FIRST DRAFT

Travel Day Sexytimes

Yick.

Most of what we go through in airports is fucking stupid. Metal detectors, sure, okay, and dogs and let's make sure nobody's bringing a warhead on. But as others have pointed out, the shoe thing and the underwear thing and the liquid thing and all the rest of it is just trying to prevent somebody attacking in the same way an attack has already failed once. I know most terrorists aren't the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, given how many of them seem to get caught with stuff in their shoes and panties, but COME ON.

An airport's the dumbest thing to hit right now. The truly dangerous and unsecured sites in America are where anybody gathers in large numbers to do things we think of as ordinary. Suburban shopping malls are more worried about teenage shoplifters than about terrorism, but tell me that isn't your nightmare scenario. Nobody would ever leave their houses again. There's no X-ray, metal detector, pat-down process at an NFL or MLB game. Community centers, most city buildings, a clipboard and a confident wave will get you way farther than you ought to go. Lest anyone think I'm giving terrorists ideas, this is just the stuff pulled from last night's crime procedurals on cable.

We're scared of flying because it's what happened last time. We should be scared of what's going to happen next time.

A.

The 9/12 Project and National Unity

This photo, from the Daily Southtown, was taken in Bridgeview, Illinois, during a rally for America that turned into a march on the region's largest Islamic center. It was taken on September 12, 2001.

Does it look familiar?

Here, watch this:

How about now? Now does it look familiar?

When Glenn Beck and his teatard followers first jumped on this idea of returning to the America we were on 9/12/01, all I could think of was that photo up there. Because that's who we were, a lot of us, on 9/12/01 -- assholes, painting our chests red, white and blue and high-fiving our drunken buddies while we beat up Sikh cabdrivers and yelled. That's who a lot of us were, and boy, were we ever grateful, weren't we, for Osama bin Laden giving us an excuse for a self-important hoedown.

That's the kind of thing my colleagues and I were spending our days covering, and it's why I have ZERO tolerance for hazy 9/11 unity nostalgia. Things were fucking scary for a large number of people, and not just Muslims and people who looked like Muslims, but people who wanted to go to the grocery store without running into a giant, angry mob of hopped-up aggro racists looking for some helpless Ay-rab ass to kick.

I know a lot of people have memories of examples of kindness and decency from those days; all I have is notes of phone calls from people talking about yet another container of pig's blood smashed on a mosque doorstep (CLASSY) and some dipshit accosting me at a rally yammering about how the "dune coons" were taking all our jobs away. It was high-level horrific, because Lower Manhattan was still actually burning, the entire country pretty much hadn't slept, and here come these people.

And in Bridgeview, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, police stopped 300 marchers as they tried to march on a mosque. Marcher Colin Zaremba, 19, told The Associated Press, "I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have."

I used to think Beck and his wannabes like Geller were just remembering that period completely wrong. I used to think they were as deluded as every maker of every soul-stirringly horrid 9/11 Tribute You Tube is, and not recalling all the truly horrific things that were done. I mean, it wasn't like that everywhere. In New York, for example, people actually were extraordinary and kind. So I used to think this whole 9/12 Project was just based on wanting to be something we never were, as a country.

Now, seeing that video, I think Beck and Geller and all the others actually remember this thing right. They want us to be exactly, EXACTLY, who we were the day after 9/11. And damn if we aren't getting there.

A.

'Imperfect but reasonable'

Fuck the whole world, today:

In town-hall-style meetings in recent weeks, the federal judge presiding over the cases, Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court in Manhattan, has urged the plaintiffs to accept the settlement as imperfect but reasonable.

In letters to clients, lawyers for Worby Groner Edelman and Napoli Bern, the firms representing more than 9,000 of the plaintiffs, spell out how costly the cases could prove if they go to trial.

“Your trial-related costs are likely to be in the range of $50,000 to $150,000, not including attorney’s fees,” each plaintiff’s letter says.

Many have pinned their hopes on a third alternative: a bill in Congress that would pay $7.4 billion for health care and monitoring programs and for reopening the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which awarded money to workers who got sick before the fund closed in 2003. But that legislation was voted down in the House, and its future is highly uncertain. “It happened in New York City, and personally I think the rest of the country could care less,” Mr. Carrano said.

As a result, many plaintiffs consider the settlement their best hope.

Tyree Bacon, a senior court officer with the New York State criminal court who volunteered at ground zero, said he was taking the settlement — in his case, about $11,000. To him, the legal battle was never about the money but about calling attention to the health consequences suffered by those “who stepped up to the plate” after the terrorist attacks.

A.

Thank God They Didn't Register Black People to Vote

Or they'd be screwed:

"[Blackwater] provided a bid that was underbid everyone else by about $26 million. And a panel that we had said that they can do the job, that they have shaped up their act. So there really was not much choice but to accept that contract."

(More in a bit on whether Blackwater, now known as Xe, has really shaped up its act.)

The CIA contract follows the news this month that the State Department awarded the company an 18-month, $120 million contract to protect consulates in Afghanistan. And even that's not all. In December, a Blackwater official told a contracting commission appointed by Congress that the company has training and security contracts as well as a "drug interdiction unit" working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan.

And in a must-read story published Sunday, McClatchy reported that the Obama Administration has opted not to pursue criminal charges against Blackwater for possible violations of sanctions in the company's long campaign to sell services to the government of Southern Sudan.

Right. Not much choice. Couldn't do anything else, like, say, NOT GIVE THEM THE FUCKING CONTRACT. Totally inevitable.

So amazing how that works.

A.

This Excuses Israel How?

Explain this, people:

Weakness always begets aggression, and, like clockwork, Obama's repeated signals that he is weakening America's commitment to Israel are emboldening the Jewish state's enemies.From Syria to Iran to Lebanon, from Hezbollah to Hamas and the PLO, the wolves smell blood and are trying to gauge whether they can get close enough for the kill.  

