Why can't we sell the notion that even torturing sixteen-year old Canadian kids is bad? See, this is the kind of thing going on right now. We, meaning the US Government that represents me and you--have hold of people who are just freaking innocent. They haven't done a thing besides made themselves obnoxious to the wrong person or people, and then--bam! Kafkaesque nightmare. Orwellian. Hellerity ensues. They are caught up in a life-wrecking ordeal with no real beginnning or end, and it's because some dumb-ass allegedly educated foreign policy advisors watched 24.
A scripted show. You know, which isn't even real. So like the endings and how stuff turn out--are like professional wrestling. If some working over of some guy leads to a good resolution it was for the damn ends of a writer's need for resolution, and did not actually represent consensual reality. They tortured people because they are dumb and mean and believe tv is real.
That's a mess. A hot mess.
The problem is, we look at these people and try to say they are evil. Wretched. But there they stand, "upright" and "sincere", and the issue is something worse and way more scary. Way more scary.
They are stupid. Staggeringly stupid. Wrong and not in any morally defensible way--but wrong in any intellectual way. And they did it quite obviously in a premeditated way. Take a look at how they were against us being in the ICC from day one. Like they already knew what they were going to do. Take a look at how wiretaps started before 9/11--this isn't conspiracy theory, just a highlight of the ways these bloody stupid people left fat fingerprints all over about what they were going to do.
They kept us scared. They told us to watch what we say and do, and to have duct tape and plastic sheeting on hand in case of emergency, and actually made us listen to year-old chatter as if it was current-day threat. They weakened our dollar. They invaded a country with very rich oilfields and hampered production, and gas companies got profits. They didn't get Osama Bin Laden, deal, alive, or any which way. And they won't. They tried to cheerlead for an "pnership society:" that made poor people buy houses for the banks, who wouldn't evn want them by the time they got them, and tried to bankrupt the only financial security some old people even know. That keeps us scared, and when you are scared, you don't take risks. You don't cry out, and you maybe indulge in a little shadenfreude. Which helps you stomach the rest of it.
Your finances are screwed, you look at your 401K statement and go sick, you look at your mortgage bill and think about bankruptcy, think about death. So you got personal worries that don't let you see the human being plucked off the street in some country and whisked off to another, and you have your own sleepless nights to worry about, so you don't know they shuffled a boy, of 16 years old, and walked his ass from one room to another every handful of hours so he couldn't sleep, and isolated him from his family and anything. You don't know prisoners died in stress positions, and then brainwashed anxious trying-to-prove themselves people in Abu Ghraib posed with those bodies. You know, but don't know, that the president said "We do not torture"--but it's kind of a lie, because we sort of demonstrably did, and it was a big fucking story and the mainstream media can't bring themselves to say it!
You know, there was a junior senator from Wisconson back in the '40's and '50's who made a name for himself, and not a great one. He had a large constituency of German-Americans, and might've been a Nazi-symp, but let's not go there, and let's instead give that young man the benefit of the doubt. There were a handful of German soldiers tried for War Crimes because of the massacre at Malmedy--you probably know that story because both O'Reilly and Olberman bring it up. (Um Olberman is right.) But anyway, this senator was concerned because confession might've been elicited from those German soldiers, not even officers...under torture. And that was truly UnAmerican. That was a thing that sickened that Republican patriot. No matter how awful the Nazis were, we don't sink to their level. We don't punish soldiers for the crimes of those that ordered them--
And that dude was Joe McCarthy.
Where is American conservatism now? On the side of torture? At a sick, stupid, criminal, unmoral place where fabled anti-Communist McCarthy would not have gone? Could you see Ronald Reagan saying "Alright, we need to get information, so I think we should should urgently support the application of water to the mouths and noses of people until the little bastards scream." (I know he winked at Nicaraguan death squads and MF-er's who drank beer from the skulls of babies and murdered priests and nuns and made their own mass graves of innocents, but c'mon--Reagan never would've tried to endorse it publically! He even withdrew in Lebanon--how liberal!) Would Nixon have authorized the bombings of thousands if not millions of people who we weren't even expressly at war with in a terroristic campaign to demoralize the bs "greater enemy" in Red China, and then later chuckle with Chinese heads of state about random shit for giggles? (Oh wait, what, he totally did shit like that.)
This Republican administration has been so shameful in its ineptitude, with the Valerie Plame issue and the many, many missing e-mails and the US attorneys issue and the perversion of the Justice Department, that it seems like Lady Liberty has been drawn and quartered, and judged a traitorous bitch just for disagreeing with these damn Correspondence (Liberty College! Regent!)-school jack-ass legacy GED basement-level IQ failing-upwards fools, that real grown-ups (hey, remember "The grownups are in charge?") get silenced. They are told they are unpatriotic. To go back to sleep, buy some shit with a stimulus check and watch some reality tv.
They are Dumb, so the dumb people are on their side. It's hard to prosecute dumb, or even make a federal case on dumb, or even an international case on dumb, but dumb it goddamn is. Not successful. Not prosperous. Not peaceful or even peace-ward-tending. Dumb. Dumb enough to make good of evil and call shame a virtue to protect necks that respect. Dumb.
We've all been had, and we've all been made dumb, and numb. Silenced in our free-speech zones off and away from where power will hear us, and farther still from where it'll fear us.
I can't be numb. I can't be dumb. I can't be repressed, distressed, held back, broke, scared and a party to torture in my name. So why would any Representative of my party, the loyal opposition, not represent me and my people? You know--American people? And our Constitution? The one that's been defiled and exiled to still-free places in Europe? And permit through negligence a government that tortures, that kidnaps and detains and profanes young-people brains and never admits its deficits and the running shit in the streets in Baghdad where the sewerage flows because a broke system knows its limits and we've hit it and the IED's are ballots--shards of votes to stick in the throats of innocent representatives of a corrupt White House who created this mess where patriots are bogged down where their country is not in sight, and maybe tonight, we can repudiate the hate that has been insatiate and await change--
and hope.
And impeach the Dopes.
(Cross-posted at Democratic Underground.)
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