TWGB: The Failing Man

 

Trump's having a weird week--yesterday, he gave an answer to the question of how to make childcare more affordable that made JD Vance sound like Mr. Policy King by giving us nothing and landing on we're a "failing country". He was applauded when he finished his rambling response which did not go into policy details (sorry to Chris Sununu) and didn't even contain a complete sentence (sorry to Bobo Kennedy) but because he finished talking, which was all anyone wanted him to do at that point. 

Then, earlier today, he decided that the best way to handle his appeal of the first civil case judgment of defamation for his sexual assault victim would be to give a press conference where he defamed her(again!) and mentioned other (alleged) sexual assault victims of his. And he referred one of the women as not "the chosen one" as if to indicate sometimes he does pick out potential assault victims, but in his long career of doing this, she does not meet his exacting standards. 

He followed this up with another rally thing where he forgot he wasn't running against Joe Biden and also made a weird non-joke about Nancy Pelosi's house having walls that did not stop the man who attacked her husband and gravely injured him. (Which says something about walls not working. An odd thing to note about a crucial gimmick of his political career.) 

This is why Joe Biden nailed Trump today, calling him "a failing man." 

Biden: My predecessor believes America is a failing nation. He is a failing president and a failing man pic.twitter.com/ZTnez17ImR

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 6, 2024

And that sums it up--Trump projects: nothing is his fault, his blame, his fuckup.  But the more he casts his insulting, perverse, negative view of the world, the more you can understand the sickness in him. 

Twenty Years Ago, the US Invaded Iraq

 

Saddam Hussein was no hero and his statue rightfully was toppled ending an anti-democratic regime so many years ago, but the invasion 20 years ago was a war of choice and the US often blows off our dumbest choices, refusing to understand the how and why of our clearest fuckups. But our basis for war then was thin.  The US made choices during that war that impacted the country very negatively, and the US failed to understand why or how until it was too late. The cost was high. 

To me, the worst thing about it was the war of choice also lead to horrible choices at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere--the dehumanization of populations, the broken faith that we were supposed to be the good guys. That even now, we have a potential US Presidential candidate who sanctioned rectal feedings at Gitmo should appall us. He rose up in the GOP bestride a very horrific steed--the willingness to not just follow a multitude to do evil, but to lead a pack. Iraq was a proving ground of what was the worst in us. Our attempts to manage the government of Iraq by crisis, to use their tragedy to make bank should be taught in every classroom. It won't be, but it should. 

9/11: Over the Horizon

 

The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family: https://t.co/eUX5WSImrD

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

There just isn't anything more apt to round out our 20 year misadventure in the War on Terror, than by this--a misguided drone strike that showed how far we had come, that we could be wrong from farther away instead of having to be wrong face to face and street by street. 

The memorial of 9/11 has been fraught for some time with me because of the cant and formulaic expressions of remembrance and the truisms that just strike me as false. "We came together that day." Tell it to visibly brown Muslim or Central Asian people who experienced discrimination, and find a kernel of what people came together to be. We needed to be unified to move forward, but we didn't need to do all we moved forward to do. 

The 9/11 fallen, those who died that day, and also their survivors, and the ones who have died of assorted toxins breathed in from working near or on the pile since and their survivors--they deserve every respect and support. But they were also used to sell an open-ended global war that was misguided in many ways. These ill-conceived decisions, occurring in part because short-sighted people didn't want to know any better and acted on what felt "right" politically, did more harm than good.  

The Bush Family Drama

It seems like a little bit of family business worked its way out in public as some of the senior Bush's opinions have been related by Jon Meacham in his biography of George H. W. Bush. It seems that "41" had a bit of criticism for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, as well as a little criticism for "43".  The elder Bush described his son as having been badly served by Rumsfeld, and described Dick Cheney as becoming a more hardline and "iron ass" guy (possibly with the encouragement of his wife Lynn, and daughter, Liz). Bush "43", for his part, sticks up for those who served in his Administration. Say what you like about W.--he's loyal to a fault or a hundred.