We heard some of this last week, too, about how Obama was so mean to Netanyahu and that completely made it okay to board a ship and shoot activists in international waters because ... WELL JUST BECAUSE OKAY SHUT THE FUCK UP. This argument basically states that Israel's government can commit heinous acts if our president appears to be rude, and that members of Hamas and Hezbollah are sitting around waiting for his secret bat signal to be fuckholes in their turn. I don't know how, exactly, this makes things better for Israel. I don't think this is the argument you want to seize on as a defense.

A.

Joey the Drama King

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN:

Washington (CNN) -- A bipartisan group of legislators on Thursday introduced legislation in Congress to strip citizenship from any American found to be involved in terrorism.

If the Terrorist Expatriation Act passes, an American would lose citizenship if found to have provided material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization -- as designated by the secretary of state -- or participated in actions against the United States.

Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, and Scott Brown, R-Massachusetts, co-sponsored the bill. An identical bill is being introduced in the House by Reps. Jason Altmire, D-Pennsylvania, and Charlie Dent, R-Pennsylvania.

"As the attempted terrorist attack on Times Square showed us again, our enemies today are even more willing than the Nazis or fascists were to kill innocent civilian Americans [in WWII]," Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told reporters. "Our enemies today are stateless actors who don't wear uniforms and plot against Americans abroad and here in the United States."

Okay.

If we're gonna do this can we start with child molesters? I'm not talking about somebody who believes a 16-year-old who says he or she is 18, I'm talking about those fuckwads that like 7-year-olds, the ones who will find a kid to molest no matter where you maroon them, the ones who can't be monitored closely enough to prevent them sneaking into a Brownie troop meeting. The ones with boxes of kiddie porn under their beds and a list of victims ten miles long.

If we're gonna do this, I vote we start with those assholes, and we not only strip them of their citizenship, we shoot them in the back of the head immediately following conviction. No chemical castration, no registry online, no electronic monitoring, nothing. Bullet, back of the head, immediately, because given five minutes those fucks will be chasing after the court reporter's toddler. Just strip them of their citizenship, declare them enemies of America (BECAUSE THEY ARE) and kill them. Maybe electrode their balls a little first. Let the parents of their victims do it.

I say shit like this all the time and then I remind people, who look at me like I've lost the plot, that shit like this is why I'm not in Congress. It's a sign I am irrationally squirreled up about certain things and should be talked out of my tree and bungee-corded to a chair until I chill. And somebody needs to do that with Joey here, because what he's talking about is just as deliciously tempting to the worst of our instincts and just as bugfuck crackers insane.

Somebody needs to bungee-cord Joey to a chair and tell him as much as he and his friends might like jacking off to the idea of stripping suspected terrorists of their citizenship, WE DO NOT DO THAT HERE, no matter how much fun it sounds like in their warblogger fantasies. What a stupid fucking country this is becoming, really. This commenter pretty much nails it:

Know what it's called when a U.S. citizen breaks the law? A crime.

Know what it's called when a U.S. citizen attacks the U.S. Government? Treason. Know what treason is? A crime.

Know what we do with people who commit crimes? We try them, and if we find them guilty, we sentence them. We don't take away their citizenship. That's not part of the fucking process, people.

But those punishments aren't extra-special enough for the extra-special crimes of terrorism! Or something! 

A.

Thank God '24' is Ending

I don't think I can take much more of this.

A.

Law Enforcement & Terrorism

This tidbit is buried in today's dose of WHOASHIT:

In 2005, al-Qaida terrorists used the area to fire Katyusha rockets at a U.S. warship docked in the port there.

The rockets missed the ship but hit a Jordanian army warehouse, killing a Jordanian soldier. Eight al-Qaida terrorists were arrested and later received prison terms ranging from seven years to death sentences.

Arrested? Prison terms? Who do these Jordanians think they are, coddling the terrorists like that? Jack Bauer would be ashamed. 

A.

Never Forget

It will be 15 years on Monday. She should be old enough to drive.

Doc

Not That We Haven't Always Done This Batshittery

But it is starting to become seriously disturbing:

Sara Howard, a spokesperson for Congress Russ Carnahan, confirmed tonight that a coffin was left on the front lawn of the Carnahan's home residence in the St. Louis area.

Mark your calendars for Wingnut Christmas:

Given that 19 April is the date on which both the Waco conflagration and the Oklahoma City bombing occurred it's probably not a coincidence that the gun nuts have chosen that date to stage a "Second Amendment March" on the nation's capitol.

I've said this before, but: I have zero issue with gun ownership. I have a SERIOUS problem with blowhard showoffs who think waving their guns around is some kind of stupendous act of courage in a society that not only permits gun ownership but positively worships violence, like, oooh, it's about as subversive as driving your car. Way to go against the grain there, Brave Patriot. Fucktards.

And the passive-aggression of wingnuts is starting to get on my goddamn nerves. Just sack up and admit that you want to threaten and intimidate. Don't be all, "Yeah, I put a coffin on your lawn, but I didn't mean for you to be upset by it or anything. Just expressing my opinion, man." Sure, I posted the wrong address for a congressman and got his brother's home vandalized, but hey, I wasn't telling anybody to do anything really. There's a fine line between plausible deniability and just generally being a puss, and these people are on the wrong side of it. Not that the other side would work for them either.

Schmucks.

A.

Given that 19 April is the date on which both the Waco conflagration and the Oklahoma City bombing occurred it's probably not a coincidence that the gun nuts have chosen that date to stage a "Second Amendment March" on the nation's capitol.

I've said this before, but: I have zero issue with gun ownership. I have a SERIOUS problem with blowhard showoffs who think waving their guns around is some kind of stupendous act of courage in a society that not only permits gun ownership but positively worships violence, like, oooh, it's about as subversive as driving your car. Way to go against the grain there, Brave Patriot. Fucktards.

