Good morning, Hampton Roads…

This is the last week of my self-imposed exile on the Costa de Almería, and next week I’ll be writing once more from the Costa de Virginia. (To respond belatedly to Jesse’s call for a catchier name for our region, “Costa de Virginia” gets my vote.) And in anticipation of being fired from ODU when Attorney General Cuccinelli hears that I believe dinosaurs existed, I’m engaged in a full-scale attempt to get Virginia Senator Jim Webb to hire me as a publicist. So this week I’m all Webb, all the time. I eagerly await his response.

Citing review, Webb votes against military gay ban repeal

The entire House, as well as the Senate Armed Services Committee, has now voted to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Local Dem Congressmen Bobby Scott and Glenn Nye voted in favor of repeal. Our own Jim Webb, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was the lone Senate Democrat to vote no.

Prior to yesterday’s committee vote, Senator Webb’s office released a statement to explain his intent to vote against a repeal. It reads as follows: “Sec. of Defense Gates and Adm. Mullen have laid out a specific and responsible plan to examine the current ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy in a manner that includes a comprehensive survey of those wearing the uniform. The White House and Sec. Gates both said today that, ideally, the Defense Dept. should complete this review before legislative action is taken. There is no question that a review of the policy is necessary and important. I see no reason for the political process to pre-empt it.”

I wrote last week that Webb needs to “end his cowardly silence on DADT.” Now he has done that, albeit with a vote for keeping the 1993 law until after Republicans stand to win back Congress. Webb says the Defense Dept. needs a long stretch of indefinite time to complete the “comprehensive survey of those wearing the uniform” before a repeal can be palatable to him.

Funny how when the word gay is uttered, even an institution as authoritarian as the Pentagon can advocate direct democracy: “Let’s hear comprehensively from everyone! Maybe there are some mid-level or low-ranking homophobes who don’t support repeal.” But this is nonsense; the military is under civilian control, and the House vote suggests it’s finally under the control of folks who have more sense in these matters than the Pentagon does.

Senate hawks used to call politicians unpatriotic who disagreed with George Bush’s forever-war policies. In the spirit of those attacks I now repeat the same charge against Webb, who is operating against the best interests of the country during wartime. It’s an embarrassment to Virginia that he won’t stand up unequivocally for ending DADT. I’m ashamed that he represents me in the Senate.

Last week at least one reader questioned my use of the word cowardly to describe Webb’s silence. Well, Webb is one of the most politically powerful men in the hemisphere. Every day men and women are expelled from the military under an absurd and destructive law that Webb should know is outrageously unjust. If he doesn’t know it, he’s not fit to be our senator. I’m actually giving him a certain benefit of the doubt by calling him cowardly; to use that adjective assumes he knows the law is wrong and just can’t stomach publicly supporting a repeal. The alternative is that he believes the law is right, in which case he’s equally cowardly in a different and arguably more destructive way.

I’m sick of the “Please, sir, can I have some more” school of gay rights advocacy. For seventeen years now, politeness has failed to end DADT. Yesterday Lieutenant Dan Choi announced a hunger strike until there is a repeal. In this fight Lt. Choi represents the opposite of cowardice, while Sen. Webb clearly does not.

Photo | binetusa

P.S. In case you want to argue that Webb is justified because of Secretary Gates’s own stance, the word “Defense” in the Secretary’s title doesn’t render his opinions sacrosanct. Recall a few of Donald Rumsfeld’s pronouncements:

“I believe what I said yesterday. I don’t know what I said, but I know what I think, and, well, I assume it’s what I said.”

“We know where [the WMD] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”

“I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.”

In Rumsfeld’s defense, the second half of that last statement is correct.

Senator Webb returning to Myanmar

It’s especially unpleasant to realize Virginia’s senior senator is capitulating to bigotry when one also sees that he’s one of the only American politicians who cares about the appalling situation in Burma. The Burmese people are some of the most oppressed on earth. If the U.S. had actually cared in 2003 about “spreading liberty” above all else, we would have engaged in a preemptive strike on the Burmese military junta, whose most elite members have sequestered themselves in a secret and inaccessible new capital deep in the jungle. Burmese freedom advocates who have heard the “spreading liberty” canard for our Iraq misadventures have been known to ask us for similar intervention in their country—but of course Burma isn’t strategically useful to us.

Webb is right to call attention to Burma, and also to take the politically unpopular position of advocating prison reform in the U.S. But no matter how much Burma and prison-reform advocacy Webb engages in, I won’t cast another vote for a segregationist.

