Is a Coup Coming?

I've read a fair number of pieces -- and I'd call them "alarmist", except I don't think they're wrong to raise the alarm -- that the Republican Party is laying the foundation to simply not accept a Democratic victory in 2024. "Stop the steal" becomes "steal it back", if you will. Certainly, the defenestration of Liz Cheney is part of this dynamic. The branches of the GOP which are even nominally supportive of democracy in America grow more brittle every day.

But meanwhile, Politico is observing goings-on amongst retired military officials, and there's some cause for concern there too:

A day after 124 retired generals and admirals released a letter spreading the lie that President Joe Biden stole the election, current and former military officers are speaking out, calling the missive a dangerous news sign of the military being dragged into the trenches of partisan warfare.

The open letter on Monday from a group calling itself Flag Officers 4 America advanced the false conspiracy theory that the presidential vote was rigged in Biden's favor and warned that the nation is "in deep peril" from "a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights."

The good news, such as it is, is that most of the flag officers are below three stars (and no four stars) -- not the heaviest hitters. The bad news, well, I'll kick it over to Peter Seaver (formerly on the NSC in the Clinton and Bush administrations) for the bad news:

Every military that coups or threatens to coup constructs a narrative in which the military is acting to save the country from something worse than military rule. Clearly the authors are attempting to write that narrative.

Not good. Not good at all.

Also, I'll just note that Thomas Sowell was flirting with supporting military coups to keep Democrats out of power since 2008. So this rot, while no doubt accelerated by Trump, did not begin with him. It has been percolating in conservative circles for awhile.

Trump Administration Targets US Troops in New Anti-Citizenship Rule

The Trump administration has issued new rules denying automatic citizenship to the children of U.S. servicemembers and government employees born while their parents are serving abroad. Until now, such persons were deemed to be "residing" in the U.S. and so therefore were automatically citizens at birth. Under the new rules, while the children remain entitled to citizenship, their parents will have to proactively apply on their behalf before they turn 18 -- new bureaucratic hoops that undoubtedly will cause some children to unwittingly never actually attain citizenship. The legal justification strikes me as quite thin -- under U.S. law, it already is the case that servicemembers and their spouses are legally deemed to be "residing" in the U.S. when deployed overseas, but the Trump administration says that the statute doesn't specifically say their children are so residing. I'd say that if you're born to someone deemed to be legally residing in the U.S., it'd be fair to infer to you were born residing in the U.S. as well. And until now, that was law.

There's no real point to this. It appears to be motivated by nothing more than the Trump administration's indiscriminate obsession with tightening immigration laws. Hell, here the primary victims are going to American citizen parents who are already sacrificing to represent their country. This is a gratuitous slap in the face to them. Who out there is thinking "it's just so unfair that the children of Americans serving their country abroad get citizenship automatically, just as they would if their parents were stationed stateside?" Who is the constituency that wants to target this population?

The only thing I can think of is that Stephen Miller and company are hoping that, in twenty-five years or so, they'll be able to snag a few more cases like this one: deporting people who grew up American, assumed they were American, lived as Americans, and yet will be banished from America if they at all run afoul of the criminal justice system. Most of us read that story and had our hearts wrenched. The Trump administration reads it and smells opportunity.

All of which is to say, and say again, the cruelty is the point.

Qualified Grader Roundup

I passed my qualifying exam last week, which is the last formal hurdle before I begin writing my dissertation. That's a weird sentence to write -- like talking about the last safety check before jumping out of an airplane, or the last underling to defeat before facing the Ultimate Final Boss Monster -- but it's where I am.

At the same time, my students' final exams are due today, so my immediate future is not as a writer but as a grader. And since it would be just catastrophic if anything distracted me from that essential task, I suppose it's time to clear some browser space.

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I wrote last week about alleged discrimination against Jewish chaplains in the army; now we get a different story about retaliation against a chaplain in the Air Force after he converted to Judaism.

This is the story of another immigrant we, the United States of America, effectively murdered in the most gruesome way possible (the penultimate part of the story -- before the death -- is an amputated penis) via a mixture of grotesque indifference to obvious medical need and complete lack of empathy.

UC-Berkeley releases its report on campus free speech issues. One interesting thing about it is that it is not really focused on questions law. Rather, it takes for granted that Berkeley is constrained in various ways by the First Amendment, and rather than dwelling on where those precise borders lie it tries to ask what practical steps the university can take -- consistent with those strictures -- to foster and maintain a healthy speech culture.