There's nothing in that necessarily that makes me go "OMG!" about either what was said, not the source and direction of the opinion. I got a good enough sense that "43" didn't seek his father's advice when he said as much himself; when asked if he sought his father's counsel on things, he said he had a "higher father" that he relied on. This kind of statement, when it was not signifying theocratic holy war scary-times, was in line with the idea W. projected of being "the Decider". Nevertheless, in the midst of making claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, programs to build same, and relationships between Saddam Hussein and terrorists that couldn't possibly have made sense, the one thing I thought rang true was when Bush justified his invasion with "This was the guy who tried to kill my dad that one time."  This was family drama as war. Unless Bush's real reason was some crazy End-times shit--we will never really know, right?

Now, presuming that Jon Meacham is a Beltway remora and Poppy Bush still has his wits about him, that particular message slamming Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney has a couple of familial interests behind it. Knowing that Number 2 son is in need of distancing himself from the foreign policy disasters of Number 1 son, he establishes a narrative of distance by setting out that the reason for the disaster was a Team Effort, giving Number 1 son opportunity for plausible deniability and Number 2 son running room. He was trying to do a mitzvah for his boys like they understood how this worked. I guess he never told them though, or didn't think he had to.

43 hugged Dick Cheney like they were still testifying behind closed doors for like an hour that one time in front of the 9/11 commission. And Jeb, like the stunning political performer he is, also totally sided with Team Cheney. This is the guy we last saw being lashed by Donald Trump with his brother's foreign policy, and then like a mook stood in front of a mirror and straightened out the knots.

When 83-year old reptilian Donald Rumsfeld was warmed up enough by the sun, he mentioned that GHWB was "getting up in years" but that W. made his own decisions. He sure did. I'm not saying I'd make any kind of president, but after the Abu Ghraib revelations, I'd have been asking for Rumsfeld's resignation the first damn thing to show I treated this stuff as a top-down disaster.

But the insinuation that Bush "41" isn't still mentally sharp is a lie. He is. He was jumping out of planes when folks his age couldn't jump out of bed. Sharp as he ever was. The people around him, though, are only sharp as they ever were, too.

Climate Sunday: Don Blankenship Edition

Greetings and Happy Sunday to you all, and thanks for tuning in to my semi-regular environmental musings. This week's round-up is brought to us by Don Blankenship, who was recently told by a judge to shut his flapping yap up about how politically persecuted he was. It might very well be true that under the Obama Administration, investigators spent more time inspecting his mines and pointing out the very tragically wrong things that led to the deaths of miners at his mines. But this might have been for a lot of reasons, such as, the pattern emerging that Blankenship was awful, the Obama Administration being less likely to ignore these kinds of abuses, and, I don't know--the deaths of 29 miners in a preventable accident due to Blankenship's pathological management? (Not a big fan of Blankenship, this blogger right here.)

But this individual's beef with the government over what he considers to have been job-killing regulations versus what appear to have been employee-killing violations, sets the tone for this week's rumination on--what about the fossil fuel industries, anyway? For example, it looks like Exxon, who apparently knew enough about global warming science in the 1970s and 1980s to have considerable private information on it, basically "gamed" the Bush Administration to sow doubt and confusion. (Although don't let the big bad oil company take the total blame for that--the Bush Administration was very willing to be had. I mean, leave it to these pricks to have a "Safe Water Drinking Act" that lets frackers screw up drinking water however they want.)

But this conflict in knowing full well climate change was real, and also working to sow doubt, is pretty unnerving. They could only act like that if profits entirely outweighed any sense that they should be responsible corporate and global citizens, and exposes a real weakness of the capitalist system.

Dick Cheney Gets A Little Char from Chris Wallace's Grilling

I think the exchange in this FOX News Sunday piece is a good reminder that even if the rationale for the Iraq war was supposedly anti-proliferation of WMD's and WMD-capability--the Bush Administration really wasn't much good at it.

Wallace made this key point:

Wallace pointed out that Cheney had eight years to deal with Iran’s nuclear program and failed to do it.