And the passive-aggression of wingnuts is starting to get on my goddamn nerves. Just sack up and admit that you want to threaten and intimidate. Don't be all, "Yeah, I put a coffin on your lawn, but I didn't mean for you to be upset by it or anything. Just expressing my opinion, man." Sure, I posted the wrong address for a congressman and got his brother's home vandalized, but hey, I wasn't telling anybody to do anything really. There's a fine line between plausible deniability and just generally being a puss, and these people are on the wrong side of it. Not that the other side would work for them either.

Schmucks.

A.

Department of Defense Mechanisms

Via the Crack Den and It's Not a Crack House, It's a Crack Home, I bring you news that Ross Douthat is a solipsistic prick, basically:

Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.

I disagree, actually. Not with the part about Douthat having absolutely no experience in the world that exists outside the combination Grand Theft Auto/porno that plays in his head. But with the idea that there has been insufficient tragic drama lent to the Bushian storyline in modern revisionism. I think there's been entirely too much. 

Bush was a great leader, misunderstood. His compatriots were loyal, loving men who were misled. Someday the world will bow down in gratitude to anyone who ever called himself Republican, when it becomes clear that they were right all along, yet so beset by criticisms monstrous and numerous it is a wonder they were able to persevere at all. Think of those billboards: Miss Me Yet?

I understand the need to cloak the past decade in grand terms. After all, if these were ordinary, ugly, animal mistakes, then any of Douthat's friends could make them. Any conservative, ideologically driven, Heritage Foundation Future Douchebag of America could step into Doug Feith's or Marc Thiessen's or Ari Fleischer's or George W. Bush's shoes and fuck everything up exactly the same way they did.

So those douchebags want there to be something spectacularly sympathetic about the Bush folks because if there isn't, why, then little poncey lordlings like Douthat would have to ask themselves why all the stupid shit that happened couldn't have been stopped. They'd have to face the fact that it all could have been stopped, and many many people simply didn't want to do so.

They put up these walls, and talk in Shakespearean terms about the Fall (and reach for Shakespeare when they really mean Aristophanes, the historically illiterate fucks), in order to distract themselves from the blame they bear. It's nothing but a way to cope with how terribly easy it was, in hindsight, to completely wreck the world. 

A.

Today on Tommy T's Obsession with the Freeperati - recycler edition

Good Monday morning, gentle people - I always have a hard time deciding which putrid little nuggets from Freeperville to share with you, and often skip scrutiny-worthy threads for something gaudy and new to dangle before your eyes. 

This week's offal offering is going to be older stuff from Free Republic that didn't make the cut for one reason or another, but sometimes old cheese is the best cheese.

First of all - a piece of smackdown heaven I originally posted on the Great Orange Satan few weeks ago.

An oldie but such a goodie it bears repeating:

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Washington. Rep Geoff Simpson smacks Freeper down HARD!

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Well, the Freeperati finally got the smackdown they deserve, and it's a thing of beauty.

Freepers are always sending letters to Congresscritters demanding this or that or the other thing, and they're generally just filed in the appropriate receptacle by the Congresscritters staff, along with the pleas for more UFO research. This time they got a personal response.

I think someone should send this Representative a thank-you note, if not some bucks.

Oh - and this is a first-time diary, but I just had to share this one with you :

Washington State Rep Smears Tea Party.

Email Request For An Apology and His Response.
Orbusmax.com ^ | February 22, 2010 | Jim Walker
Posted on Monday, February 22, 2010 10:28:26 PM by jonrick46
DATE: 02/22/2010

RE: WA Rep. Geoff Simpson Response For Using Porn Term 'Teabagger' During Televised Debate Of I-960 Suspension
After repeated attempts to contact WA State Rep. Geoff Simpson for an apology/retraction for using a porn term during televised debate on TVW last week, I finally receieved an email response. You can read the exhange below. At the bottom of this page, I have included links to the TVW video, and the email address for Rep. Simpson. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 

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Subject: Re: Your comments on I-960 From: orbusmax@orbusmax.com Date: Mon, February 22, 2010 10:24 am To: simpson.geoff@leg.wa.gov
Still waiting for an apology from you, sir, for using a pornographic word during televised debate, to describe patriotic Americans. In addition, you also need to apologize for describing the Tea Party as racist and sexist. You obviously have never been to a Tea Party rally, or else you would have not made such a slanderous, idiotic statement.
Also, still waiting from the leadership (Reps Chopp and Debolt). The leadership shouldn't condone this language, and should take necessary action to censure/reprimand.
Rep Simpson, please apologize for both slurs ASAP. If you issue a statement of apology, I will be happy to post it.
Thanks,
Jim Walker Orbusmax.com

He got a reply, all right - probably not the one he was expecting:

Subject: RE: Your comments on I-960 From: "Simpson, Rep. Geoff" Date: Mon, February 22, 2010 10:57 am 

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Dear Jim -
I don't think it's patriotic to fly airplanes into buildings as one of your tea party members recently did.

(Tommy sprays coffee onto keyboard/monitor)

I find your movement to be infected with the same selfish, hate-spawned and dangerous ideas that have plagued civilization from time to time, only to be quelled when appeals to man's more patriotic attributes of selflessness, kindness, compassion and peace have prevailed.

I was puzzled by your objection to my recounting the words of my 90 year old decorated WWII veteran constituent until I heard the more obscure alternate meaning associated with the term teabag. I believe my friend was using the term to describe angry, predominantly white, anti-government individuals who have recently been made prominent by the media highlighting their hate-filled rhetoric toward all things progressive.

Indeed, it is well documented that the originators of your movement themselves adopted the names "teabag" and "tea bagger" to describe their anti-government antics. Your manufactured outrage toward me for using the term that the fathers and mothers of your movement coined for themselves is tiresome.

I will apologize to you for recounting my friend's puzzlement about the selfishness of your movement when you apologize for your hatred, your selfishness and your lack of compassion toward others.

Thanks,
Geoff

That is definitely not gonna buff out.

More recycled raunch after the flying leap...

