"I come from a very good Christian family and I was raised much better than my actions speak," he explained in his clemency application in 2000. "I'm still ashamed to this day for the shame my stupid involvement in these crimes brought upon my family's name ... I have never done anything good for God, but I've prayed for him to grant me in his compassion the grace to make a start. Now, I'm humbly appealing to you for a brand new start."

There will always be hate-filled nuts on the fringe of any movement; left, right, religious or secular. No one in leadership should be blamed for their fringe -- unless they don't speak up. Post "Tea Parties", "Obama isn't a real American", and all the rest it is strange and disturbing to witness the silence of the evangelical leadership in the light of so much venom directed against our President by a largely evangelical Republican base.

This is shocking to me, given that for much of my life I was not just the son of a famous evangelical leader (Francis Schaeffer -- "credited" by Max Blumenthal and others as a founder of the religious right) but for a time I was also his sidekick and a leader in the evangelical world in my own right. I quit over the slide of the religious right into extremism. That said I'm still a believing Christian (non-evangelical and progressive) and to see the name of Christ used to promote hate outrages me. To see the Bible used as a political bumper sticker source (for whatever "side") is an affront.

... the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can't manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data "highways," abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

Have no doubt: we punched a fist into the Arab/Muslim world after 9/11, partly to send a message of deterrence, but primarily to destroy two tyrannical regimes — the Taliban and the Baathists — and to work with Afghans and Iraqis to build a different kind of politics.

In his Cairo speech last June, President Obama effectively built a connection with the Muslim mainstream. Maybe he could spark the debate by asking that same audience this question:

“Whenever something like Fort Hood happens you say, ‘This is not Islam.’ I believe that. But you keep telling us what Islam isn’t. You need to tell us what it is and show us how its positive interpretations are being promoted in your schools and mosques. If this is not Islam, then why is it that a million Muslims will pour into the streets to protest Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, but not one will take to the streets to protest Muslim suicide bombers who blow up other Muslims, real people, created in the image of God? You need to explain that to us — and to yourselves.”

Of course, if this had been a Muslim extremist caught with such an arsenal, we'd be getting talk-show panels on Hannity featuring Michelle Malkin ranting at length about the threat of Islamic jihad, blah blah blah. Not to mention chatty discussion on Fox and Friends and Morning Joe.

But instead, because he's just a white anti-government extremist, hey, let's just give it a big shrug.

I've always been a square individual. I mean, I've attracted a very strange group of friends, from Hell's Angels to junkies and psychopaths and a lot of other people. For some reason or other, they're attracted to me, knowing that I'm not of them.

Q: What did you learn from the time you spent in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and on spiritual retreat in Japan?

Brown: True spiritual practice teaches you to overcome your conditioning, your programming. From Zen, I learned how conditioned I was. From Mother Teresa, what it is like to observe the poorest of the poor, and how generous human beings can be.

You can either unselfconsciously follow your program or you can work to transcend it. That's what enlightenment is. That's what the Buddhists call nonattachment and the Jesuits call detachment. The precondition is to free yourself from, as they say, your addictions. In the religious context, they call it your attachments. Saint Ignatius, which I studied as a Jesuit novice, said you have to free yourself from inordinate attachment. Inordinate attachment, that means you crave, you need, you are dependent on desires for material things that distort your capacity for wisdom. If your consciousness is broadened and if you increase your awareness, then your action should follow, because action and consciousness are linked together. Even when we do dumb things, it's because we have a dumb idea in the back of our head. People who live selfish lives or spend their time building little private empires of greed are missing something.

Q: Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

Brown: I would say I'm certainly aware of the world of spiritual practice. I've pursued it for many years of my life and I've also neglected it for many years of my life. [my emphasis]

Q: what would you'say to those people who doubt your sincerity based upon your background?

Brown: Well, I think that's a good place to start: with great doubt [laughs]. What is it they say--to achieve enlightenment you need great faith, great perseverance, and great doubt. All three working together.

I believe we have to look into our collective condition and we have to say, "Does this square with what we know to be right?" We can look to the Bible, we can look to our experience. How do we treat friends? Is this the standard that we're seeing applied? That's the analysis that's missing. And if we don't do that in some collective way, we're going to see the country continue to move in a fascistic direction.

If your approval ratings go up fifteen points after Oklahoma City where 168 people are killed, how do you think you react to that as a President? Do you care more about your poll ratings, or do you care more about those people whom you never met before? The system is rewarding things that shouldn't be rewarded. There's no reason why the President's polling should go up fifteen points. That is perverse. Just the measurement of that is perverse.

The FBI trots out its wish list and you get several hundred more agents and all the other agents combined are up to 1,000. And they get new powers of surveillance and infiltration. [my emphasis]

The Supreme Court voted 6-3, with two of Clinton's appointees forming the majority, that if you want to play sports, the school can drug-test you, the state can drug-test you. The most significant part of this is again the tilt toward authority, toward subservience, toward obedience, toward a nation of sheep. You take the child's mind at a vulnerable age and you embed deeply in the consciousness of that child the idea that taking orders is what it's about to be an American. Take your pants down and pee in that little jar and we will send it to a certified laboratory. You won't see it, but you will know, you can believe, that the results will tell us whether you're clean or not. This is the way the state builds totalitarian consciousness. It's what Ivan Illich calls the "symbolic fallout" of the use of technology. The symbolic fallout of drug testing is that the child learns without even being able to debate it that his job is to follow orders even to the point of yielding up bodily fluids to the state to be evaluated by a process that he or she can't understand. That's true disempowerment.

