Madam Secretary

I don't do a lot of blogging on Hillary directly as Alegre really has that corner of the blog market sewn up (and not just Hillary - Alegre's Corner is a must read every day for political junkies. Give her the hits and throw her some change, 'kay?) and because my political blogging interests are more about the condition of political thought than about any specific politician, no matter how admired.

I do, however, have a list of Hillary sites linked in the sidebar, with State Department links first. One link I have begun to click on routinely enough that I've added it to the streamed blog section (Just Click Already, OK?) is Madam Secretary, "an obsessive blog about all things Hillary Clinton. From her policies to her pantsuits, Madam Secretary delivers up-to-the-minute news, analysis, and gossip about America’s top diplomat." The blog is part of the Foreign Policy website.

What I find interesting about this blog is the mix of policy analysis and domestic political commentary. For example, in a post accompanied by the above photo, Hillary hitting the phones to talk North Korea, Preeti Aroon, who writes the blog, notes:

The Associated Press reports that Clinton has spoken on the phone with foreign ministers in a number of countries, and the Washington Post reports that she is asking them for a "strong, unified" response. As Clinton proved last April, she knows how to handle those 3 a.m. phone calls.

Zing. The SNL skit about The Precious calling Hillary at 3 AM on what he should do about this or that crisis has come true in more ways than one.

Aroon spends time blogging about the details of the Sec. of State's travels and appearances. It may not rate highly as "serious" foreign policy news, but it provides context to the work HRC is doing and the tone of her State Department. Aroon has also been documenting in post after post Hillary's very outspoken and aggressive diplomatic presence, as well as some of the inside baseball of who in the White House does or does not want her doing what:

• Hillary lays the smack down
• Is the White House keeping Clinton off Sunday TV?
• Was Clinton too verbally hard on Pakistan?
• Is Hillary Clinton too outspoken?
• U.S. being 'out-communicated,' Clinton says
• Clinton: no more settlements, no exceptions

I keep thinking about the cartoon (no, I'm not giving it any eyeballs) drawn by Oliphant after the "tearing up" incident during the New Hampshire campaign where he portrayed her as sitting at a table and crying about how mean the foreign leaders on the other side of the table were being to her. And now the Village is having vapors over how pushy she's being.

Which leads to an older post by Pat Lang which I did not blog about at the time, Jim Jones, Sally Quinn and the neocons, where he discusses a WaPo Op-Ed written by Sally Quinn about the whisper campaign being conducted against NSA Jim Jones by unnamed people in the State Department and the White House. Quinn tossed in this statement, "Reporters are protecting their sources, but Hillary Clinton is apparently not behind the stories. She likes her job, those who have been spun say, and gets along well with Jones. " Lang himself didn't pick up on Quinn's CDS, being more concerned about the neocon attack on Jones, but it jumped off the page at me.

Quinn, who just cannot shake her anti-Clinton psychosis, introduces what was never a question in the first place, a division between Jones and Clinton. This is another example of a Villager trying to create a conflict by innuendo - the "apparently" qualifier is the dead give away. The second sentence diminishes the professional, diplomatic and policy authority of the Sec. of State. HRC "likes her job," as though this is a mid level manager at some tech firm in a Silicon Valley office park who is denying stirring up trouble for Bob, the project manager down the hall, because they "get along well." Quinn is too smart not to know that she's trying to solicit information from "those who have been spun" to give her a call and dish some dirt.

But Quinn's petulance points to something interesting once you strip away the psychosis. One of the foreign policy conflicts that has dogged the US is an internal one - turf wars between the State Department and the White House advisors. In the Bush administration, the State Department was deliberately humiliated when it was not simply ignored. As I wrote way back in November when Hillary's name was first being bandied about for SOS, the determining factor for her taking the job was having a policy team she could work with:

But there are a few conditions under which it makes no sense for her to accept. The four most powerful positions in the cabinet are Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury and National Security Advisor. Gates will be Sec. Def. for the time being. In the past, the SOS and the NSA have engaged in power struggles that have worked to the detriment of foreign policy. If Obama has the sense to put HRC in as SOS, he may suffere a failure of nerve and decide to divide powers by putting an opponent in the NSA slot to "counter balance" her influence, and we would end up with political infighting. Unless that position is filled by someone who would work with the SOS and not be a pawn in some passive-agressive game, it would be foolish for Hillary to leave the Senate. It would need to be someone like Wes Clark or Richard Clarke. Likewise, if the Sec. Tres. is filled by some tired Wall Street insider hack, there will not be a partner to work with on economic concerns. (I myself would love to see Stiglitz. He's run the World Bank, he won't be bullied, and Wall Street has no attractions for him.)

