U.S.A. R.I.P.
All the mainstream discussion of the Pro-Torture bill seems to characterize it as a 'victory for the President' which it indisputably is -- and thus is a loss for the rest of the human race. To think, Congress just authorized one of the stupidest, most-inept, corrupt, clueless and flat-out deluded individuals on the planet to torture pretty much whomever he can wave the magic word s "illegal combatant" at. Nobody mainstream has noted that Congress also outlawed prosecution of those who have already conducted torture on the President's behalf. They issued a blanket pardon to the President and his henchmen, ensuring we will never even begin to know what's already been done.
How turning America into a pariah nation, deservedly hated by billions around the world, including millions who were born into its manifold blessings "makes us safer" is not immediately apparent.
One thing to bear in mind, with respect to the Vichycrats: A false friend is vastly more dangerous (and despicable) that a frank enemy. Will nobody even hold the Democrats accountable?
Via
Daily Kos:
On the question do you favor (1) allowing the President to define torture, (2) strip the court of judicial review via habeas corpus (even though the constitution does not allow you to except in cases of invasion or Rebellion), and (3) allowing the President to jail American citizens arbitrarily and without court review?
Gutless Democrats saying Aye:
Tom Carper (Del.)
Tim Johnson (S.D.)
Mary Landrieu (La.)
Frank Lautenberg (N.J.)
Bob Menendez (N.J)
Bill Nelson (Fla.)
Ben Nelson (Neb.)
Pryor (Ark.)
Jay Rockefeller (W. Va.)
Ken Salazar (Co.)
Debbie Stabenow (Mich.)
Gutless Connecticut for Liebermans saying Aye: Joe Lieberman (Conn.)
Republicker-Lite
Politicians of the so-called Democrat Party have had nearly nothing to say about ongoing Congressional efforts to dismantle the Billof Rights and the Geneva Conventions.
Reportedly this is Vichycrat strategy:
"Democrats are not planning any organized effort to filibuster the deal in the Senate, even though they may not agree with some of the specifics in the legislation.
With just a few days left before the election recess, Democratic aides say they are not going to give Republicans an opportunity to paint them into a corner. 'We’re going to do what we can to limit the amount of daylight between us and them on national security issues in order to neutralize this as a political issue,' a senior Democratic aide said."
So, lets see: the Democrats don't dare stand on principle, because that might risk losing the election -- after which if they somehow don't lose they'll have to come up with a new reason for not standing on principle.
Also, you don't want to be at odds on national seciurity issues with the party that botched 9/11, botched Afghanistan, and mislead the country into the greatest military debacle in its history.
Hmmm. Okay then.
Torture Soon to Be Legal in "Land of Free"
So, the Republickans are agreed that it's okay to torture people so long as it's not, y'know,
excessive in the sober judgment of the Preznit.
Tristero has this to say about that:
Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permittted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina. What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget?
Toxic gasses are wafting down of the Hill today. I've never been more disgusted with this country.
The Defenders of "Civilization"
So Prince Bunnypants is once again on the the warpath to save civilization. He's been saying this shit for
5 years now: "We wage a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we will fight it and we will prevail."
Who knew that the way to save civilization is attack without provocation, to eavesdrop without warrant, to imprison suspects incommunicado, on secret evidence, while torturing them? Seems rather like raping for chastity to me. And suggests that our current rulers have no concept of civilization, except most definitely, as the inarguable Higher Good which makes necessary the many evils they so enthusiastically perpetrate in its name. It's like "freedom" to them, another magic word, about which they have very foggy notions.
The W Monument
People who have little must rely on their imaginations more than people with vast resources. That's one reason why plutocrats are often among the dullest, stupidest people on the planet. That's also the reason that the American military regime keeps building great monuments to their own lack of imagination -- which the little guys in black pajamas circumvent and undermine with the inventiveness necessary to their survival. This is akin, as I've said, to the Maginot Line Effect. Now the Bushites have a new plan for securing Baghdad at least, they're going to dig a
moat (or at least a trench) around it. Yeah, that'll work.
I propose that it is at least the prototype for what, in a just and tasteful world, would be the George W. Bush Memorial. American children would come from all over and line up to consecrate W's memory in proper fashion.
The Wisdom of the Market
Every peak has its
troughand every boom its swift die-off.
Any being’s growth unchecked
parasites a host to death.
In the future as the past
our fate is set in simple math.
The
Club for Growth’s a cancer cell
sending mankind on to Hell.
Give In to the Dark Side....
It occurs to me lately that the Bush regime has really a bizarroworld approach to justice: when they encounter hatred they do their best to
deserve it. They do this for all Americans, (and Westerners?) but they especially do it for the formerly persecuted people who foolishy ally with the Junta, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics etc. Although I am as good a knee-jerk, bleeding-heart, why-can't-we-all-get-along? Liberal as you could hope to find in any Starbucks, every time I see Condi speak I want to join the Klan. Is this what W meant by being a uniter?
Here, via Hulaballoo & You Tube, is Condescenda in one of her scuzziest all time moments, turbo-lying to the Senate.
Holiday with Ernesto
The Day of Rain
Four or five nights into the Beach Week I adore
the day of rain. It balms the salted sunburn,
soothes the belly rubbed raw by a sandy surfboard.
Rain perfects the surf, glassing it off like the river
polishes rocks, after first turning the sea surface
to the world’s shivering skin, surfers on it like mites,
micro enough to see each pore, each goose pimple.
I suppose I like the way rain altogether dissolves
obligation to make the most of the pricey location.
One is freed to shack up with the hack’s paperback,
to idle on the glider as the sky’s porch-paint-gray
fissures with downstriking lightning. One does
things on the rainy day one otherwise would shun:
air hockey in the arcade on the rickety fishing pier,
the Alligator Garden at the causeway’s nether end,
a noon run on the luxuriously empty slant of sand,
the absurd, sad end-of-summer swimwear sale,
lunchtime tequila in the louche local poolroom,
and thence to ensemble siesta, drifting in and out
with the wind as it sings in the cedar-shake sides
of the old hotel, which itself seems to breathe.
The Crusade Turns 5
Religion,
except insofar as it fosters the communal, contemplative and humane impulses, is simply an hallucinogen, a mob psychosis which, as history richly shows, makes any and all atrocity possible.