Also germane: Jeffrey Sachs has an interesting data set on instances of speech suppression on campus. Interestingly, there have been more successful terminations of left-of-center college professors for "bad" speech than conservative professors -- and while on its own that might be explained by different base rates, the big spike in left (but not right) firings from 2015 to 2017 can't be. The other interesting finding was that -- contrary to some narratives about the so-called "Palestine exception" to the First Amendment -- Israel issues were of comparatively minor importance. There were, depending on how you count Joy Karega (Oberlin) and Michael Chikindas (Rutgers), between three and five Israel-related terminations (or coerced resignations) over the data-collecting period (out of a total of 58). Of the unambiguous cases, two were for anti-Israel speech (Steven Salaita at Illinois and N. Bruce Duthu, who returned to the regular Dartmouth faculty from a deanship position due to backlash over his role in the NAISA BDS resolution), one was for pro-Israel/anti-BDS speech (Melissa Landa at the University of Maryland).

The mixture of deep hostility to divorce, openly male supremacist theology, and physical abuse is a toxic combination in the Southern Baptist church.

Speaking of toxic Protestants, a wing of the Presbyterian Church has published a follow-up to its notorious Zionism Unsettled document -- 110 pages on why Israel is the locus point of global colonialism and genocide (this sounds familiar....) through everything from eating hummus ("cultural genocide") to wanting to actually talk to people ("normalizing oppression"). This is the latest in a series of PCUSA highlights, including calls for all Jews to "come home to America" and my absolute favorite exhortation by a Christian minister on this issue: "Jesus wasn’t afraid to tell the Jews when they were wrong."

An interesting "This American Life" segment on an ill-fated Alabama field trip to see Schindler's List.

Two good pieces on police misconduct that I wanted to flag. One is by a Black police officer commenting on business trespass calls (like the Starbucks affair). The argument here is that when individuals call the cops against seemingly innocuous conduct, there is to some extent a fobbing off of responsibility to then say the police officers are the wrongdoers rather than the caller (cf. Colorado State). The other is in the Atlantic on how we might want to extend our narratives of police bravery or cowardice to cover instances where they whistleblow (or cover off) instances of violence, racism, or misconduct by their colleagues.

Sleeping in Fear, Part II

The other day, I noted the abject paranoia of some Texans convinced that a U.S. army exercise in the southwestern United States was a cover for a military takeover leading to the seizure of their guns and their internment in FEMA concentration camps. My snarky comment was that perhaps this fear would give these residents more empathy towards the far more reasonable fears that many people of color have towards the armed governing authorities, which pose a far less speculative threat to their lives and livelihoods.

But I also admit sharing Digby's sentiments, which were to marvel at just how disrespectful this is towards the men and women who serve in our armed forces. This conspiracy-mongering relies, at its root, on the presumption that the young people who volunteer to risk their lives in defense of America will, at the drop of a hat, just elect to destroy their own country as tools of oppression and despotism. That is a statement of contempt, and entirely undeserved contempt, and it really is shocking that prominent politicians from a party that perceives itself as "pro-military" would indulge in such ugly sentiments.

They Step Up as We Step Down

President Barack Obama has announced the US will begin a complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, to be completed at the end of the year. This, of course, is another major accomplishment for the Obama administration, and we can all be glad that our troops are finally coming home.

Meanwhile, Turkey has just launched a major invasion of its own into Iraq, where it continues to battle Kurdish rebels seeking an independent homeland based in northern Iraq and eastern Turkey. The current Turkish Prime Minister has promised that Kurdish rebels will "drown in their own blood".

Fortunately, then, anti-war and anti-occupation groups can simply refocus their ire on Turkey, which is invading another sovereign country in an explicit bid to maintain political dominance over a disenfranchised minority group that simply wishes to express national self-determination. That is what will happen, right?

Sunday Punch Roundup

A bit of a rough weekend here, and unfortunately Jill is out of town.

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Melissa Harris-Perry on why (some) White liberals are turning on Obama.

An interesting retrospective by the participants in the notorious "Stanford Prison Experiment."

After a Palestinian stone-thrower apparently caused a car accident which killed a Jewish settler and his infant child, settler militants are vowing revenge, with one extremist Rabbi proclaiming "There are no innocents in war."

Convicts told: Go to church or go to jail. It's not an Establishment Clause violation, the police chief argues, because you've got a choice!

The Marine Times cover on the repeal of DADT is, indeed, fantastic.

I thought the Herman Cain fad had passed, but apparently nobody thought to tell Florida.

This is from a few days back, but the new Union of Jewish Students (UK) campaign for a two state solution respecting the rights and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians alike looks very cool. I'm dubious that it will have any impact on campus radicals, but hopefully it can make a dent on the middle.