So, the Sec. Treas. position went to a hack, but the other players in the foreign policy team, Gates, Jones and Panetta, all work well with Hillary. Sally Quinn's vengeance fantasies aside, there really does not appear to be any significant division or power struggle between the leaders of the agencies (which is not to say that there are not disagreements between the leaders, nor conflicts in the lower ranks), and that the US has a fundamentally unified foreign policy team. This is a good thing for the nation.

However, this makes me ask a very serious question - just where is the resistence to deconstructing the Bush administration's terror regime originating? Obviously, the Republicans are frantically trying to keep the terms of the debate within a language game of fear and revenge, but the problem is larger than defunding Guantanamo. It has to do with the nature of executive power, the way the US's relationship to other nations and their citizens is conceptualized, the use of military and CIA power abroad to achieve domestic objectives, the constitutional constraints (and the ways in which such constraints are ignored) upon the exercise of power by the executive branch, the balance between competing claims of sovereignty, and so forth.

As I pointed out obliquely in the Guantanamo post, when dealing with the use of the state monopoly on large scale violence, "them" and "us" is not such a clear distinction in our modes of political life. We cannot arbitrarily ascribe bad motives to only part of an administration without evaluating how the whole enables the part.

Who is developing the theory of state and executive power for the Obama administration? Who is signing on to it? Who disagrees but executes? If the SOS, Sec. Def, NSA and head of the CIA are fundamentally in agreement, then does this mean they are the ones who have crafted this theory of power?

I know where I want Hillary to be on these questions. We'll see if my hopes are borne out by facts.

Anglachel

On Guantanamo

National Journal asked for contributors to respond to the question "What Do To About Guantanamo?" There are currently 8 responses, all interesting in their own way, some more for what it says about the commenter than what it says about the conundrum of Guantanamo. Col. W. Patrick Lang (Ret.) of Sic Semper Tyrannis posted the following response:

Guantanamo has become a kind of national Rohrschach test for the American people.

It is a place seen within the mind's eye as a projection of what is inside us. I have been impressed since just after 9/11 with the depth of the illusion of personal security within which most Americans lived before the attacks. A friend called then from across the country to say that "now we all live in your world," referring I suppose to the life I had lead in the security services. The caller was a well traveled international businessman. The "blue funk" level was incredible for months. People acted as though each and every one of them stood on the ramparts on watch against the Saracen hordes. I remember repeatedly being stared at with hostility on the DC Metrorail system by men who could not take their eyes off the modest beard I then had. Supposedly grown up people would say things like "Say Muzlim, not Muslim!" Why? They imagined that to pronounce words correctly made one a kind of collaborator.

Now, we have the media encouraged phenomenon of the masses' inability to deal with the idea of prisoners charged, tried and imprisoned on our soil. This is fear of the boogy-man come back once again. This is behavior for children who need a night light. I heard a member of Congress from Kansas say on the floor of the US Senate that prisoners could not be sent to Leavenworth because the "purity" of the post and Army school at Ft. Leavenworth would be ruined by their presence. No matter that the federal prison that adjoins Fort Leavenworth is full of some of the worst people who ever lived.

And then there is the issue of the actual guilt or innocence of some of those now held without charge by the United States. When people here are asked if they think that all those held in our prison in Cuba are guilty, they generally fall silent, unable to respond. Of those who do, many of them clearly do not care if the imprisoned are guilty of anything. They might be... They are Muzlims... Keep them there and then my children will be safe...