“You and President Bush, the Bush-Cheney administration, dealt with Iran for eight years, and I think it was fair to say that there was never any real, serious military threat,” Wallace noted. “Iran went from zero known centrifuges in operation to more than 5,000.”

“So in fairness, didn’t you leave — the Bush-Cheney administration — leave President Obama with a mess?” the Fox News host asked.

Cheney completely did not understand that this was a failure. He pointed to the invasion of Iraq as something that was supposed to have done some good there--but the actual facts are that no, the Iran nuclear program was never arrested by the invasion, and in fact Iran had an ever-greater influence in Iraq because of that invasion and the destabilization of the previous political infrastructure.

Which gives me a notion that Cheney was in part, operating under the Kissingerian "madman" strategy, where the monstrous destruction wrought in Iraq was supposed to serve as a caution to other nations to not even try with the US.

That would be goddamn stupid. Because if you became aware that your neighborhood was unsafe--wouldn't it make sense for you to arm yourself? That nonsense didn't even work in Vietnam. If looking like a country run by crazies was supposed to result in a draw-down, what in the hell was the arms race with Russia and the escalation in Afghanistan in the '80's about? Everybody got to buying weapons. It was the opposite of anti-proliferation logic.

Well, funny old thing--in his post-congressional life in the 1990's, Dick Cheney got a job at Halliburton and they kind of went around sanctions to sell multi-use gear to Iran that might have been useful in their nuclear program. (There was all kinds of wrongdoing in the 1990's by Halliburton though. But they were in good--that is to say bad, company--see Donald Rumsfeld and North Korea.)

But let's call all those little ways in which Bush Administration so-and-so's screwed-up to make things worse world-wide in terms of WMD mere mistakes.(And how could they do better, being the heirs of Iran/Contra and the Cambodian Campaign?) Would it not make sense then, for people who were journalistically inclined, to not actually ever rely on the words of such people as experts in anything ever again? Just because they are very likely either abominably stupid or quite obviously lying?

I do not understand why failures are promoted in the media and why I should feel so happy to see one journalist even bother to address some aspects of the failure. This should be the media's regular job. Cheney should have been called out like an SOB in 2003.

Dick Cheney is Living Like it's 2003

That former VP Dick Cheney goes on the slowly sinking media vessel called Meet the Press to try and air out his recently exposed dirty laundry seems less surprising when one just gives in and accepts that in Cheney's mind, it is always February 2003, and we are in the business of selling the Iraq War. In the Cheneyverse, 9/11 has happened so recently that no one really questions whether the government is meaningfully pursuing the people responsible, and leeway has been ever-so-fraughtfully-given. Because a lot of people trusted the intelligence given out by the Bush/Cheney administration at the time as being meaningful in a post 9/11 context. 

Does former VP Cheney wonder where Tim Russert has gone (RIP)? Does he wonder why he himself isn't trolling down to the West Wing anymore, and why his access to intelligence has dried up? I can't imagine, but mentally, he seems to be living in the first handful of months prior to the invasion of Iraq, because he's still selling that piece hard. And all the tactics that bought that sweet lying trash that made that war plausible. Here's some of that:

In fact, he seemed to suggest that if some innocent people were tortured, it doesn’t matter, because the program still overall has had what he believes to be a successful result. “It worked. It worked now for 15 years,” he explained. “We’ve avoided another mass-casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I’d do it again in a minute.”

Todd pointed out that the intelligence reports that the White House was receiving about the effectiveness of the torture techniques were coming from the same intelligence sources that were wrong about the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. But Cheney defended the entire process: “I know what they were asked to do and I know what they did,” he assured. “And I’m perfectly comfortable that they deserve our praise. They deserve to be decorated. They don’t deserve to be harassed.”