Steny Hoyer, Newspaper Commenters Fight For Title of Today's Biggest Jackass

First of all, Steny Hoyer is an asshole:

WASHINGTON -- As Obama administration officials discussed a possible mid-2011 opening of Thomson prison as a federal facility, a key Democratic lawmaker said today that the president would have a fight on his hands to secure funding for the prison, which would house terrorism suspects.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., spoke in answer to a reporter's question on whether Obama would have a "steep, uphill fight" to get the millions needed to buy the Illinois prison and move Guantanamo Bay detainees there.

Hoyer said yes.

"I think the administration realizes that this is a difficult issue, and I think that they are assessing where they are and where they think we ought to be," Hoyer said. "And I think that's appropriate, and I look forward to discussing it with them."

Apparently there is nothing you can't get Hoyer to say, so long as it's damaging to a Democratic agenda. His flack tries to walk it back later in the story, but ... yeah, damage done.

The commenters are hysterical, though. Full of ideas about fiscal responsibility, murderous fantasy, and detailed instructions as to how terrorist attacks could be carried out in order to fuck over some sheep in the deep country:

Take all these Gitmo prisoners for a ride to their native countries in 747's hold trial on the plane's and release them all at 10,000 feet over the Ocean out the cargo door. That saves 300 million plus the cost of feeding and guarding them. That is fiscal responsibility. You know if the table 's were turned they would chop our heads off and show it on worldwide TV. Dropping them in the Ocean may deter future terrorist acts. "I'm just sayin"

This guy has GI Joe figurines on the top of his bookshelves.

[[All of the tough talkin' keyboard commadoes are afraid to house some terror suspects ...]]

They are captured combatants. They shouldn't be "suspects" for anything.

We're allowed to hold combatants, without charge or legal representation, for the duration of the hostilities in which they were captured. For as long as the A'stan war is going on ... we can hold them.

Furthermore, if they were fighting out of uniform *improperly*, then we can accuse them of being saboteurs or mercinaries, give them a military lawyer, give them a military hearing, and then execute them.

They totally deserve a fair trial before we convict and killinate their asses!

Illinois doesn't want this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Leave them in Gitmo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Is anyone listening?????????????????????

Try a few more exclamation points. That might help.

While the federal govt may have to react to any terrorist threat, it is the local property owners who bear the risk. This is because, for several year now, federal laws have allowed all U.S. insurance policies to exempt policy holders from coverage for terrorist acts. A dam breech could flood hundred of farm acres and rural homes, causing millions upon millions of dollars of damage. Similarly, federal laws mandate that we, farmers, destroy all our own livestock and crops if there is any nuclear leak and exposure. There is no insurance coverage if that leak is terrorist created. And, the risk is already significant enough for us to get yearly federal reminders and siren towers in our fields to warn of that risk.

Listen, if you get attacked by terrorists, you will in fact be taken care of. It seems we only hate Americans who were in the path of hurricanes, floods, broken-down infrastructure and general crime. You'll be fine.

A.

The Unanswered Question

I haven't been following the Christmas Day underwear bomber wannabe story that closely. I'm numb to wingnut hissy fits, lies and fear mongering; it  just doesn't irk me as much as it used to. In short, I'm an irk shirker...

There is, however, a pressing question for the underwear bomber guy that needs to be answered: boxers or briefs?

Malaka Of The Week: Rudy Giuliani

Yeah, I know: Rudy is overqualified for malaka of the week. His malakatude is eternal but it's particularly egregious this week. My original plan was to kick Rudy around for his opposition to trying that furry mass murderer, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, in Manhattan after having favored terrorism trials there before. Also, if he were still a US Attorney he'd be demanding the right to more trial headlines in Noo Yawk. The *real* reason that Rudy 9/11 is malaka of the week is that he's injected himself back into the public discourse in a big way this week. I hadn't thought about this cut rate Mussolini for quite some time and I resent having to do so again. That's the essence of malakatude, y'all.

Rudy has also been in the news because of his flirtation with running for office in Noo Yawk. He considered running for Governor since David Paterson is a sitting duck but opted out because Andrew Cuomo seems ready to go and the mean Cuomo (as opposed to his gentlemanly father) would be a prohibitive favorite. Then, there was a flurry of ersatz excitement when the Daily News reported that Rudy might run against Senator Tracy Flick Kirsten Gillibrand in the 2010 special election and use it as a springboard for another futile run for the Presidency in 2012. That trial balloon landed like the Hindenburg and the story was denied to Ben Smith of Politico, which is the home of journalistic malpractice as well as malakatude.

So, Rudy get the fuck out of my face, go off and make buckets of blood money giving inflammatory speeches, visit Bernie Kerik in jail but please go away. I'm tired of your ugly mug but I do miss your old hairdo, I loved calling you Mayor Combover and your new 'do took away the only pleasure you ever gave me. You, sir, are a festering pustule of a malaka; slink off into a corner you fucking asshole and shut the fuck up.

Holy shit, I sound like the love child of Jude and Ashley Morris. Fuckin' A. Hmm, does the A stand for Athenae? 

It's Never Over

This is why I'm always hesitant to sum up the war that's still going on:

BERLIN (Nov. 17) — A former SS sergeant who worked unnoticed for decades as a train-station manager was charged with 58 counts of murder Tuesday after a student doing undergraduate research uncovered his alleged involvement in a massacre of Jewish forced laborers.

University of Vienna student Andreas Forster was working on a project about the slaying in a forest near the Austrian village of Deutsch Schuetzen when he stumbled across Adolf Storms' name in witness testimony.

Forster then obtained files from federal archives in Berlin that enabled him to link the former sergeant to the massacre, his professor Walter Manoschek told The Associated Press.

Manoschek visited Storms, 90, at his home in the city of Duisburg several times last year after finding him in the phone book. The professor conducted about 12 hours of interviews in which Storms repeatedly said that he does not remember the killings.