Boumedienne, the Algerian former prisoner now living in France is a good person to remember. He, clearly, had done nothing wrong, but was imprisoned by us without charge for SEVEN YEARS. Neverheless, most Americans do not care...

It is going to take a long time for us to live this down. We should get on with it.

We should get on with it. This is what ties Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to black sites and extraordinary rendition - the inability of the people in power and the faux-innocents in the public to come to terms with the fact that atrocities were performed by Americans under our flag as an explicit policy of our government.

We cannot pretend it didn't happen. We cannot continue to squall that we're just protecting ourselves from the current Big Bad of the zeitgeist. We cannot pretend that we're doing good by covering up the evidence of evil. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened enough to elect a Black president while we obsess about the "Muzlim" other.

Guantanamo, and all the other festering pockets of national shame connected to it, will not go away on its own. It cannot be quietly swept away, which is what the current administration would probably prefer to happen precisely because it is a reflection of something that this nation is, not even some dark side or ignorant underbelly, something not-US. It is inherent in our language, which is to say in our way of life.

Wittgenstein's observation, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in language and language seemed to repeat it inexorably," gets to the heart of the language game that is "Guantanamo." Using that (or Abu Ghraib, or extraordinary rendition, or war crimes) as a starting point, and you will be drawn into the hall of mirrors populated by those who both react to the images and create the new reflective surfaces that contribute to the sense of inexorability. There is the argument about security, there is the advice about not being hasty, there is the concern over precedent, there is the outrage over violations, each participant playing his or her role in the language game.

I do not mean that this is "just words" or that people are merely "playing" at being scared or cautious or concerned or outraged. Part of the language game, what makes it tenacious and gives it strength, it that it is real, the warp of the social fabric. Am I not now this very instant engaging in this game? If it was not real for me, I would not do this.

The picture, and especially the pictures, has its rules of enagagement, a known and familiar mode of objection, rejoinder, riposte, counter argument, and so forth, a mode of life fervently defended by the various participants in the language game that is "Guantanamo." This is what confounds Pat Lang's common sense advice to "get on with it" - the nation is invested in this mode of life, the opponents of this picture as much as the advocates and defenders.

The only way to cease being captive to this picture is to invent, if you will, a new language game in which this artifact can both be made into us (something ineluctably American) yet shifted in such a way that we no longer look into the reflection of ourselves that brought us to this pass in the first place. Lang's observation, "They imagined that to pronounce words correctly made one a kind of collaborator," points at the socio-psychological construction of the game, how we understand that words make us complicit in this mode of life rather than that one.

Perhaps we will simply tire of the game and abandon it, like something with a few missing pieces offered for "$1 or best offer" at a garage sale. It would be the normal way a society disposes of an unpalatable picture. Again, it's not merely that "they" want to cover it up and "we" want to live in the truth and the light. It is that to "get on with it" may be a language game this nation is not capable of playing, from any position on the political spectrum.

The disappointment over Obama's performance on this picture (among others) stems in part from the expectation that he would be a game changer, crafting a new language game yet enabling us to recognize ourselves even as we are made different than we were. I posit that the deep well of left wing resentment against Bill Clinton stems from his failure to perform a similar transformation in how we imagine ourselves, while the resentment from the right shows how close he came to making the rules of the game change.

We remain captives of Guantanamo.

Anglachel

To Paraphrase Howard Baker

What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it?

A) Less than Bush and Cheney, who made contempt for the rule of law the centerpiece of their administration.

B) Long after Bush and Cheney went forward with their plans to make torture the new normal.

Yeah, I'm pissed at the cowards in Congress, too, and with the lack of backbone in the Democratic leadership. I'm pissed about both of those situations today and not just on the topic of torture.

The trouble is that the hoopla over Pelosi is doing the Republican's dirty work for them by implying that she has some responsibility for the policy of torture, rather than her true responsibility, which was reviewing, comprehending, and opposing such policy.

The crime lies first and foremost with the people responsible for authorizing the use of torture. Once they have been made to answer for their original crimes against humanity and the nation, then we can get around to the pissant Congress critters who may or may not have been informed fully and unequivocally about the use of torture.