"If" innocent people were tortured, like the 20% of the people who were swept up and had no reason to be interrogated or held, let alone tortured. It worked for 15 years--if the program of torture started after 9/11/2001, then that would be 13 years--unless we started fucking up people before 9/11 (you know, the way warrantless wiretapping started before 9/11). When he says "we" captured Bin Laden, I am saddened to think he might believe he was still in office at the time--what does he mean by "we"? The "guys who were responsible" for 9/11 mostly went down with the planes. The masterminds got picked up haphazardly. But we know now that torture, like waterboarding, which Cheney is so proud of, did not stop any "ticking time bombs". The interrogators asked about al-Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein. And that wasn't connected. It was bullshit. And thousands of US servicemembers and contractors died or were maimed, or were so profoundly altered by what they'd seen they suicided because of our war there--and how is Iraq doing today?

It's been eleven years since this idiot administration tried to sell us on a yellowcake fraud, aluminum tubes and a diorama of doom. We've had plenty of time to figure out that so much of this was fake. And here is Cheney, stuck in 2003, telling us it was all real and necessary. Acting as if he believed all of it, then and now. Either he is a brutally stupid incompetent gullible shit for brains, or he is the most brazen fraud that has ever strutted across the Sunday chat-show stage. In either event, I do not see why he pollutes our airwaves. If anyone thinks he'll say one thing new, they are foolish. He's hanging with his lie.

He ought to be hanged by it. (Figuratively--I'd say "figuratively".)

This is Not What "Exceptional" Means

The release of the Senate Select Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program reveals things we basically already knew or should have known about the CIA program--it was worse than reported, it yielded little to no useful information, and it was run by liars who repeatedly tried to project that they were not performing acts of torture when they were in all actuality, textbook acts of torture.

There are people who seem to believe that releasing this information somehow endangers Americans here and abroad. Since this report details things that actually happened, I would say that the actual program of torture run by an agency of the United States government is what was actually harmful. Much of the information had already been reported in news publications; this report is just filing in the blanks. For that matter, this is just what was unclassified after certain details had been scrubbed, leaving the possibility that there are things yet worse that we don't know--but what is here is pretty starkly disgusting.

It has never escaped my notice that the use of torture is not reliable and has the potential for severe blowback--this was authorized by people who should have known those things. The program was devised by people who should have known better (and got paid some $81 million to not know better). If torture was used by the Inquisition to get people to confess to cavorting with demons, or by the Reds to get false confessions out of captured soldiers, why would it somehow become a force for getting truthful confessions from detainees in the GWOT? It simply makes no sense that battered and broken people who are dissociated by their treatment are now going to impart reliable intelligence. Because why? Because we're so nice? No! They'll lie their asses off to save what remains of their hides! And as far back as the Revolutionary War, George Washington had stern things to say about torture--he believed it brought disgrace on the nation. And so it does.

Nattering Nabob of Nepotism Pans Prez, Touts Torture

I've long been astounded at the utter cheek of the Cheney family with respects to their rather vocal defense of what was, actually, some entirely immoral and vicious activity in the name of "defense of country". This current report regarding the torture of "some folks" that President Obama is speaking of is the result of an investigation in the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques", and is not just Obama out of the blue slamming the previous administration as some kind of a blind for any current activity. Concerned people have been looking into the matter of torture and murder carried out by the Bush Administration since well before Obama ever took office. I myself have blogged about it extensively.  More prolific and high-profile bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have made a point of acknowledging and recording the multiple inquiries, official and journalistic, into what had been done by the previous administration in our name. And revisiting them again and again. Because it is moral to love this country and do so.

Handicapping 2016: Rand Paul

David Corn at Mother Jones comes across a fascinating video of Rand Paul:




I can't say I have much complaint with Rand Paul's narrative here or his interpretation of Dick Cheney's motivations. I've pretty much said the same sorts of things about the Iraq War, myself. But it's not the likes of me that Rand Paul would have to impress in a Republican presidential primary, is it? Especially when the Bush Era foreign policy neo-con in-crowd is still, unfathomably as I find it, popular.

Oh, You Torture Apologists!