To speak more generally, it’s perplexing that politicians who call America the apotheosis of freedom when they’re advocating war can’t see that the gay rights movement, nascent though it may still be, is a quintessential embodiment of the freedom they call America’s gift to the planet. Markos Moulitsas has a forthcoming book called American Taliban that looks at how America’s xenophobic right, which ostensibly opposes the Taliban, actually holds Taliban values dearer than its members care to admit. If right-wing hawks desire to draw contrasts between the American and Iranian governments, they could notice that America doesn’t execute gay people by hanging, and that American women have reproductive rights enshrined in law. It’s mind-bogglingly hypocritical to stand opposed to privacy rights and simultaneously to call America earth’s best bastion of freedom.

I write these words from a country where gay marriage is legal and gays serve openly in the military. The year 2006 saw Spain’s first gay military wedding, just a generation after the end of Franco’s reign of fascist terror. This makes me hopeful that by the 2040s, after America’s current batch of bigots have died or grown too senescent to rule, we might come to live under similarly just laws.

Call me bombastic if you will, but we—i.e. you and I—hired Jim Webb to represent us. I say we because we’re all complicit in the actions of our government. When Virginia executes a prisoner, all who live in Virginia are executing him, morally speaking. That’s how representative democracy works.

The difference between representative democracy and direct democracy lies in middlemen like Webb. The Secret Service might mow us down with gunfire if we try for direct democracy, so we’ve chosen Webb as a middleman to do our bidding. Last week an unusually large number of these middlemen were voted out in primaries. The mainstream media claims that the primary victories of anti-establishment candidates signal a “purge.” That’s because the MSM and the party elites (Republican and Democratic) are tied inextricably together in a complex array of nepotistic binds. In 2006 Jim Webb was the anti-establishment candidate, and that spring I applauded his primary defeat of Harris Miller, but it seems that since then the tables have turned.

(Note: I’m not advocating war against Burma; I gave the example in part to prove the hypocrisy of a major argument in favor of the Iraq War. If there’s any brutally oppressive government on earth that might be toppled with few civilian casualties, and whose toppling might result in rejoicing by the citizenry it controls, it’s Burma’s. Our lack of interest in the plight of the Burmese is one of many clear signs that our military adventures abroad are unrelated to concerns about oppression. Also, the Pilot states that “Myanmar is also known as Burma.” The Pilot isn’t alone in the convention of acting as if Myanmar is to Burma as tom-ay-to is to to-mah-to, but that doesn’t make it make sense.)

U.Va. fights subpoena of climate-change research

U.Va. is standing up to Attorney General Cuccinelli’s witch-hunt against one of its professors. A Cuccinelli spokesman “did not respond Thursday to several e-mail messages seeking comment.” When Cuccinelli’s spokespeople remain silent, it’s impossible to discern what this intriguing cipher of a man really thinks.

McDonnell responds to Obama order to halt drilling lease sales

Governor McDonnell has guardedly admitted that Obama is maybe sort of correct to have halted drilling lease sales off the coast of Virginia. However, he hopes this “does not signal the end of offshore energy exploration and production off Virginia in the years ahead.” In other words, the future is not necessarily less predictable than the past, and the governor believes what he said yesterday.

Officials: Va. lawyer in custody over threat to Obama

A Virginia patent lawyer named Adam Albrett has sent an email threatening to “blow the brains out of Obama unless he vacates the White House.” In addition, the lawyer expressed his plan to kill Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. But if not for the Pilot’s footnote that “in the same e-mail, Albrett also mentions his cat,” I doubt I would feel such a visceral, desperate need to read the whole text of the letter.

Mall’s curfew gets positive reviews

According to WAVY, merchants at the MacArthur Center, which occupies practically a third of downtown Norfolk, are still breathless from the thrill of being able to discriminate against people under eighteen. “That is the best rules [sic] they’ve ever made,” said “a manager at one of the shops” whom WAVY seems to have granted anonymity for the sake of this report. Later a probably inaccurate claim from the mall’s general manager goes completely unchallenged: “[Jim Wofford] said the curfew has actually helped attract more customers,” says WAVY, offering as evidence the general manager’s own subjective sense that “more families” now shop there.

Wofford also said, astonishingly, that “We’re not trying to keep teens out of the center.” Equally astonishing is that the WAVY reporter, MaryKay Mallonee, didn’t challenge even this logic-defying lie. Future stories we can anticipate from WAVY: why Ken Cuccinelli isn’t trying to keep climate-change research out of U.Va; why Jim Webb isn’t trying to keep gays out of the military; why Governor McDonnell isn’t trying to keep money out of elementary-school budgets.

