Alexander is one of the leading voices on the rise of a level of mass incarceration in this country in the last 25 years. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating our prison-industrial complex has become. The huge numbers of African American men in jails for nonviolent crimes begs comparison to the darkest days of slavery. Bill Clinton escalated mass incarceration and the “War on Drugs” as a way to prove his political toughness.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

We tend to remember the Clinton Administration through rose-colored glasses but there were a lot of WTF moments we’ve forgotten–three strikes, the sanctions against Iraqi civilians, the way cruise missile strikes seemed to magically coincide with administration scandals, Bill’s serial philandering and Hillary’s slut-shaming responses. On paper, HRC is the most qualified candidate to ever run for the presidency. But if she’s running on the Clinton brand, she needs to explain how her political choices differ from her husband’s 20 years ago.

So while it’s not a surprise, there is a certain satisfaction in the latest media rumor that “Law & Order” is planning one of their classic “ripped from the headlines” dramatization of the scandal:

Raffaello’s arrest was and still is the buzz in New York City’s social circles.…He was the ultimate con man; handsome, rich, smooth and with a celebrity girlfriend to make him seem legit. I’m sure this will be the highest-rated Law & Order episode next season.

There’s enough angles to this story to fill an entire season of television so we don’t know how prominent the Bishop’s part will be. But L&O creator Dick Wolf grew up an altar boy at St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York and the L&O costume department has more clerical outfits that Raffaello Follieri’s closet. Wolf rarely misses the chance to throw a priest into the script. Whole seasons of the show were devoted to ripped-from-the-headlines pieces on the priest/bishop sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s and I’m sure a follow-up look at the web of financial fraud fueled (or at least justified) by the settlement payouts would be a big ratings hit.

I just wish Lennie Briscoe was still around to make the collar. BOMP BOMP.

The Diocese of Camden is in frantic spin control mode after yesterday’s revelations that Bishop Galante personally received $400,000
from high flying Eurotrash con man Raffaelo Follieri for the sale of a
beach house the Bishop had been unable to unload. Follieri’s the guy
who’s been trying to buy up Catholic church properties across the
country while making out with his Hollywood girlfriend on San Tropez
beaches and partying it up with Bill Clinton’s sleezy billionaire
buddies.

It seems like a pretty clear cut case. Galante had his hand in Follieri’s cookie jar.
Sold his beach house to the guy who stood to profit most from the
Bishop’s plan to sell off half of South Jersey’s churches. Oldest story
in the book. Give him the cell next to Follieri’s and they can reminisce about
the good old days (NSFW).

I’ve been wondering just how the Diocese would try to spin this story
as it waits for federal investigators to come knocking at the door. And
today the official Spokesperson in Charge of Fairy Tales called up all the papers. Ladies and gentlemen, we present you with:

The Andrew Walton Idiot Defense

Turns out someone at the Vatican called someone at the
Diocesan offices back in 2004 telling them to sell to Follieri. That’s
it. No one can remember who made the call. No one can remember who took
the call. For all we know Follieri filled his mouth with cotton balls
and did his best Marlon Brando imitation from the pay phone across the street.

The Archdioceses in Boston, New York, Newark and elsewhere told Follieri they had enough bridges thank you very much, but poor Grandpa Joe was confused and started lending him priests and giving him the keys to the beach house.

How could anyone imagine that Follieri was a crook? He seemed like any
other Mother Teresa choir boy with his $10,000 suits, New York penthouse,
heroin habit, convicted mob associates, San Tropez weekends and expensively-maintained Hollywood girlfriend. “Nobody was aware of problems with Mr. Follieri or his company at that time.” Yeah right. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. And I’m the widow of the late John Paul II, recently deceased President of the Vatican, with frozen assets in Nigeria I’d like your help in securing. Please email me back at your earliest convenience Andy Walton, I know you won’t be disappointed.