Well, of course self-defenders are going to self-defend, but I just want to point out that General Hayden and Liz Cheney are some nervy folks. Take General Hayden's response to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogation:

Citing specifically Feinstein’s line about not using such techniques again, Hayden told Fox News Sunday host Chis Wallace, “Now that sentence that, motivation for the report, Chris, may show deep emotional feeling on part of the Senator. But I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.” 

Wallace — who is far from a sympathizer for Senator Feinstein and her party — responded incredulously to the Director’s assertion that Sen. Feinstein’s emotions drove her to want a public report on the U.S.’s potential use of torture. “Forgive me because you and I both know Senator Feinstein,” Wallace said. “I have the highest regard for her. You’re saying you think she was emotional in these conclusions?”

There is no reason that moral and emotional repugnance of an inappropriate process should not overlap. I won't insist that he used that term "emotional" because Senator Feinstein is a woman, but I won't put it past him either. Is Hayden a torture defender because it could be his ass if it is determined this was a criminal enterprise?  I reckon that might make someone emotional, a little.

In other news, Liz Cheney defends torture and thinks the investigation is political because she loves her Daddy (if we're playing by Hayden's rules, why not?) And, she adds, what about Benghazi? (Because that isn't political at all, is it? I mean, is it?)

If I wasn't already inclined to think the worst of some people already, I must admit, they have done nothing to make me think better of them.

This Report, in Full, Should be Released.

The Senate report on the CIA interrogation program seems to show that the use of the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" were more severe and widespread than we have been led to believe and also highlights what I think is a particularly meaningful aspect--it just wasn't effective. It was done for misplaced motivations and to get results that did not have to do with getting information that was not known. I don't know to what extent it would shed more light on what had taken place than previous journalism has exposed, but I do think it would be appropriate for there to be an official recognition of it.

It isn't a bright and rosy picture of this country, but it's the only way forward.  Former Vice-President Cheney said he'd be okay with waterboarding again. Former President Bush said he'd authorize it all over again.  And why not, so long as they can claim they were trying to save lives? When we might know very well what they were after--the foregone conclusion that led to a war we never would have wanted. Except they managed to make so many things so plausible.

I do not think we should accept this in silence. And I really don't think openness about these practices now could do the US reputation much more harm than has already been done.

Freakshows are cruel, though.

I'm not sure why former Vice-President Dick Cheney is invited places to say stuff. I guess there are people who are completely comfortable with his disregard for truth, compassion, humanity, his tendency to lie about things we know are lies, his regular defense of what should not be defensible. I don't get it.

I'm not dogmatic about much. I don't stand for torture, though. Not being associated with that sort of thing was one of the ways the US could consider itself exceptional. We were better than that.

Until the Bush Administration. Then, I'm afraid, there was a real question: What, exactly, were we better than?

Yellow-gutted chickenhawk war-profiteer Dick Cheney still does not feel that torture was ever beneath us, and despite good reasons to believe it does not work, talks as if he thinks it did. Maybe he thinks it did. People can persuade themselves of many untrue things when they are, in their guts, very afraid, and may even say them aloud.

What is anyone else's excuse, though?  It's easy to cast him as a freak--harder to understand why he gets such a regular and thorough hearing. I'm not sure the spectacle of watching him slowly grind another bloody bit of raw poultry between his teeth is worth the two bits.

Come for the Carpetbagging, Stay for the Fishing

On the campaign stump, Liz Cheney performs "The Robot".

Sadly, it appears that the bid for US senator from Wyoming of torture apologist and nattering nabob of nepotism, Liz Cheney, may be drawing to a close.  It's really quite unfortunate that a campaign that featured a massive rift between herself and her sister and sister-in-law over the validity of their marriage, an apparent break in the friendship between Darth Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and Senator Mike Enzi,  the payment of a fine over a fraudulently-completed application for a fishing license, and the revelation that Mr. Liz Cheney was registered to vote in two, count them, two states,  (which is certainly the sort of thing that can happen if you are a resident of... wherever you say you are)--was all for naught.