And on the question of who knew what ands when, Alegre links to an NPR article on Sen. Bob Graham where he flatly rejects the CIA's claim to have informed Speaker Pelosi on waterboarding:

Graham says the CIA was initially reticent when he told the agency what he had found in his notes.

"They said, 'We will check and call back,'" Graham recalled. "When they finally did a few days later, they indicated that I was correct. Their information was in error. There was no briefing on the first three of four dates."

Graham says the agency offered no explanation regarding how it came up with the other dates.

The Sept. 27, 2002, briefing occurred about three weeks after the briefing in which the CIA says it told Pelosi about the use of waterboarding, a technique also described as simulated drowning. Graham, like Pelosi, says waterboarding was not mentioned during his briefing.

"There was no discussion of waterboarding, other excessive techniques or that they had applied these against any particular detainees," he says.

Pelosi has charged that she was misled by the CIA. Graham puts it another way.

"Nothing that I can recall being said surprised me or has subsequently proven to be incorrect," he says. "It was a matter of omission, not commission."

Graham says he is not surprised at the CIA's claims, noting that within a week of its Sept. 27 briefing, the agency presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee its National Intelligence Estimate of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was later shown to be flawed.

"I'm not impressed with the credibility of the CIA as it was being led in 2002," Graham says. "I think it had become an agency that instead of following the admonition to speak truth to power, it was trying to speak what it thought power wanted to hear."

Pelosi's claim of being misled at the time may not be formally correct, but the CIA has now been caught in an outright lie about what meetings it held and what topics it covered.

The proper paraphrase of Howard Baker is:

What did the Bush/Cheney administration order done and what steps have they taken to cover up their crimes?

Anglachel

PS - Sarah on Corrente is also channeling Howard Baker - Defending Nancy Pelosi

Olbermann Calls for Clinton's Murder

Other blog posters have stepped around the obvious intent behind Keith Olbermann's recent verbal assault on Hillary Clinton. I know why. It's a hell of a step to take. I've spoken extensively about the irrational and boundless fury at this woman who has done nothing to deserve the outrages inflicted upon her. I've blogged before on the level of violence in the reaction to Hillary Clinton. I've blogged on how the shame of the Left when confronted by her - shamed by how she has been trashed, shamed by how badly she beats their darlings - underlies the demands that she be eradicated from politics, a symbolic honor killing.

I have sat in front of the computer for two hours, reading other blog posts, thinking it over, wondering how to talk about it. Maybe I could talk about it in terms of the times I have been in that situation, alone with a much stronger and violent male, and what a man suggesting putting her in that position does to me. Maybe I should talk about it just up to the edge of the extreme and stop with a knowing (virtual) look. Perhaps I could write again about expressions of violence against this person and put Olbermann into a continuum. Or maybe I could just put all the cards on the table and say what is staring us in the face.

What Keith Olbermann said yesterday is not symbolic. He flatly said a (male) Democratic super delegate should take Hillary Clinton into a room, and only the man should emerge.

Keith Olbermann is openly advocating the murder of Hillary Clinton.

We need to say this. It does not preclude talking about the other elements that may be subsumed under that final act, that she would also be battered and raped, but the clear message sent out by Keith Olbermann is he wants someone to murder this woman.

Over the months, I have read various bits of bullshit talking about how "people" are "worried" that Obama might be an assassination target. This is such an obvious line of sensationalistic crap from his campaign to try to create a false aura of danger (Quick! Flock to Barry's defense! Those terrible white racists are gunning for him!) when there has been nothing in the public realm to back it up. Let me be perfectly clear. I think it is probable that there is some nutcase out there who would like to try to assassinate Obama, and I think this because there is always some nutcase out there who thinks killing a public figure is a peachy idea. Or just some nutcase who wants attention - remember the would-be suicide bomber at Hillary's New Hampshire office? However, certainly within the liberal blogosphere and the MSM (I do not venture into the wingnut fever swamps), there is no drumbeat for violence against Obama.

