"HOW TO MAKE THEN LOSE POTENTIAL SYMPATHIZERS", BY ATRIOS

Step 1: Point out an outrage that even the more reasonable of your ideological opponents would support:

Army chaplain offers baptisms, baths

BY MEG LAUGHLIN
mlaughlin@herald.com

CAMP BUSHMASTER, Iraq - In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust, there's an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water.

It belongs to Army chaplain Josh Llano of Houston, who sees the water shortage, which has kept thousands of filthy soldiers from bathing for weeks, as an opportunity.

''It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,'' he said.

And agree they do. Every day, soldiers take the plunge for the Lord and come up clean for the first time in weeks.

''They do appear physically and spiritually cleansed,'' Llano said.

First, though, the soldiers have to go to one of Llano's hour-and-a-half sermons in his dirt-floor tent. Then the baptism takes an hour of quoting from the Bible.

''Regardless of their motives,'' Llano said, ``I get the chance to take them closer to the Lord.''

It's crap like this that made me skeptical of Christianity for quite a while, before returning to the flock. I'd rather go dirty than support this nonsense. You don't coerce people into Baptism. It weakens the nature of religion, which is by necessity voluntary.

Step 2: Explain why this is so wrongheaded

So, if you are a desperately thirsty Jewish soldier, do you have to accept Christ to get a juice box from this "man of God"?

My first thought was atheists and/or agnostics, but that's true, it'd affect Jews, too.

Step 3: Accuse people who would cross ideological lines to agree with you of being racists

Fucking hell. And people bitch about anti-Semitism 'on the left.' I'm also pissed off that I have to use the example of the Jewish soldier to bring the point home. If I had said "Muslim" or "Atheist" most people wouldn't even give a damn.

Go to hell, Atrios.

Secularly speaking, of course.

DOMESTIC TERRORISM, HATE CRIMES, AND THE MOTIVATIONS OF WRONG-DOING

Anyone interested in me talk about the war, I also contribute to the Reductio Ad Absurdum blog (that makes what, four blogs? Overextended? Me? Well yeah, probably). Though you don't have to go there to know that I am in favor of it and have been and so on.

That said, this kind of crap is more UnAmerican than any non-violent anti-war protest I've seen to date has been... by a factor of two at least.

Those conservatives that are tempted to rationalize it by saying that there's no right to block traffic and cause substantive disruptions, I ask that you think of it again in another context: hate crimes.

What the Oregon law does is take something already illegal (blocking traffic) and then gauge its seriousness on the context of the motives. Motivations are, of course, an important determinant as to how serious a crime is or if something is a crime at all. You can kill someone as long as it's in self-defense. If you kill someone in the heat of passion or by accident, it's differentiated from a contract killing, even though the effect is the same. If you stop traffic to work on the roads, it's obviously different than doing so because you're against a war that the traffic you're stopping may well be.

But the context of the motives ought to be factored differently than the beneficence or malevolence of them, which is to say they shouldn't be a factor in the seriousness of the crime). If Person A kills Person B because B looked at A funny, the penalty ought to be roughly the same as if Person A kills Person B cause A is white and B is black (or vice-versa). The effect is the same (B is dead) as is the basic motivation (evil as opposed to benign, greedy, or temporarily out of their gourd).

Similarly, if someone blocks traffic in order to prevent a local porn shop from getting patrons, it's little different than if they do so cause they oppose the war. Both are seeking to break the law in order to apply pressure to achieve desired results. They are both criminals and neither are terrorists.

Many protesters and their supporters are claiming persecution because they police are intervening in their protests. That is, of course, silly. You break the law, you invite the police to get involved. During the WTO protests several years back, I couldn't help but be amazed at the martyr status the protesters, who destroyed public property, looted, and injured non-participants with their recklessness, took. Crap like this lends that sort of silliness all the more credence because we are singling out protester and while the first amendment right to protest doesn't make it okay, it definitely procludes it from being terroristic.

LETTING BYGONES BE BYGONES

It seems to be becoming popular among many on the right to lay the recent French troubles on the doorstep of the government. Chirac and company denounced the graffiti on the graves of the British WWII liberators and the response seems to be "You can't feed the flames then complain about the fire."

Now, I'm not one to defend the French. In fact, I'm not going to. I am, however, going to tentatively defend the government. The underlying principal is that since Chirac was so vocally, obstructionally against the war, people taking anti-war sentiment to the next level are, of course, to be blamed on Chirac. To test this, leave our distaste for the French aside and take the inverse of the statement and see if it holds.

Let's say that there was a rash of killings against Arab Americans and immigrants in the south as Bush declares war against a Muslim country. Is Bush "feeding the flames of anti-Arab hatred"? I'm certain many French and others in Europe would say so, but let's get real here. A leader of a free nation only has nominal control over its people. Bush has his reasons for pursuing the war as does Chirac in his reasons for opposing it, but it has nothing to do with persecuting Muslims or defacing graves in France (or, for that matter, the unfortunate violence against Jews going on over there). What Bush has said about the evils of extreme Islam was tailored in speak about Islam being the "religion of peace." What Chirac has said about American (and British) aggression and unilateralism is a message of restraint, which the vandals certainly did not show.

To be sure, I am very angry with Chirac and hold no personal goodwill towards the man. I wish the (Socialist candidate) Lionel Jospin, who I was rooting against in their last election, had won. Jospin would have been more adamently opposed to the war than Chirac, but his opposition would have been more honest. I am also unhappy with the French at-large, who seem to be undecided as to whether they would like the liberal democracy or brutal dictatorship to win. Then again, I'm sure the hostility is mutual, so oh well.

All these thing being said, the goverment's condemnation was immediate and did not tuck any deflections such as "I'm sorry the American hostilities have provoked..." I don't know what the future holds for America and France, former and possibly future friends. Maybe we'll be able to mend our bridges or maybe we're just too far apart to be able to do that. Whatever the case, lets at least save our debates for important issues and not waste them on tarring an entire nation and its government on the actions of a few. Let's accept their apology as we'd hope that they'd accept our apology if someone were to ransack the French embassy.

The issues that lay ahead are more important than this. Not to say we shouldn't be angry. I'm furious. Nor is it to say that we should let it slide. On the contrary, we need to make sure that Chirac backs up his words with actions. But Chirac is sitting on a powder keg of Europeans and Muslim immigrants, left with the derision of the only other local nation with a serious army to speak of, and isolated from the most powerful nation on the planet. This is all, quite literally, Chirac's problem.