My predictable post-election essay is over on Nonviolence.org, “Four More Years”. Aside from the politics, I’ve been fascinated how the election was finally framed in terms of “moral issues” and how this measurement somehow translated to support for President Bush.
Friends and other lefty Christians need to take the “moral and faith issues” question as personal and corporate queries. (As usual Beppeblog has a good post about this, “Tough numbers for a fag like me…”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/tough-numbers-for-fags-like-me.html). If someone had come up to me after I voted yesterday and asked me what I thought was the most important issue in this election, I would have replied “the war”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_iraq_antiwar.php. The answer would mask the fact that for me war is a moral issue defined by a deep passionate faith (a deep passionate Christian faith). It’s too easy for me to talk around my faith though, and to frame the debate in secular language. I tell myself I’m being more inclusive when I use pragmatic rationales, but in reality I’m hiding from my listeners my true understanding of Christ’s work in the world and our role in His covenant.
A majority of voters are suspicious of us East Coast liberals and they should be. I just talked to a Friend buying a book for a Bush supporter who, she explained, “doesn’t understand the complexity of life.” Talk about judgemental! Would you support someone who thought you were a idiot if you didn’t support Kerry? The Democrats are starting to look at the turn-off of this form of elitism; from today’s _New York Times_ (of course, here _I_ am, quoting from the official publication of elite America):
bq. “Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter got elected because they were comfortable with their faith,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide. “What happened was that a part of the electorate came open to what Clinton and Carter had to say on everything else–health care, the environment, whatever–because they were very comfortable that Clinton and Carter did not distain the way these people lived their lives, but respected them.”
He added: “We need a nominee and a party that is comfortable with faith and values. And if we have one, then all the hard work we’ve done on Social Security or America’s place in the world or college education can be heard. But people aren’t going to hear what we say until they know that we don’t approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment.”
h3. War and tolerance as moral issues
Why am I not more explicit about my faith and my politics? Why don’t I say that I voted against Bush because I question his moral judgement and his faith? Why don’t I say that war is a Christian issue and that all Christians should be against war? Why don’t I say that charity and love is a Christian issue and that all Christians should honor loving same-sex relationships?
The Revealer has an article called Gay Marriage, GOP secret weapon. The author recently wrote a book about religion in America and concluded that the “greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality.” But here’s a telling observation from his interviews of Christians:
bq.. Most of these people are surprisingly abstract in their thinking. There may be a certain disingenuousness to the popular anti-homosexuality mantra, “hate the sin, love the sinner,” but nearly everyone we met really did distinguish their hatred of homosexuality from their dealings with homosexuals.
How do I know? Because many, if not most, thought that Peter and I were a gay couple, by virtue of the facts that we�re writers and had come from New York City. We�re neither a couple, nor gay, but there never seemed to be a polite way to say that, so we didn�t, and still some of the great homosexual-haters of America welcomed us into their homes and their churches and their temples.
p. This does mean the laws are abstract and we shouldn’t worry. I’m sure there were plenty of Germans in the 1920s who could work themselves into a lather against Jews but be good friends with actual Jews. This sort of casual bigotry grows cancerous when government gets involved. When Hitler took power it was all too easy for them to pretend that the obvious wasn’t happening.
In this election, religious conservatives were able to craft a message making same-sex marriages look like an afront to apple pie and baseball and of course people voted against it. What if we could have somehow framed this election with the details of human suffering that these laws suggest?
The most striking moment of all three debates came when the top lieutenant of the most loyalty-obsessed administration in modern history said he disagreed with his president on the proposed constitutional amendment on marriage. Vice President Dick Cheney has a lesbian daughter and that experience forced him to see the human consequence of these otherwise-abstract laws. Both Cheney and his debate opponent “John Edwards are United Methodists”:http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week745/news.html. What if Edwards had broken the debate rules, walked over to Cheney and asked that they use his ninety second response time as an opportunity to offer up a joint prayer on love and charity? They could have held hands (gasp!) and could have turned the issue around right then. What good is faith if we don’t witness to it when it counts?
h3. Elsewhere on the Net
* “Gary Hart: Why the Personal Shouldn’t be Political”:http://nytimes.com/2004/11/08/opinion/08hart.html
Who would have thought that the Howard Dean of the 1980s would be so incisive about the issues of religion? I didn’t realize how religious a man he is and he explains why: “As a candidate for public office, I chose not to place my beliefs in the center of my appeal for support because I am also a Jeffersonian; that is to say, I believe that one’s religious beliefs — though they will and should affect one’s outlook on public policy and life — are personal and that America is a secular, not a theocratic, republic.… Declarations of “faith” are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy.” Found via “The Revealer”:http://www.therevealer.org/
* “Beppeblogs’s roundup of post-election talk”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/inspiration-about-elections-beyond.html
* “Omri Elisha: God Save the Queen”:http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_001162.php
An explanation of Christian Evangelical appeal of Bush, and why for them qualifications aren’t as important as faithfulness (a principle any Quaker should agree with). “The Esther story, and that passage in particular, is read by evangelicals as a sign of the individual�s role in God�s sovereign designs for human history. They see it not as a story of heroism, but of instrumentalism; Esther is a vehicle, a tool. Mordecai�s statement (�Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this�) sounds like grandeur, but for evangelicals it is read as a radical call to self-abnegation.” These are Quaker themes too, and there are possibilities for “Liberal Quakers and Evangelicals to connect on these issus”:http://www.nonviolence.org/Quaker/emerging_church.php.
* The Friends Committee on National Legislation has issued a “Minute on Moral Values”:http://www.fcnl.org/legpolcy/moral_109th_printer.htm. It’s kind of the predictable press release you might expect but it’s good to see them weigh in.

Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.

I put this at the bottom of the piece because then the idea that Clinton might have done this was still way out there.

Since then most every major turning point in the President’s scandals has been echoed by military maneuverings.

On August 17th Clinton gave a televised address which was widely criticized as being “too little, too late” and non-repentant enough. Public opinion turned sharply against him. Three days later Big Bill sent 100 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in order to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the previously unknown archenemy of the United States.

And now, on the afternoon before the House of Representatives was scheduled to begin proceedings on his Impeachment, Clinton has ordered an attack on Iraq. Congress will of course delay the vote. Rumors are that this new bombing campaign might last more than a few days, and come January’s new Congressional term there will be five less Republicans.

Each time these coincidences happen, a few pundits that mutter about “Wag the Dog” scenarios before assuring the audience that Clinton would never do that. Everyone talks about coincidence and then moves on.

But coincidence has been Clinton’s friend throughout his scandals. Remember the long-lost Whitewater documents that mysteriously appeared on Hillary Clinton’s coffee-table when investigators were threatening to issue here a subpoena? Remember the job offers that Clinton cronies arranged for key witnesses just before they either recanted their stories or lied under oath? All of Clinton’s scandals have been of the “who cares” variety-shady land dealings twenty years ago in Arkansas, his having sex with an intern in the Oval Office. They displayed a lack of judgment and character, but were not Impeachable. But his scandals have grown and taken a life of their own as Clinton and his wife have been visited by an ever-growing amount of coincidences.

Enough is enough. How much more are we to believe? As I write this the missiles are screaming over Baghdad and Iraqis are dying horrible deaths. This is real. This is not some political game. It is time for Americans to stop denying that these coincidences are really coincidental.

It is time to demand Clinton’s resignation.

And if he refuses, then it is time to subpoena White House records on the last year of military actions. If they show that Clinton has murdered in his desperate attempt to save his Presidency, then it is time not only to impeach him but to put him into jail.

We’re told it’s because U.N. inspectors believe that Iraq has hidden “weapons of mass destruction.” But of course so does the United States. And Britain, France, Russia, the Ukraine, China, India and Pakistan. Iraq doesn’t even hold a regional monopoly, as Israel certainly has atomic weapons atop U.S.-designed rockets aimed this very moment at Hussein’s Baghdad palaces.

Insanely-destructive weapons are a fact of life in the fin-de-Millennium. There’s already plenty of countries with atomic weapons and the missile systems to lob them into neighboring countries. Hussein probably doesn’t have them, and the weapons U.N. inspectors are worried about are chemical. This is the “poor man’s atomic bomb,” a way to play at the level of nuclear diplomacy without the expenses of a nuclear program.

Clinton seems oblivious to the irony of opposing Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction with our own. The aircraft carriers and battle fleets that have been sent into the Gulf in recent weeks are loaded with tactical nuclear missiles.

If the possession of weapons of mass destruction is wrong for Iraq, then it is wrong for everyone. It is time to abolish all weapons programs and to build real world peace along lines of cooperation.

He’s our Bully

Most Americans, on hearing a call to let Hussein be, will react with disbelief. Conditioned to think of him as our modern Hitler, anyone opposing a new Gulf War must be crazy, someone unfamiliar with the history of the appeasement of Hitler prior to World War II that allowed him to build his military to the frightening levels of 1939.

But Americans have alas not been told too much of more recent history. Saddam Hussein is our creation, he’s our bully. It started with Iran. Obsessed with global military control, the U.S. government started arming regional superpowers. We gave our chosen countries weapons and money to bully around their neighbors and we looked the other way at human rights abuses. We created and strengthened dictators around the world, including the Shah of Iran. A revolution finally threw him out of power and ushered in a government understandable hostile to the United States.

Rather than take this development to mean that the regional superpower concept was a bad idea, the U.S. just chose another regional superpower: Iraq. We looked the other way when the two got into a war, and started building up Iraq’s military arsenal, giving him the planes and military equipment we had given Iran. This was a bloody, crazy war, where huge casualties would be racked up only to move the front a few miles, an advance that would be nullified when the other army attacked with the same level of casualties. The United States supported that war. International human rights activists kept publicizing the abuses within Iraq, and denouncing him for use of chemical weapons. They got little media attention because it was not in U.S. political interests to fight Hussein.

Nothing’s really changed now except U.S. political interests. Hussein is still a tyrant. He’s still stockpiling chemical weapons. Why are U.S. political interests different now? Why does Bill Clinton want U.S. media attention focused on Iraq? Look no further than Big Bill’s zipper. Stop the next war before it starts. Abolish everyone’s weapons of mass destruction and let’s get a President who doesn’t need a war to clear his name.