Forster and Manoschek notified authorities and state prosecutors near Storms' hometown in the industrial Ruhrgebiet region of western Germany filed the charges against him Tuesday.

The last war almost anyone living can remember isn't over yet.

A.

It's Always Worse Than You Thought

Always:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The CIA provides hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's spy service, including payments for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a US newspaper reported, citing unnamed officials and former officials.

The CIA's financial support accounts for as much as one-third of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency's budget, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday.

When contacted by AFP, the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment Monday on the report.

The clandestine program that offers bounties to the ISI for the capture or killing of militants has prompted fierce debate within the US government, officials told the paper, as ISI is suspected of retaining ties and providing support for Taliban and other Islamist extremists in Afghanistan.

The payments were first approved by former president George W. Bush and have continued under President Barack Obama, the report said.

A.

Oh, GOOD FOR YOU

Because there hasn't been enough of a backlash already:

Politicians, Muslims, and law enforcement are concerned about a 'backlash' against Muslims. Now is the time for a professional and legal backlash against the Muslim community and their leaders. Muslims know what materials are being taught in their mosques and they know many of the materials instruct young Muslims to kill innocent people who do not adhere to Sharia law. If Muslims do not want a backlash, then I would recommend a "house cleaning." Stack every Saudi, al Qaeda, Pakistani, Taliban, Hamas, and Muslim Brotherhood piece of material from their mosque and have a bonfire. Tell the American, Jewish, and Muslim community this hatred will no longer be allowed in their mosques.

Boy, this is just this little be-overall-ed fuckwit's moment, isn't it? He's just ready to seize on the death and destruction to make his point that his book is awesome and we should all listen to him.

NOW is the time for a backlash? What the fuck do you think the past eight years have been, pal? Maybe you were reading Little Green Footballs at the time but War Preznit mouthed a few words of conciliation shortly after 9/11 and then left his slavering hordes to their own devices while they broke windows and beat up Arab shopkeepers. Paint your chests red, white and blue, boys, and vote Republican, because terrorists are in your base pwning your noobs. The president's a terrorist. Nancy Pelosi's a terrorist. That Sikh dude that lives down the street and shovels your snow sometimes, he's a terrorist too. Muslim jokes are hilarious. It's never a bad time for a good old-fashioned Quran burning in Middle America.

And every time we think things have calmed down, and maybe we'd be able to respond to tragedy like adults and prosecute those responsible instead of turning into a community theater production of The Crucible, here comes some dickwad to make out like every shopping mall in Nebraska is full of jihadis. Now's the time for a backlash. As if the backlash had ever stopped.

A.

Worth It

Susie, writing about real things:

During remarks at the American Enterprise Institute recently in Washington, Tedeschi said some servicemembers found the changes in their lives so profound after combat, they expressed gratitude for having gone through it — even if it cost them permanent physical damage.

“They’d felt they’d changed as people in ways they otherwise wouldn’t have,” Tedeschi says. “At the same time, as this trauma separates them from other people, it also allows them to maybe see themselves as more human than they ever were before, have a closer connection with what it means to be a human being .”

You know, I don’t doubt this happens. After all, people have a tendency to try to integrate their experiences for growth. But there’s a fine line between that voluntary process and being cajoled by the Army into pretending you don’t have problems.

I used to write about this stuff all the time when I was writing about Galactica, and 9/11, and all the horrible shit my friends and I put each other through once upon a time:

That which does not kill us takes away our best friends, our arms and legs, our hair and eyes and lungs and hearts. That which does not kill us pushes us onward. Come out of the chrysalis and you can tell yourself you're more beautiful, if that makes it better, if it soothes your sting. I don't care, particularly. Does the pain really make us who we are, or is that what we tell ourselves in order to survive it? Can we ever see the worth of the race at the finish line? Or do we need another hundred thousand years?

Because otherwise, if it's not Meaningful and Necessary, it's burned and blackened and stupid, empty, half a bridge to nowhere on a deserted, bombed-out world. Otherwise it's just what you dreamed of, destitute and lost, the thing you bought at the cost of your miserable soul.

I'm too involved with my own coping strategies these days to slam anyone else's, except to say that it's so, so, so easy to confuse "necessary" and "okay." Most of us do it all day long anyway, because shitty things that happened to you have to be necessary in order that they no longer be shitty. For the story to make sense in retrospect, for it to fit inside where you need to keep it, you have to trim the hard edges off. Repeat something often enough, like your story about the hard times, and it starts to seem less real, and more like a movie you once saw.

But we only ever tell the story in retrospect. Poverty is a useful lesson, once you're wealthy. Hunger may make the feast seem sweeter but there has to be a feast for you to taste first. Nobody says, while hurting, this pain is teaching me something. It's only afterward, when the pain is gone. It has to be over, first, before it can become A Moment, and that's where the idea that one should be grateful for one's misfortune becomes the worst kind of condescension. Kids today don't know how rough you had it. They only know how rough they have it, because that's all any of us know. 

So don't tell me my pain will be useful someday. And don't ask someone else to endure something you think will be good for him. The only lessons you're responsible for are your own. You can't tell me what was worth it. You have no idea. None of us do.

A.

Nation-Building At Home

Herbert:

Whether it’s Newark, Detroit, parts of Chicago, South-Central Los Angeles, Camden, N.J. — take your pick — we’ve looked the other way for decades as the residents of hard-core inner-city neighborhoods struggled with overwhelming, life-threatening problems and a chronic shortage of resources, financial and otherwise.

We’re having an intense national debate over whether to move ahead with nation-building in Afghanistan and to continue protecting the population in places like Kabul and Kandahar while all but ignoring the violence that is consuming the lives of boys and girls in Chicago, America’s third-largest city.

Dozens of boys and girls of school-age and younger are murdered in Chicago every year. One hundred were killed there last year, according to the police. The blood of the young is spattered daily on the stoops, sidewalks and streets of American cities from coast to coast, and we won’t even take notice unless, for example, we can engage in the ghoulish delight of watching the murder played over and over again on video.