But let's look for silver linings, shall we? Now that Liz Cheney has settled in the lovely state of Wyoming, she can spend time getting to know people and making herself some friends, possibly bonding over casting lines and hoisting brewskis. It might just be that she is what we would call an "acquired taste" and the good folks of Wyoming haven't had ample enough opportunity to, um, acquire a taste for her. (I know I never have.)

Now admittedly, they might never warm to her (although pitchforks and torches may be involved at some point down the line) and taking up full-time residence in Wyoming may cut into her television appearances shilling for neoconservative foreign policy ideas she learned at daddy's knee. I don't see a downside there.

(X-Posted at Rumproast.)

Liz Cheney on the Wrong Side of History. Or "Another Day ending in 'Y'"

Scowling Sith Kid Liz, Daughter of Dick, is not doing especially well in her primary race against incumbent WY Sen. Mike Enzi, and she isn't exactly endearing herself with her sister and sister-in-law, either.

Here is La Liz:

Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney (R) on Sunday defended her opposition to same-sex marriage, saying that she disagrees with her sister, who is married to a woman and has criticized the Senate contender's views on gay marriage. 

"I love Mary very much, I love her family very much. This is just an issue on which we disagree," Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday." 

Cheney's sister Mary Cheney said in August that Liz Cheney is "dead wrong" on the issue of gay marriage.

And here is Heather Poe, her sister-in-law, who took to Facebook to disagree:

Let's all not listen to Dick Cheney, m'kay?

The Prince of Darkness, Dick Cheney, has been throwing shade again, and I was kind of going to go into why what he's saying doesn't even make sense or go into how getting bin Laden probably couldn't even be kept a secret and any intelligence gathered would have an expiration date and he's just jealous anyway, but look. Let's just get this out of the way--his relevance is as a historical figure, a member of the administration that blew off the intelligence that bin Laden was poised to strike on American soil and embraced bad intelligence about WMD's in Iraq. He is respected by connoisseurs of a very particular art in politics because of how good he used to be. But let's look at how he plies his particular forte these days:

He lies about whether he has fished with Senator Mike Enzi, because his darling little girl and fifth deferment wants the man's job. Did the senator think they were any kind of friends? Huh. Well. Henry Whittington was a friend of Dick Cheney's, too.

Now, maybe the former Vice President simply forgot whether he was part of a fly-fishing tournament with Enzi, because it's not like angling is such a great passion of his (maybe compared to shooting little birds by the barrelful it isn't), and besides, the man can forget a thing or two, can't he? Like how often he might have met former Senator John Edwards when he dissembled about that during the 2004 campaign. No, it's not quite as bad as the way he had repeated lies about, say, Saddam Hussein and yellowcake uranium, or the non-existent Mohammed Atta-Iraq connection. It's a sign, however, of how petty he's willing to be.

To the extent he acts trifling--he is trifling.  He has managed to, in his retiring years, become the EF Hutton of bullshit, and I can't imagine why anyone listens anymore.

Sometimes we have to recognize--

Andrew Sullivan has a breath-taking post up. And yes, it's from a very Catholic perspective, but it's also the kind of thing I follow his blog for:

Then we have the astonishing argument from Thiessen that the torture-victims in the Cheney program he supported were grateful for being tortured, because when they were forced beyond what they could endure - which, of course, is Thiessen's unwitting admission that what he was doing was definitionally torture - they were grateful. They were grateful because their duty to Allah had been fulfilled and they were then free to spill their guts. They had done their religious duty and had been brought to a spiritual epiphany that allowed them to tell us so much.

There is much to say about this but let me on Ash Wednesday simply remember the Catholic church's own shameful history of torture. It was done, according to the Inquisitors, as a way to free the souls of the tortured, to bring them to a religious epiphany in which they abandoned heresy and saved themselves from eternal damnation. It is hard for modern people to understand this, but as a student in college of the years in which my own homeland used torture to procure religious conversion, it is important to remember that the torturers sincerely believed that what they were doing was in the best interests of the tortured. In fact, it was a sacred duty to torture rather than allow the victims to die and live in hell for eternity, a fate even worse than the agonies of stress positions or even burning at the stake. Why? Because the torture they would endure in hell would be eternal, while the torture on earth would not last that long.