This is not the case with Hillary. I have myself read comments advocating rape and murder. I have read main posts saying she was inciting violent acts against her, or saying they could "understand" the position of those who wished violent harm to befall her, her husband and her daughter. The descriptions of what Obama should do to Hillary verge on the pornographic. Not a day goes by that some prominent voice on the left or in the MSM does not demand her submission, subordination and public humiliation.

And now a major MSM celebrity and talking head, not some anonymous commenter on some obscure blog, has openly and unapologetically advocated that Hillary Clinton be marched into a dark room and murdered.

Think that is too far? A real stretch? Just a tad bit hysterical? Replace Hillary Clinton with Barack Obama in that formulation and you tell me what that means. If someone said this about Barack Obama, it would mean that this man be lynched to remove him from a path to power. Period. Full stop. No equivocations. It would be understood as nothing less than a call for the man's murder, and there would be an outcry from EVERY Democrat, even those of us who do not much care for Obama as a candidate, condemning those words, because that is what we are called upon to do when confronted with evil.

What Keith Olbermann wants done to another human being is evil. It belongs with torture, lynching, and systemic rape. He is saying we should use physical violence against a political enemy to secure the outcome we want. He is saying murder is an acceptable act when done against a reviled outsider by those on the inside who know what is good for the nation. Anyone who chooses to share a sound stage with this man after these words, unless it is to condemn him in the harshest, most ungiving terms, is to put yourself on the side of evil. Any blogger who fails to condemn Olberman for this blunt and unequivocal statement has no business writing a critical word about Bush and Cheney's torture policies, because you would be just cool with it being done to this individual simply to be rid of a political rival.

Let's say it again clearly so there can be no mistake:

Keith Olbermann has called for Hillary Clinton's murder.

Anglachel

It's not about them, it's about us

ABSOLUTELY NOT WORK SAFE.

The Rude Pundit cuts through the crap and tells us what the unwillingness of this nation to reject torture really means:

If you haven't yet read the New York Times article on just how deranged the Bush administration is about covering its ass over torture, do it and then come back here. The Rude Pundit will wait...

Yeah, yeah, it's long. Get the fuck back there and finish it. Jesus, short attention-spanned motherfuckers.

You done? Good. Let's get going here:

In essence, what that article by Scott Shane, David Johnston, and James Risen said is that conversations went on in the White House and the Justice Department in the United States that went something like this: Bush might say, "Hey, all that fucked-up shit we've been doing to prisoners, how much of it can we still do?"

To which some random bloodthirsty Yoo or Addington would say, "Oh, fuck, we can do whatever the fuck we want."

And some plaintive Comey or Goldsmith would say, "Umm, we kinda got treaties and shit, maybe a few laws that might say we should back off."

And some Cheney or, to a lesser extent, Gonzales would say, "Yeah, right, fuck you, Comey or Goldsmith. Yoo or Addington, kick out the enhanced interrogation jams and tell those CIA pussies who wanna know if shit's legal that we got their backs."
....

And some Cheney or, to an even lesser extent, Gonzales would go, "Call the CIA. Tell 'em naked, drownin', sleepless brown people is a-okay."

And Bush would say, "I'm glad we decided we're not war criminals. Now lemme go tell Umerka we done made 'em more securer."

And then in some brightly-lit metal cell at Bagram Air Base or Gitmo, ice cold water was thrown on a naked man from Iraq, with the water tosser feeling assured that what he was doing was good and right for God and country.

A few years back, a social worker friend gave the Rude Pundit a simple moral question that seems so obvious once it's said, but it hangs over the Rude Pundit constantly. He was looking for absolution for some betrayal of trust he wanted to commit. The friend said, "You have to ask yourself, 'At the end of the day, what kind of person do I want to be?'" The Rude Pundit decided he wasn't that kind of person. No, he ain't a saint, but he ain't outright cruel.

The Rude Pundit has not been one of the loud drum beaters for impeachment out here in Left Blogsylvania because of the practicality of achieving it. But he has to say that the longer these depraved motherfuckers get to go unpunished, the more obvious it is that the Congress and, indeed, the citizens of this fallen nation have decided what kind of people they are.

