Teabags & Tyranny or: It's hard to keep Indignation Down

Sometimes, I just have to rant. I'm going to rant about the torture docs, if you don't mind. And I'm going to tie them to the tea-baggers, and I hope they do mind. See, they carried signs that used words like "tyranny" and "socialism" and "fascism". But all those incendiary nouns were mere words. Words easily enough fed to them by Glenn Beck or Michelle Bachman, neither of whom seem to be quite clear on what those words mean either, and at least half of whom know all they know about liberal-fascism from looking at the cover of Jonah Goldberg's book on the same.

Do any of you tea-baggers recall being herded into prisons? No? Recall your favorite t.v. host, whether it be Beck or Hannity or O'Reilly, be actually taken off the air, if not taken into custody for anti-government propaganda? No? Exactly how "hassled by the man" did you all feel when you protested the people who make above $250K from getting a restoration of their original tax rate? Did you need to wear a bandana soaked in water because the tear-gas was so thick, you thought you saw Jesus in the nebulously-shifting clouds of smoke? And you wanted to save your lungs and your eyes, so you could look half-way like a respectable citizen in court on the morrow? So you crawled away with a wet, and half-covered face, and shot down an alley to where you felt a little less like you were going to be clubbed by the police for saying what you were thinking? No?

So, um, the "tyranny" shit is just shit then. You're full of it, and you have no fucking reason to protest besides being pissed your "team" lost. Surprise--guess what? Political parties aren't "teams" and being a conservative your whole life doesn't mean you should get cross-eyed tantrum-y when more people decide they like how the liberals run things. You like how we're in a democracy? Hmm?

Put on your big-girl pants and like it, then. "Black, liberal, Ivy-league-educated, well-spoken, serious, wants to make shit work guy" is in the White House. He's dealing with terrorists, pirates, other world leaders, a broke-ass economy, chronic Wall-Street whiners, and he knows he's being extra-scrutinized every step of the way besides, and he isn't fucking whining like a girl whose balloon just popped. So why oh why, teabagger--would you?

Answer--you are a whiny ass titty baby and you suck. Also, you weren't paying attention.

Just recently, there were some additional torture memos that went out. See--torture would be a thing I, myself would associate with tyranny. It's not great. There is speculation that the children of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, at the time aged 7 and 9 years of age, might have been taken in and had insects that were alleged to be stinging insects, put in with them, in the hopes they would rat out their own dad.

At a military tribunal in 2007, the father of a Guantanamo detainee alleged that Pakistani guards had confessed that American interrogators used ants to coerce the children of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed into revealing their father’s whereabouts.

The statement was made by Ali Khan, the father of detainee Majid Khan, who gave a detailed account of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American guards in Pakistan. In his statement, Khan asserted that one of his sons was held at the same place as the young children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs and were denied food and water by other guards,” the statement read. “They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.” (A pdf transcript is available here)

Khan’s statement is second-hand. But the picture he paints of his son’s interrogation at the hands of American interrogators is strikingly similar to the accounts given by numerous other detainees to the International Red Cross. The timing of the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s son — then aged seven and nine — also meshes with a report by Human Rights Watch, which says that the children were captured in September 2002 and held for four months at the hands of American guards.

“According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while U.S. agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts,” the report said.

Can I, in good conscience, not call that tyranny? Obama didn't do that. Bush did. Bush ran up the debt persuing the war in Iraq with pallets of cash and no good sense....He was responsible for the loss of American lives there. He insisted on his tax cut for the wealthy.

I believe that a president of these United States misrepresented intelligence regarding uranium to us. He lied about Iraq's WMD capability. He ordered the invasion of Iraq without provocation. He acted in a such a way to try and insulate himself from war crimes in decoupling from the ICC and the signing of white papers and the commissioning of opinions from his minions to justify torture. He was a de facto tyrant.

Bush made us less safe, and more disliked abroad. Obama means to correct that. To be more diplomatic, and admit we were wrong when we were. This is how grown-ups behave.


So, anyway, since we're the lot who walked Omar Khadr like a witch, we need to admit something's gone wrong with our democracy. If Bush wanted to say we don't torture, he should have first made it clear we didn't.

The teabags--much to-do about nothing.