A few years back I did a story; can't find it on the Southtown site now, about a group of ministers from the South Side neighborhood of Englewood who wanted to get terrorism prevention funds from the government, on the grounds that drugs and gangs and guns were killing more people in their community every year than supposed weapons of mass destruction elsewhere. It was a genius move, really; turn the conversation around. Naturally the downtown and national press yawned: How quaint. How silly. How naive.

They knew how the world works, you know. A lot of the disgusted commentary that comes from pundits who treat everything like a joke has this tone, like, "Oh, you silly idealists, you don't understand." They knew the only shot they had at getting their problems made a priority was to make the conversation what the powerful wanted to hear. It's because idealists know how the world works that they know what can be fixed and how to fix it. It's not a willful disregard of the facts, it's a cold assessment of them: The only way anybody's going to care about us is if we have the word "terrorism" attached to our problems. And for that sincere attempt to get something done the only way they could, they got laughed at.

The money never came. No army of nation-builders ever arrived to support those who wanted peace and fight thoe who wanted violence, any more in Englewood than they did in NOLA or Cedar Rapids or anywhere else struck by disaster in the past eight years. The debate continues about how much we should spend building a world half a world away. How much should we spend building a world right here? Our national conversation never comes near the question anymore.

A.

National Unity

DIscussion of our perfect national unity on 9/11 make me crazy. I was at work on 9/11 and at work every day or just about thereafter, and while the TV news was covering heroic efforts to save the dying and recover the dead or sweet stuff about schoolkids writing letters to firefighters, all we were writing about was this kind of stuff:

On the afternoon of Saturday, 2001-SEP-15, a gunman killed the 49 year old owner of a gas station in Mesa, AZ. He was a Sikh. His family believes that he was killed because he "looked Middle Eastern." Additional shots were fired at a Lebanese clerk and at the home of an Afghan family.

On the evening of Saturday, 2001-SEP-15, a gunman killed a Pakistani Muslim store owner in Dallas, TX.

Adel Karas, 48, an Egyptian-American grocer was shot and killed near his International Market store in San Gabriel, CA. He was a Copt -- neither Muslim nor Arab. No money was taken. Police are investigating the murder as a possible hate crime.

A man drove his car through the front entrance of Parma Mosque in Cleveland OH.

Also on Saturday, a Christian of Egyptian origin was shot dead in California.

Near Chicago, IL, there was a march in which about 300 anti-Arab youths waved flags, shouted "USA, USA," and attempted to march on a mosque in Bridgeview, IL -- a suburb southwest of Chicago. Colin Zaremba, 19, said: "I'm proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have." Three demonstrators were arrested.

In Chicago, a Molotov cocktail was thrown t an Arab-American community center. There were no injuries and little damage.

In Huntington, NY, Adam Lang, reportedly a drunken driver, 75, allegedly tried to kill a Pakistani woman with his car. He later followed the woman into a store and threatened to kill her for "destroying my country."

In Gary, IN, a man wearing a mask pumped over 20 bullets from a high-powered assault rifle at a Muslim, Hassan Awdah. He survived. Hassan is a U.S. citizen, born in Yemen.

In Lynnwood, WA, a mosque was vandalized.

In Suffolk County, NY, a man allegedly made anti-Arab threats and pointed a handgun at the employee of a gas station. He was arrested.

In a prison in Washington state, two inmates fought over an anti-Muslim slur.

A gasoline bomb was thrown into the home of a Sikh family in California.

Two mosques were firebombed with Molotov cocktails during the weekend of OCT-20-21. They are located in Burlington and Mississauga, near Toronto ON Canada. Kendrich House, 35, from Oakville ON has allegedly been charged.

Yeah, Glenn Beck, let's totally go back to the people we were immediately after 9/11. Let's paint our bare chests red, white and blue and go beat the shit out of some brown people. Which ones? Doesn't really matter. What matters is that we're united as a country.

A.

Must-see TV

I may have, on occasion, professed that I rather like Rachel Maddow, and I've more than once posted here about her.  This one, though, isn't just fangirl squee, trust me.

Maddow knocked it out of the park last night with this Tom Ridge interview. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth your attention. The clip below is one of three, the other two are on her show site. She devoted over half the program to the conversation with Ridge, starting with the topic of whether politics influenced DHS terror alerts, whether Ridge has  backtracked on statements to that effect made in his new book, then moving on to Iraq intelligence and the failured FEMA response to Katrina.

It's a remarkable bit of broadcasting, not just for what Ridge says or doesn't say, and not just for Maddow's tenacious questioning. What really struck me as I watched it was that something real was happening here, something we don't see very often. By "real" I obviously don't mean Ridge is telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. Rather that, as the interview unfolds, there's a palpable sense that we, along with Ridge, really don't know where it's going to end.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What if it Saves Us?

Richard Cohen:

This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of those lives is your child's?

It's not, actually. It's not complicated by questions of its efficacy because torture isn't effective. Read your own newspaper. Jesus tits.

Next?

Seriously, what if it saves the life of YOUR CHILD? What a dickhead. I regret not having children because without them I can't tell RIchard Cohen to keep his ideological ugliness to himself and stop using them as an excuse to be the asshole he really wants to be. 

There are many things to which this argument could be applied. What if universal, absolutely free, single-payer health care (which indisputably works, wingnut myths about Britain and Canada notwithstanding) saved lives? What if it saved many lives? What if one of those lives is YOUR CHILD'S? Then do we have a moral imperative to provide it regardless of how many Republicans sign on to support it? I mean, if we're going to raise the incredibly stupid idea that anything that saves YOUR CHILD is therefore worthy of consideration, let's spin the argument out to its absolute bitterest end.