It’s bad enough when journalists give unnecessary anonymity to national politicos whose leaks make them feel personally uncomfortable. Here, though, it seems some store manager was afraid that despite his sunny claims to the contrary, his bias would indeed hurt sales in his unnamed store. Or maybe the corporate leadership of his store would be upset to learn about his cheery take on legally sanctioned discrimination. Or maybe WAVY didn’t deem trivial details like his name and workplace relevant in a report whose first half nevertheless relies primarily on this mystery manager.

And again: “Nine out of ten stores visited by WAVY.com said they love the teen curfew.” Well, which nine stores swooned with this “love” for the curfew? What does it mean for a “store” to “say” something? Which store was the odd man out? This opacity is made literal in the accompanying video, which blurs the face of practically everyone who was interviewed. Anonymous quotes are given as voice-overs while a hand-held camera veers along MacArthur Center walkways. Are the shaky handheld cameras meant to be indicative of the tastes of the teenagers no longer allowed inside the mall?

Journalism can be exhausting, I know, but the name of the unnamed manager would at least help prove that his quotes weren’t concocted out of thin air by WAVY, as another of the stores is now claiming.

The unspeakable in the Rand Paul civil rights discussion

Speaking of discrimination by merchants, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul thinks restaurants should be able to discriminate by race. He calls his stance on the Civil Rights Act “the hard part of freedom” and thinks “market forces” would have integrated Southern lunch counters in 1965. A pernicious fact that doesn’t compute with Paul’s ideology is that in most cases it wasn’t businesses mandating discrimination; it was state and local laws. Integrating a lunch counter didn’t mean getting thrown out by the owner; it meant getting arrested.

Ye olde Senate

To continue with this week’s Senate theme, Democratic Senator Ben Nelson doesn’t know if we should cap ATM fees, because he’s never used an ATM. “I don’t know how to use one,” he said, “but I could learn how to do it just like I’ve … I swipe to get my own gas, buy groceries. I know about the holograms.”

There are lots of Luddites who can’t tell the internet from a pinball machine, but senators write the laws that control how we use the Internet. When politicians run for office, reporters should ask them a series of questions: 1. Have you used any form of technology since 1980? 2. If not, what have you been paying the servants who have obviated your need to use technology? 3. What corporations have given you the money you’ve paid those servants, and what demands have they made of you?

P.S. If you’re not sure which holograms Sen. Nelson knows about, he’s referring to the ones that paid him to oppose health care.

Warner siding with the richest on Wall St. over the unemployed

The three questions above would also serve us well in the case of Virginia’s junior senator, Democrat Mark Warner, who seems to be working hard to protect Wall Street bankers from paying taxes. Read all about it.

DNA to be forcibly extracted from suspects

Here we learn that “Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database.” It’s one of several steps taken this week to degrade the capabilities of writers of Orwellian fictions by rendering those stories’ dystopias too mundane to hold interest. Also participating was Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, whose letter to Obama asked that he “consider wider deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles along our southern border [because] of how effective these assets have become in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom.”

(Recall too that if Obama thinks these words are an incitement to terrorism, he can now have me legally assassinated.)

The Bigger War

Worth noting on this Memorial Day weekend: “For the first time since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, there are more U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan than Iraq—94,000 compared with 92,000. The total number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan [has] roughly tripled under the Obama administration.”

Also, because I’m a state employee, I got a letter inviting me to a ceremony last night that was to honor “Virginia’s fallen heroes in the Global War on Terrorism.” It would be nice if we could honor war dead on Memorial Day without propagandistic event-naming. Does reducing all the battles of the last ten years in which Americans have died to the singular “Global War on Terrorism” honestly make anyone feel better about anything? Isn’t it rather deranged to still be calling our initial invasion of Iraq a “battle in the Global War on Terrorism?”

Elena Kagan goes on Supreme Court confirmation offensive in drab clothes

This Post piece by Robin Givhan notes that in photos Elena Kagan “doesn’t appear ever to cross her legs.” Givhan is the writer who said seeing Hillary Clinton’s V-neck was “like catching a man with his fly unzipped. Just look away!” She justifies this crap by claiming “the chatter in the coffee shops” is ablaze about the topic. Indeed, who can buy a mocha at Fair Grounds these days without a fight about Kagan’s leg-crossing? If this argument hasn’t died down by the time I arrive home on Monday, I’ll buy a Mister Coffee.

Whole Foods request link

At this discussion forum on the Whole Foods website, you can request that Whole Foods open a store in your city. Hampton Roads is surely the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. without a Whole Foods. There’s room to add that you want for ours not to come with any teenagers in it. I have vowed to the Whole Foods Corporation to spend at least seven dollars in any future Hampton Roads Whole Foods every day until I die. Similar pledges from others of you might convince Whole Foods that there’s an ineradicable movement in our area for one of their stores.