I don't think there is any way to force Bush and Cheney from power before the end of the term, so the focus has to be on two things:

1. Elect a president who has a freaking clue about foreign affairs and international law. That means Edwards, Kucinch and Gravel are out. Period. Not even VP material.
   
2. Elect as large a majority in Congress, particularly the Senate, as we can get to keep the Rethugs sidelined. The prospects are looking better by the day.

If we want any hope of help on extricating ourselves from Bush's war without having our military destroyed in the process, we have to show that we're serious about upholding the Geneva Conventions and destroying Cheney's imperial framework. Otherwise, we'll be left to our own increasingly isolated and powerless devices. Failure to do so, and we will get what we deserve.

Rejection of the Cheney doctrine is the first step to the refoundation of the republic.

What Bush has Done in Six Years

Courtesy of Eric Alterman on Altercation:

"September 11, 2007: "How I Spent the Last Six Years," A brief list that might easily have been written by George W. Bush.

Regarding the attacks:

• Ignored persistent warnings of an imminent terrorist attack.
• Continued reading The Pet Goat ...
• Went up in Air Force One after having been informed it was a likely target.
• Spent the day in a panicky runaround, leaving it to others to reassure and inform a shocked nation.
• Later sold photographs of self on same day for purposes of Republican fundraising.
• Purposely misled rescue workers and volunteers about the safety of the air quality around Ground Zero.
• Declared, like Wyatt Earp, to capture Bin Laden "dead or alive."
• Told the rest of the world either they were "with us or against us," like Superman or something ...
• Ignored the fact that most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; pretended they were from Iraq.

Regarding Afghanistan:

• Refused the help of NATO.
• Squandered numerous opportunities to capture bin Laden, allowing him to escape at Tora Bora and elsewhere.
• Rejected a more effective strategy of police work and targeting killings for mass bombings that helped alienate the population.
• Allowed the Taliban to regroup and rebuild.
• Allowed Al Qaeda to regroup and rebuild.
• Allowed heroin production and exports to increase.
• Allowed country to lapse back into chaos and threaten nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Regarding America:

• Insisted on the right to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely without right to habeas corpus, thereby invalidating virtually the entire Constitution.
• Kidnapped individuals for the purpose of "rendition" and certain torture, violating national laws at will.
• Opened secret torture prisons in former police states and lied about it.
• Wiretapped American citizens without warrant or lawful authority.
• Monitored the actions of loyal patriotic organizations without warrant or lawful authority.
• Attacked patriotism of everyone who questioned mindless path to self-destruction and attacked media sources who informed Americans of the actions of their government as having "blood on their hands."
• Set up ineffective, scandal-plagued Department of Homeland Security.
• Failed to protect obvious targets like nuclear and chemical power plants, ports, and the like.
• Hyped phony arrests of unserious nutcases as victories in war on terrorism.
• Refused New York City sufficient funds to protect itself from future attack.

Regarding Iraq:

• Lied about evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
• Lied about ties to Al Qaeda.
• Lied about Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
• Lied about infamous "Prague meeting."
• Lied about lying about all of it.
• Attempted to destroy reputation of loyal government servant, Joe Wilson.
• Lied about willingness to fire anyone involved with doing so.
• Failed to provide troops with sufficient body armor, vehicular protection.
• Insisted on repeated stop-loss orders.
• Cut medical spending for wounded veterans, resulting in substandard care for the wounded.
• Refused to allow photographs of honored war dead.
• Refused to attend funerals of killed soldiers.
• Refused to give a military recruitment speech.
• Told Americans to go shopping; offered further tax breaks to the wealthy, asking sacrifices of no one but soldiers and their families.
• Opened and maintained a prison at Guantánamo that violated U.S. and international law, branding the United States as a rogue nation.
• Misled Congress for purposes of securing war authority.
• Failed to send sufficient troops for post-invasion occupation.
• Failed to heed any postwar planning recommendations.
• Failed to ensure restoration of order, post-invasion.
• Failed to secure weapons sites, post invasion.
• Failed to reach out to population.
• Refused to count numbers of civilian dead and wounded.
• Failed to set up functional government, police force, etc.
• Arrested innocent individuals for the purpose of torture.
• Lied, once again, about ties to Al Qaeda.
• Failed to re-assess failed strategy, refused to replace incompetent subordinates.
• Failed to heed message of 2006 congressional elections to draw down war, escalated it instead.
• Failed to heed both Iraqi and U.S. population's repeatedly polled preference for withdrawal.
• Squandered sympathy of entire world, drastically sinking global opinion of the United States.
• Squandered hundreds of billions -- and, ultimately, trillions -- of dollars, destroying a functioning nation.
• Strengthened Iran.
• Strengthened Syria.
• Strengthened Libya.
• Weakened Israel.
• Weakened Jordan.
• Weakened Egypt.
• Killed more than 3,000 Americans.
• Wounded nearly 30,000 Americans.
• Killed and wounded untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
• Provided recruitment material for terrorists the world over.
• Continually attacked the patriotism of those who suggested alternatives that might have avoided much of the above.
• Redoubled "determination," "strength," "grit," etc., every time any of the previous disasters was discovered.