This is not an exact parallel to the way in which Thiessen defends torture. But the meme that it somehow relieved the victims, that it liberated them, that it helped them to embrace giving information without conflict with their religious faith is horribly, frighteningly close to this ancient evil. For a Catholic to use this argument on a Catholic television program and to invoke the Magisterium of the Church in its defense is simply breath-taking in its moral obtuseness.

To me, the question boils down to whether one identifies with Christ or the centurions. Not as a Christian, or a believer in any God, but just as a human being. A long time ago, I read that some mystics would actually imagine themselves in Christ's place and try to experience, for themselves, in their own minds, what kind of suffering was endured. When I read that, I couldn't help but imagine. And that feeling was outside of time, desolate even before a crowd, and an eternity of pain. More than any crime or reason deserves.

But do we even have to recognize that we are scourging and crucifying people in the way that the teacher Jesus was persecuted according to the Bible, or can we just recognize what this government did to ordinary people? When I think about how mundanely this activity has been sanitized, with words like "enhanced interrogation", and with our former vice-president even having confessed publicly, and matter-of-factly, that he was a supporter of water boarding, I think the idea that the people that this was done to were human is lost. And he goes on chat shows, and his daughter does, and John Yoo writes editorials for The Inquirer. And Theissen gets a WaPo column.

But they have, to use the Christian metaphor, identified with those who drove the nails in. They have offered excuses, but never considered what the impact is on the world that watches, on the families of detainees, on just normal people with a regular conscience who recognize that there just never is a reason for dehumanizing others. And that part is actually kind of obscene--

You can't say of any of them that they "know not what" they are doing. There are laws against torture and they are as plain as day. They know and are covering it up like a cat kicking sand over its own crap. But they still don't seem to "know" in the full sense of grasping that human beings suffered "hell" at the hands of people working on the behalf of the US. And that lack of awareness puzzles me, and disgusts me. How do they look at torture, and just not see the moral wrong?

Nattering Nabob of Nepotism strikes again--

Liz Cheney Echoes Father ?(like, what else?)

- Liz Cheney is echoing her father's recent criticism of President Obama's response to the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, saying Wednesday the president has not taken sufficient national security steps in the wake of the botched plane bombing.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and....(that really is enough, isn't it?--VS) released a statement calling on President Obama to reverse his decision to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, and to overrule the Justice Department's decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian court in New York City.

At least when Deadeye Dick takes to the talk shows and growls this drivel, he's talking as the pirate. She's the parrot. Why are we listening to the parrot? Somebody give her a cracker already.

But to stop being insulting for a minute, um, wouldn't it have been the Bush Administration that released the Yemeni guy who was supposed to have planned the "undiebomber" caper? And didn't they release this guy, and others, because legally, there just aren't grounds to hold all these people indefinitely? So the mere existence of the Guantanamo facility, and the kind of haphazard "maybe we just won't have files on anyone and eventually we'll come up with a military tribunal thingy" approach that the Bush Administration was employing weren't possibly the most brilliant strategy at "keeping us safe".

And oddly, as far as trying terrorists in a civilian court goes--we've done it before (Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ramzi Yousef), successfully.

It's possible that she knows these things. It's possible that she may believe what she says, regardless. It's hard to say when a parrot speaks that it really understands the words it's saying, though.

What we now know--um, (Dick Cheney)

If Dick Cheney wants to talk about what the Obama Administration is doing, and by the way,wants to be stupidly insincere and critical about it, maybe he could illuminate just what his role was in the Bush Administration--and just how he screwed up. And how he is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands. Or maybe he'd even be willing to discuss whether or not he benefited from it, via Halliburton. Hmm?

Or maybe he would rather just enjoy the Politico and other MSM outlets just being his stenographers--I would totally understand. Less incriminating. More like the good old days....when he could front like he gave a damn whether people died from terrorism, instead of cheering it on, like he seems to. Because he's a partisan hack! Thanks for asking!