Q: Do you fear the far-right agenda?

Brown: I don't know about the far-right agenda. It's the survival agenda of the incumbents that I'm most concerned about. The militias are going in there and calling attention to the dangerous power-grab of the state. What do you have? You have the ACLU and the NRA, two groups that are not viewed by the establishment very seriously. So The New York Times did a piece comparing the militias to the Black Panthers, not ever drawing the conclusion that they both were talking about excess oppressive practices by the government. They drew the conclusion that, well, the Panthers were wacky, and now the militias are wacky. The Panthers committed crimes, but that doesn't mean that they weren't speaking from an authentic community and speaking heroically in many, many instances. And all these militia people are marching around because they think the state has been taken over. If you really look at it, the United States has certainly been submerged in a transnational system where one-person-one-vote or the checks-and-balances as envisioned by the founders in the Federalist Papers barely exist.

Q: What do you think the price is we're paying for all the murder and mayhem committed by the United States abroad?

Brown: I don't know about prices. It's wrong for the people who suffer. If you say human-rights violation, that's an abstract word. If you say castrating somebody, putting a balloon full of water down their throat, or cutting their arms off with electric saws--what they did in El Salvador and Guatemala--horrible, horrible things, cutting heads off, putting them on platters, that was reported by the Jesuit magazine America. Why is the money and prestige of America playing into that? The entire story of Haiti. That was an eye-opener to read. The people who were involved with the murders of Haiti were receiving American intelligence payments. So what is that all about? It appears to be a deeply corrupted form of activity that cannot be good for the American government, is not right morally, it is not good for the country, and it's kept a secret.

If we don't have morality at the top, how do you expect morality at street level? It's not going to work. Clinton had a drive-by shooting in Baghdad. [A 1993 bombing attack.] There was no war, there was no judicial order--not even a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It was just, "Let's send twenty-five Tomahawk missiles toward Baghdad." I believe a half dozen or more landed and eight people were killed. Now what's that? What's the moral label that you affix to that? Does he have a right to kill innocent people to send a message to Saddam Hussein? Those people didn't do anything. It was supposed to be about the alleged plot against [Old Man] Bush. What happened to the alleged plotters? They were not the ones who were killed. It's almost like burning a witch. It reminds me of the short story by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery, in which the town picks one person to be stoned every year. We need a few people to die, just to make an example of them. [my emphasis]

Every one of these guys--Dole, Gramm--they're playing football, and in the football game of politics, you have to have the big bucks and the 1 percent who own 39 percent of all the assets. That power is the reality, unless you have an agenda for changing that reality, disrupting it, coming up with an alternative for the people to consider. ...

The experience of the $100 limit in the campaign, making fundraising no longer the key to the campaign, gave me a detachment and a separation to observe the incredible dependency of the politician, and therefore the government, on this very narrow band of people at the highest strata of the society. That goes contrary to the notion of a middle-class, almost class-less society, that the American political class likes to pretend we have. So that's on one level, the political.

Then as I read more about covert action, what the intelligence agencies are doing, and what really went on in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Reagan's bombing of Qaddafi, Clinton's bombing in Baghdad, or Bush's intervention in Panama, I realized that there is an immoral, inhuman kind of formula that is being pursued by the government.

And the magnitude of the injustice appears to be increasing. [my emphasis]

Alluding to William Paley’s analogy between a crafted telescope and the human eye, which was a key part of the Anglican theologian’s famous proof of an intelligent designer behind organic creation. Darwin then added, “Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressing designed.” Even human nature and mental ability might result from natural processes, he concluded.

The sequence in Darwin’s letter to Gray is telling. It passed quickly from observations of what seemed bad in nature (such as cruel animal behavior, which even devout creationists hesitate to blame on God) to ones about what seemed good in nature (such as the human eye, which Victorians typically credited to God), and then moved on to ponder the origin of what seemed best of all, human morality and mentality, which natural theologians typically hail as the ultimate gift and proof of the divine supernatural. In Origin of Species, Darwin avoided making comments about human evolution, fearing that they would prejudice readers against his general theory, but his private notes, essays, and letters reveal his longstanding fascination with the issue.

Gov. David Paterson was dragging [Kennedy] through mud and refusing to announce a decision on the appointment for the New York Senate seat. Paterson was being lobbied by a vengeful Bill Clinton. Bill was still upset at Caroline for bestowing the Camelot mantle, which he had tried to claim during his campaigns, on Obama.

... especially puzzling given that Obama faces tough midterms and a less-than-certain re-election - and given that we all now know someone on the unemployment line. (A new poll shows Obama and Sarah Palin neck and neck among independents, but then it is a Fox survey.)

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]