And perhaps most amazingly of all: Got most of the mainstream media to go along with almost all of it ..."

So much destruction in only six years. Breathtaking in its own way. We are weaker, poorer, less safe, on the verge of several disasters (economic, environmental, military), and yet a morally and intellectually retarded rump group in this country has just enough power at the polls and in the media that we cannot impeach this bastard.

Dear Religious Right: Give It Up

Courtesy of the Rude Pundit. NOT WORK SAFE:

How many more fuckin' times are we gonna go through this same pathetic charade with presumptive leaders for the religious right? For moral values supporters? How many more men, for indeed, can anyone name a powerful woman brought down in a sex scandal recently? How many hypocritical Ted Haggards and Newt Gingriches and Mark Foleys and David Vitters, all, all, all men that the religious right counted on to lead them to the promised land of political power, to keep those homosexuals down, to punish Bill Clinton, to make abstinence and anti-abortion policies the rule of the country? How many more men who make a show of deep faith who are just assholes who wanna get their rocks off?

When do we get to act like a nation of grown-ups where we can say, "You know, I don't give a fuck if my candidate likes to have his nutsack stomped by a cross-dressed male hooker in stiletto heels as long as he supports my issues"? And where those issues can be shit like war and education and health care and not bullshit like who's fucking who and for what reasons?

Amen. I am sick of the faux morals (and rampant moralism) of the religious right. Their leaders are some of the biggest perverts in the country, blathering on about their love of Jeezus while they are humping hookers and kids on the side. What's worse are the religious fellow travelers who tut-tut ordinary people's foibels, but won't hold their hypocritical fellows responsible for corrupting the very fabric of their faith.

America is so fucked up. We'll impeach a president over a consual blow job but don't have the balls to do it to one who has gutted rule of law and made us into a nation that condones torture. We are the opposite of a Christian nation.

Anglachel

Rude Pundit - Policy and Attitude

The Rude Pundit (WARNING - never work safe) has pointed out something from Seymour Hersh's New Yorker intreview with Gen. Taguba that hasn't been noted in other analyses I have read - the way in which the treatment of Taguba himself after release of his critical report exposes the way in which the attitudes of Rumsfeld et. al. created a perfect condition for a pro-torture policy:

And isn't that the whole key to what happened at that Hussein-era hellhole remade into an American-controlled hellhole? It wasn't enough to imprison the people there; they had to be made to regret ever having dared to think about opposing America. What Hersh's article tells us is not just that the decisions about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib came from the highest levels of the Defense Department (and the Bush administration). It's that the very nature of the men who were creating the policy led naturally to the abuses. It's what they know. It's what they do. It's who they are. For if they can treat an American two-star general like a syphilitic camp follower, what chance did Iraqis have?

Yes, the torture that happened in the past - and even more that which continues to this day in the secret camps and undisclosed locations - was caused by bad apples. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush. They are three people who enjoy the prospect of harming and humiliating others.

These people are war criminals. Period. They were criminals from the day they entered office and they will continue to assault humanity even when they leave.

Anglachel