Trent Lott.

It is a mark of progress that Sen. Lott, a white man suspected of not abandoning the racist sentiments of his idol, former Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond, and not giving a good explanation why he wasn't a racist, was stripped of his position as majority leader. Not so long ago his comments would have been seen as quite routine palaver from a Southerner.

Imagine, then, how Rev. Wright's remarks are playing with the Bush Base, alongside Michelle Obama's crack about only being proud of the U.S. now that her husband is running.

Just this last Sunday I got a reaction from a thoughtful, moderate Republican woman who had been a supporter of Obama and was ready to vote for him: she is repelled by those unpatriotic comments, and she's not buying the "I didn't know" line.

There is a big difference of course: Lott personally bought into the old ideology, Obama is expressly rejecting comments made by others.

But the stain is there and it is coloring opinions massively.

As an Obama supporter myself, I'm glad this is happening in March rather than August. He may not be able to survive what I fear is a meltdown of moderate support, and with it a winning edge over McCain. But if he can survive, his odds are better having this fight now.

But I am pessimistic. Whites in this country still don't know blacks well at all, how they have had to persevere against a steady awareness of being different from the (former and now ebbing) white majority. There is no acquired tolerance for annoyed or angry statements from blacks about white society. And so whites, without for one second being aware that their reaction is grounded in lack of understanding about racial-cultural differences, which creates a kind of subconcious racism, are going to quietly demonize Obama and make it impossible for him to be elected.

I think the process has already started here in Salon. This article, without comment, reports the National Enquirer's view that Rashid Khalidi is some kind of radical pro-Palestinian lefto, when in fact he is a thoughtful moderate who, like many such, knows that in Israel, as here, there is intense conflict between pro-war right-wingers and peace-oriented moderates. But the swiftboaters will make him into a suicide bomber at Obama's side.

And that's too bad.

I can conceive of a situation where in order to do a very good thing for humanity it becomes necessary to violate the law. But that justification is tricky, because that is exactly what the torturers are saying.

Civil disobedience always carries with it the duty to accept the consequences in exchange for the good done by the disobedience. So Diaz should be the first one saying, Don't cry for me, America.

Sometimes civil disobedience isn't necessary or even helpful. Jazzlstnr is right that there were alternatives available to Diaz which might have been just as effective as what he did. And his failure to use them appears to have been folly.

Bureaucracies have channels, and into the channels go paper. And when paper hits a problem, it becomes history. Except for Cheney's safe and dozens of Bush executive orders, governmental paper stays in the system and can create big problems for those who don't pay attention to it.

And the Navy in particular has a recent history of its senior legal officers standing up for Constitutional rights, which in one case had the effect of stopping military torture even before it began. Diaz had allies at the top.

At the very least, he would have made big trouble for the system and any retaliation could have been reversed by Congressional pressure, as it has been many times in the past.

So it's a pity he didn't do as jazzlstnr says, and ring the bell from inside. He might have been able to accept his prize wearing his uniform.

I agree with Yerevan's suggestion. I went to a wonderful YMCA summer camp in Colorado half a century ago, and they went pretty light on the religious stuff. Grace was said at mealtimes, and there were services on Sunday, but they weren't mandatory. And that summer there were a few dozen Jewish kids from Chicago in attendance, which was fun and educational. In fact, there was a fat kid with a beautiful voice who the others said was going to make a good cantor, and on Friday evenings there were Sabbath services we were invited to attend, and the song of Israel was raised to the mountaintops. The chaplain was Unitarian, who cheerfully debated the Virgin Birth with conventional Christians.

Send the kids to one of those. You can't go wrong.