And not for nothing, but let me be cold here for a moment. Of course you're in favor of saving your children. Of course you are. And what you say in that scenario is that you'd sign on to any bloodthirsty thing on the planet in order to make your children okay. That's what you're supposed to do. That's your job as a parent. It's not, however, your job as a politician, an interrogator, or a journalist. There's a reason we don't let the families of murder victims pronounce sentence on the murderers of their loved ones. There's a reason we institutionalized some balance of power in this country, to give ourselves the necessary distance to make decisions like this. Not that anyone remembers that now.

Don't shove your shit onto me with pronouncements about YOUR CHILD and dark fantasies about what kinds of threats would let you waterboard some imaginary terrorist. Cohen and his ilk like to talk about liberal pussies who prize "our national soul" and "the idea of America" over their hysterical concept of AMERICAN LIVES ARE AT STAKE when it comes to talking about national security. As if it's the height of courage not to refrain from insane behavior in the face of terror but to give in to every wild impulse they've ever had. Don't you care about YOUR CHILD? That isn't the argument.

If it saved MY CHILD? Absolutely, I would want to torture everybody on the planet.

So?

A.

They Called Us Traitors

All us filthy hippies:

Among the headlines promoted by publisher Thomas Dunne Books: Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Because that's what we were, back in 2004, we Kerry-voting Bush-doubting hippies who couldn't do anything right. We just wanted to undermine the president and so we'd suggest monstrous things, like maybe we weren't in danger of being attacked on the eve of the election, like maybe Bush was quite often talking out his ass when it came to these "terror alerts" and having himself a little funny at the expense of the whole world. Who could even think such a thing? Surely our sick imaginations had their limits.

Apparently my sick imagination did have its limit because while I personally imagined Bush would manipulate the terror alert system for his own political gain, I never imagined him doing it obviously enough to piss off Tom Ridge. You'll notice the manipulation and incompetence had to be blatant to get Ridge riled up. It had to be, you know, not just upping the alert level on the basis of some oldsauce intel from three years ago, it had to be not just fucking up the workdays of like five thousand flight attendants and those poor TSA fuckers and grinding the airports down to a slow trickle, it had to be doing it right before an election.

So fuck Ridge in his ear. It was worth resigning over but not worth saying anything about until now, when he could make a buck off it selling books? Releasing that book on Sept. 1? Why not Sept. 11? Why not go all the way in? What an asshole. He can join a long line of former Bush administration whores at the sink all out damned spot. I mean, you tell us this NOW? Instead of in 2004, when it could have fucking helped? When it was actually happening? Four years more of that chewy little jerk, you gave us, and don't tell me this wouldn't have turned the tide, it was a close election, anything could have turned it, four years in which countless people died and oh, yeah, a whole fucking city drowned, and you could have stopped it?

And you come to us now? Now, when we're this? When we're this shell-shocked, retina-burned national kicked puppy jumping a mile every time the phone rings? When we're unable to open our mouths on TV without eating each other alive? When we can't have a civil debate about anything because a third of us are too cowardly and a third are too stupid and a third are exhausted and just want some ice cream and a nap? You wait until we're this to tell us what you have to tell?

For what possible purpose? To be absolved? Not a chance, you son of a bitch. Nobody who stood around while this crap happened and waited five years to speak up gets to say shit that isn't an apology. I don't care how horrifying Tom Ridge found it all at the time. He kept his mouth shut and he stayed indoors and yeah, maybe he quit, but he sure as hell didn't do it fast enough. I have zero respect. They called us traitors, and we were right, and he and many many others knew it, and didn't say a damn thing till now, when it's just too late for it to do any good.

Schmuck.

A.

Have People Changed Their Font Colors Back Yet?

In case anybody's curious Iran's still all fucked up.

The reason I got so cynical about the AND THE BLOGOSPHERE SHALL BE GREEN FOREVER type of thing, by the way, is that I know from bitter experience how hard it is to keep up interest in a story when everybody's flittered on over to the next topic. When people have promised you their eternal support and devotion and attention and said, "Hey, we're all over this until whatever the bitter end might be" then bugger off to chase the next shiny object they see, it's discouraging. So I tend to be suspicious of bandwagons simply because most of the people jumping on board them will be bailing onto the next one that passes.

And look, nobody's particularly obligated to care about a thing forever. What we choose to care about is called our lives and our lives change fast. People are allowed burnout. People lose interest in things and move on. I can't say I care unequivocally about every single thing I used to care about ten years ago. It happens.

But knowing that it happens is just one more reason NOT to use your eternal fealty to something — your warblogger intensity — to shame anyone who doesn't appear to care as much as you say you do. Not even stones, goes a line from one of my favorite books, are always and forever.

A.

Take Them at Their Word

Why is it that if you actually assume everything Bush-Cheney et al say is true, it makes things worse, not better?

It was asassinations of Al Qaeda operatives. Okay, awesome! Who doesn't want to hunt down and smoke out and hang high our nation's fearsome enemies? Tell Congress all about it! It's not like any of them have Osama on speed dial, no matter what Rush says, so for fuck's sake, what's the problem here? Right after 9/11 congressmen were falling all over themselves (and most of them still are) to cross the finish line of Most Hardcore first. You really think they'd have had an issue with it?

It was even more illegal spying than the illegal spying we already knew about. Well damn, hooker, shit. That clearly would have been tough for Congress to accept, considering that they totally gave retroactive immunity to everybody who went along with the illegal spying we knew about and have prosecuted exactly no one for any of the previous lawbreaking. A little more might have pushed them over the edge? Honestly? They might have used adjectives in their sternly worded letters? You might as well tell Congress basically as a DARE.

I realize that I am presently arguing that Congress is such a bunch of stupendous pussies that it really doesn't matter what sick and twisted shit Herr Cheney was up to in his secret bunker, that they would have agreed to it completely. Yet, no one who has been paying attention could argue this wasn't the case.

