would not happen if the parents felt that he would be tortured, and while the example of Chechen parents not turning their kids in to Putin’s thugs is a bit extreme it is on point.

So basically the American security hawks want the right to torture or deny trial to terrorist suspects (my guess is that given how the right reacted to the FBI raid at Ruby Ridge in the 1990s we are talking about Muslim suspects here) in the interest of national security, but such deviations from the rule of law are not permitted elsewhere (particularly against Christian suspects).  It is hypocrisy at its rankest.

One of my complaints about the American legal response to 9/11 was the failure to evaluate how other countries handled similar (and often far more severe and pervasive) terrorism threats and the failure to set up mechanisms to limit the inevitable abuse of power from draconian anti-terror statutes.  It was also unfortunately not the first time in American history fear became a mechanism to subvert the rule of law and American values.

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One of the problems with choosing a sanctimonious corporate motto like the one above (which may be loosely derived from the Hippocratic Oath) is that it opens you up to charges of hypocrisy when you inevitably fall short.  After years of fudging the oath to comply with the dictates of the Chinese security state Google pulled back to a chorus of applause.  Now in one stroke Google has squandered that goodwill with its disastrous launch of Google Buzz.

The arrogance of the implementation of Google Buzz is breathtaking.  New users of Google Buzz found that Google preselected a list of contacts based on the people with whom they communicated with the most on Google mail and chat.  See link.  Also see here.  Did the testers for the product not see the obvious flaw in the procedure and how Google’s presumptuousness was likely to piss off people?  Privacy concerns with social networking sites are hardly new.  Its only been a couple of months since there was a brouhaha about Facebook’s new options to reset privacy settings.  See link. For suggestions to enhance your privacy on Facebook see here.

An example of the privacy maelstrom Google kicked up see this expletive laden blogpost from a blog dedicated to women’s violence issues (the blog itself appears to be offline).  Also as Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy points out Google’s new system could be manna from heaven for authoritarian regimes hunting down dissenters.  See link.

With Google’s Orkut not having a huge following in the United States, Google appears to have tried to jump start its new networking tool to allow it to catch up with Facebook and others.  See link.  Google is right in how tedious it is to populate a new list of friends on a new social network.  The proliferation of these sites makes it very difficult to follow all of them and most users trim the amount of sites they follow.  But Google should still have given people the choice whether they wanted to toss their privacy to the winds (something Facebook in its pursuit of Twitter and a positive revenue stream needs to remember as well).  The brouhaha makes me glad that logistical reasons prevented me from switching my primary email use to my gmail account a few years ago.

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From Northern Ireland comes a scandal right out of the pages of the “The Graduate,” right down to the lyrics.

And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know, wo wo wo
Stand up tall, Mrs. Robinson
God in Heaven smiles on those who pray, hey hey hey
Hey hey hey

Iris Robinson, the 60 year old wife of the First Minister of Northern Ireland and a member of Parliament in her own right evidently engaged in an affair with a 19 year old.  You can read the details on the affair here and I do not intend to dwell on the salacious details.  The scandal threatens to bring down Northern Ireland’s government and has split the Robinson’s church.

I bring this up as an example of a politician from across the pond in the hypocritical moralizing (and more strident) tone of John Ensign, Mark Sanford, Chip Pickering, John Edwards, Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Newt Gingrich etc.  A politician who cloaks himself or herself with the garb of morality and cannot resist from sermonizing others for their human frailty, but inevitably is revealed to be a fraud.  Robinson who termed herself a born again Christian was notorious for her screeds against homosexuals and Catholics.

Obviously every person is entitled to their religious faith.  However, when politicians grandstand on issues of faith I cannot help but recall the paraphrased (the original quote is in Hamlet Act III, Sc. II) Shakespeare quote “Methinks thou dost protest too loudly.”  As the list of fallen hypocrites grows longer (and global) the cynic in me feels a sense of grim satisfaction.

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