US gives high-powered military equipment to Mid-East ally fighting terrorist organization which seeks an independent homeland for a stateless, oppressed people.

Looks like Congressional Republicans have been reading my Comment.

Legal Perils

A few months ago, I blogged on the distressing case of Yaderlin Hiraldo, whose husband, Alex Jimenez, is currently missing in Iraq. Despite the fact that her husband either died, or is being currently tortured by Iraqi insurgents, while fighting for his country, the US government initiated deportation proceedings against Ms. Hiraldo. It was, I said at the time, one of the more tone-deaf moments in US immigration history. What's worse, the only reason the government even knew about Hiraldo's undocumented status was because her husband tried to legalize her status by having her apply for a green card. Had they not tried to go the legal way, the problem would have never manifested itself in the first place.

Today, CNN has a related story of Navy sailor Eduardo Gonzalez, about to be deployed to Iraq for his third tour. His wife is also under the threat of deportation, so Gonzalez is going to war literally not knowing if his wife will be around when he comes back.

What's particularly tragic is that Mrs. Gonzalez did not originally come here illegally. She was a war refugee from Columbia who came with her mother at age five. Now, I'm of the opinion that it is meaningless, absurdist, and malicious to label anyone who comes to the country as a five-year old a "law-breaker" as a result of it (as if kindergarteners have the state of mind necessary to comprehend immigration laws), but Gonzalez was actually given political asylum, so her entrance wasn't illegal after all (as far as I understand the law here). Her mother applied for permanent legalization for herself and her daughter in 2000, which was granted four years later in 2004. However, by that time Gonzalez had married her husband, meaning that her mother's application no longer applied to her own status, and she was left in limbo. A judge recently granted her a one-year extension, but if her legal status is not resolved by June of 2008, she faces deportation.

I mention all this to contextualize the next passage in CNN's article:

That's just fine, according to Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which lobbies for tougher laws on illegal immigration.

"What you're talking about is amnesty for illegal immigrants who have a relative in the armed forces, and that's just outrageous," he said. "What we're talking about here is letting lawbreakers get away with their actions just because they have a relative in the military. ... There's no justification for that kind of policy."

Now, I think in general there is a lot more outrageous about disrespecting our men and women in uniform by deporting their wives than there is in the horror of letting some more brown people in the country. And, to reiterate, I think it is particularly callous and hateful to refer to people who came into this country as five-year olds in this manner. But Krikorian's statement is particularly revealing here because Mrs. Gonzalez isn't a law breaker. She entered this country legally, as a refugee. The only reason her status isn't secured is because of a breakdown in our bureaucracy. If it hadn't taken four years to process her mother's application, she'd be legal. If we didn't penalize her for getting married, she'd also be legal (can I hear a shout out for "family values" anyone?). Only things on our end distinguish her from the perfectly legal and documented immigrants Krikorian claims to have no problem with. You want to know why immigration advocates like myself don't trust folks like Krikorian when they say their only problem is with "illegal" immigrants? Because they don't take their own distinction seriously. And when faced with situations like Gonzalez's, their true colors become clear. It's not about legal versus illegal. It's about less versus more people named "Gonzalez". Xenophobia, pure and simple.

Shame Squad

The Senate just voted 75-25 to condemn the infamous MoveOn "General Betray Us" ad which, of course, is the most important issue facing our country today and thus far more worthy of cloture than, say, restoring Habeas. I do agree that the "Betray Us" ad was in poor taste. But what about supporting all the troops, rather than just the ones willing to serve as water carriers for the Bush administration?

Well, those troops can apparently just suck it. Fresh off denying them much needed rest, Republicans voted en masse against a substitute amendment by Senator Boxer that would have condemned all political attacks against our nation's troops and veterans. "Betray Us", qualifies, as does the Swift-Boating of John Kerry and the smear of Ex-Sen. Max Cleland in 2002. Because Democrats couldn't overcome the 60-vote margin necessary, the resolution didn't pass.

The problem here isn't that Republicans have no shame. Few politicians possess an intrinsic sense of shame; they can only be shamed by outside forces (the media, the voters) willing to take them to task for outrageous conduct. And in contrast to Democrats, who are forced to undergo a renewed round of newspaper and television fire every time a MoveOn-type organization sneezes, Republicans know that they can be as cruel and mean-spirited to the troops as they want without ever seeing the media blink. Check the papers tomorrow, and let me know if you see a headline reading along the lines of "Republicans block vote condemning political attacks against troops." It'll never happen, and I have no idea why we've collectively agreed to set our expectations so low for one party but not the other.