A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Becker and Posner have some interesting thoughts on income inequality, envy, and whether the inequality is deserved or not deserved.

I have seen more references to David Barton than is usual lately. Mostly I come across his name when Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars debunks one of Barton’s offerings. But now I’m reading about him in other places. For example, Tipsy notes a squabble between Barton and Ann Althouse.

There is an almost hermetically sealed, alternate intellectual universe where the half-truths and fabrications of guys like Barton are taken, almost literally, as Gospel. They strive to portray Founding and pre-Founding America as a place where there was not a notion that a wall should exist between (Christian) Church & State; and where other religions may have been tolerated but not equal in the eyes of the government. (See “Dominionism“) Chris Rodda has undertaken to debunk a good number of these in her “Liars for Jesus” (pdf). But, as historian Paul Harvey notes, such debunking is necessary but not sufficient because Barton is simply playing a different game than historians.

Barton’s intent is not to produce “scholarship,” but to influence public policy. He simply is playing a different game than worrying about scholarly credibility, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. His game is to inundate public policy makers (including local and state education boards as well as Congress) with ideas packaged as products that will move policy.
. . .
Barton’s success at withstanding the phalanx of professional critics comes because he taps into a long history of “Christian Nation” providentialism.

In short, perhaps the best way to understand Barton is as a historical product of Christian providentialist thinking, one with significant historical roots and usually with a publicly convincing spokesman. He is the latest in a long line of ideologically persuasive spokesmen for preserving American’s Protestant character.

Barton is the intellectual descendant of “Parson” Weems, Lost Cause historians, and William Jennings Bryan. (Harvey notes that Bryan’s Christian Nation bordered on socialism, in sharp contrast to the coldly libertarian one envisioned by Barton.) Harvey goes on to argue that the “debate” about the Founders view on religion is mostly fictitious — at least as argued against Christian Nationalists. The “godless” view of the Constitution recognizes that the Founders were, by and large, religious people. They just did not believe that religion should have any special privileges at the federal level. Harvey concludes:

The Christian Nation “debate” is not really an intellectual contest between legitimate contending viewpoints. Instead, it is a manufactured “controversy” akin to the global warming “debate.” On one side are purveyors of a rich and complex view of the past, including most historians who have written and debated fiercely about the founding era. The “other side” is a group of ideological entrepreneurs who have created an alternate intellectual universe based on a historical fundamentalism. In their drive to create a usable past, they show little respect for the past as a foreign country.

Guys like Barton are looking at the past, not for its own sake & not to understand it, but as a tool to achieve a predetermined purpose. And what’s the point? To influence politicians and policy. And it’s working. Mike Huckabee likes Barton so much that he joked that he wanted every American to be forced to listen to him at gunpoint.

And I just wish that every single young person in America would be able to be under his tutelage and understand something about who we really are as a nation. I almost wish that there would be a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced, at gunpoint no less, to listen to every David Barton message and I think our country would be better for it.

G.O.P. Presidential frontrunner, Michele Bachmann, wants Barton to teach “Constitution classes” to new members of Congress.

Bachmann and Barton have a long relationship going back to Bachmann’s time as state senator. Barton was invited to Minnesota to help Bachmann with legislation on school history standards, she’s appeared his radio show numerous times, and she and Barton have conducted tours in Washington, D.C., to demonstrate to tea partiers how religious the Founding Fathers were.

And, the other likely G.O.P. Presidential nominee not named Mitt, Rick Perry, used Barton as a textbook expert. Using Barton’s mythical story of the Founding is argument by appealing to (fabricated) authority. They want a present where their view of Christianity dominates government policy; so, they want to create the illusion that there was a happier time in our past where our country embraced their policy views so that they can further argue that we should “return” to that embrace and, thereby, return to that happier time. This is necessary since, often times, the general public is a little skittish about embracing those views on their own merits. (See, e.g., a wife should graciously submit to her husband.) This is the sort of thing that gives rise to Stephen Colbert’s quip that reality has a known liberal bias.

The Guardian has an interesting article from a chapter of history about which I had previously known nothing. In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold was the UN Secretary General when his plane went down over northern Rhodesia on his way to peace talks about a rebellion in the Katanga region.

According to the article, the plane crash was chalked up to operator error at the time. But, it appears that the investigation was suspiciously cursory and that there is fairly good evidence that the plane was, in fact, shot down. Hammarskjold had pissed off just about everyone in the world already; and these peace talks were particularly unpopular in some quarters.

The investigation led Björkdahl to previously unpublished telegrams – seen by the Guardian – from the days leading up to Hammarskjöld’s death on 17 September 1961, which illustrate US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region.

Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed at the general assembly vote due the following year.

Looks like maybe some truly hardball politics was at work there. Anyway, nice, long article for those of you interested in such things.

That didn’t take long. It looks like the Region’s Ken Allen is first out of the gate with a Fairground lawsuit.

This does not give me confidence that I was wrong when I offered predictions about how this was going to shake out.

“This was a terrible tragedy that could and should have been prevented,” Valparaiso attorney Kenneth J. Allen said in a news release. “The responsible parties must be held to account.”

Translation: Your Client Is Evil. Pay Me.

Matt Taibbi has a good article on the destruction of records from preliminary investigations known as “Matters Under Inquiry,” (MUI) apparently in violation of the SEC’s agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration and other federal records retention laws.

More importantly, it’s bad police practice to destroy such letters. According to Taibbi’s report, the practice, since 1993, has been to destroy MUI documents if the MUI doesn’t get green-lighted to become a “formal investigation.” To make that jump, it has to get the approval from higher ups from the enforcement division. These higher ups routinely get big pay days on Wall Street after they leave the SEC.

Taibbi points out that it’s pretty atypical for a law enforcement agency to destroy its own evidence. He concludes:

We’ll never know what the impact of those destroyed cases might have been; we’ll never know if those cases were closed for good reasons or bad. We’ll never know exactly who got away with what, because federal regulators have weighted down a huge sack of Wall Street’s dirty laundry and dumped it in a lake, never to be seen again.

I’m scarred by years of listening to plaintiff’s attorneys pretending to be sanctimonious, but I’m already tired of reading about whether or not the weather front that blew over the stage at the Indiana State Fair, killing and injuring people, could have been predicted or not. The “search for answers” in these cases is typically a search for someone upon whom we can pin the blame who also has money.

Here is the game plan: 1) find someone solvent; 2) find something they could have done better; 3) pretend that thing was the entire reason the stage fell over with people underneath; 4) hope the jury feels sorry enough for your client to more or less ignore the contributions to the accident by people or factors without money.