Sure, a couple of speeches might have been given, and Feingold might have told the entire U.S. Senate to suck him once your mom was done, but in the end anything and everything would have been authorized lest Bill O'Reilly make fun of Democrats or some imaginary voter living in Chris Matthews' head have concerns you might be the kind of pansy who drinks the wrong thing at the diner. They should have just owned up to it. Nobody would have stopped them.

Even with this major scary new revelatory whatever, no matter what it ends up being about, in about two weeks we're going to have a resolution declaring it's all okay, and nobody needs to go to jail or apologize or anything. I'd love to be proved wrong, by the way, but I don't think I will be.

A.

Rule of Journalism, Politics, World in General

It is always worse than you think:

President George W. Bush authorized other secret intelligence activities — which have yet to become public — even as he was launching the massive warrentless wiretapping program, the summary said. It describes the entire program as the "President's Surveillance Program."

The report describes the program as unprecedented and raises questions about the legal grounding used for its creation. It also says the intelligence agencies' continued retention and use of the information collected under the program should be carefully monitored.

I suppose that is AP-speak for "the report basically had a whole page that said SERIOUSLY GUYS WHAT THE SEVEN HELLS?" And I love this paragraph:

Many senior intelligence officials believe the program filled a gap in intelligence. Others, including FBI, CIA and National Counterterrorism Center analysts, said intelligence gathered by traditional means was often more specific and timely, according to the report.

Many people think it was great, except the FBI, CIA, NCC, NSC, all three branches of government, the military, the SEIU, Donald Duck, some dude in a tinfoil beanie waving a sign around, your mom, Paris Hilton, and Bo the First Dog. Other than that, it was universally praised.

The Bush White House acknowledged in 2005 that it allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without court orders.

AFTER THE NEW YORK TIMES EXPOSED THEM FOR THE LIARS THEY ARE. It wasn't like Bush got up one day, went out into the Rose Garden, stretched, belched, and said, "Just so you all know, I've been breaking the law for years heh heh heh."

Five former Bush administration officials refused to be interviewed, including former CIA Director George Tenet and former Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The others: former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; former top Cheney aide David Addington; and John Yoo, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general.

Perhaps they can address questions for Yoo to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The report suggests Yoo ignored an explicit provision in the FISA law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

SO AWESOME. Way to be, PI!

Dodd hasn't weighed in on this yet, according to his site, but Feingold, who back during the FISA immunity fight said basically, "I know all this stuff and trust me, it's worse than you think," has beseeched the rest of Congress and the White House to BITE HIM SO HARD:

“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power.  I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.”

A.

Robert McNamara Dies

Obit:

Finally, in 1993, after the Cold War ended, he undertook to write his memoirs because some of the lessons of Vietnam were applicable to the post-Cold War period "odd as though it may seem."

"In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" appeared in 1995. McNamara disclosed that by 1967 he had deep misgivings about Vietnam — by then he had lost faith in America's capacity to prevail over a guerrilla insurgency that had driven the French from the same jungled countryside.

Despite those doubts, he had continued to express public confidence that the application of enough American firepower would cause the Communists to make peace. In that period, the number of U.S. casualties — dead, missing and wounded — went from 7,466 to over 100,000.

Too little, too late. But of course, it was those filthy hippies who screwed that glorious war adventure all up.

A.

This Isn't Yours

Hey, Mr. President. This doesn't need to be your problem.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”

This is the previous administration's fuckup. This is the previous administration's regime of total and complete and nonstop fuckuppery. All this report will reveal is how Bush and his people fucked up, from day one, from the day they were handed a joystick and the keys to a Humvee. How they tortured people, for hours, for months, for no good reason, to the detriment of the very things they purported to be trying to accomplish. That's all that's in here.

So this isn't your deal, this won't make you or even the America of the present look bad. It'll just remind us all how grateful we are that that administration, the one that authorized such things, is no more. It'll just remind everyone that we no longer do shit like this, and won't we all — Americans, everybody all over the world — be happy to hear that?

Unless you make it your deal. Unless you make yourself complicit in this and every other Bush atrocity by continuing to cover up their crimes. Unless you continue to deny and delay and flap around with excuses and have your people blither on about how it's hard to read books really fast, like that's the biggest problem here. Every day you sit on things like this, and send your lawyers into court to argue that people can't handle pictures, or hearing about torture, or how it's hard to do the right thing really, is a day you get in deeper. The more time you spend hanging out with the horrors, the harder they become to disavow.

This isn't yours unless you make it yours. Stop making it yours.

A.

What It's Going To Take

You know, there are days ... I just ... you need a NUCLEAR TERRORISTIC STRIKE KILLING THOUSANDS to get your rocks off? Really? I can't ...

It's finally happened. They broke my brain.

A.

Kip's Another One

Dear Jeffrey Goldberg,

Welcome to the Internet. This is known as concern trolling:

The attacks in Arkansas and Washington are both manifestations of a radical type of intolerance, and they are linked in very deep ways. The left, generally speaking, doesn’t want to acknowledge Muslim intolerance, and the right, generally speaking, doesn’t want to acknowledge white, Christian intolerance. But they both exist, and they should both be acknowledged.

First of all, not going batshit crazy does not equal refusing to acknowledge intolerance. It's liberal groups like Amnesty International, after all, who've been on about human rights violations in totalitarian regimes for years, but I suppose that just means Teh Left is full of pussies. If we REALLY acknowledged Muslim intolerance we'd get behind blowing some Muslims up, instead of writing letters and making phone calls and trying to actually improve conditions for the desperate and impoverished. After all, Iraq is a monument to tolerance today, thanks to our glorious intervention. Jesus bugfuck Elvis CHRIST.

Second, I so hate this fucking nonsense, you guys. Like you can't look at the Tiller murder and the Arkansas murders and the Washington murder and conclude, "Basically the world is burning down, which, WTF? and shut up, Hannity." and leave it at that. In Goldberg's world, I guess you have to Sister Souljah somebody before you earn your street cred, but out here we just talk about the stuff we care about without worrying that it doesn't rack up Conservative Points that we can redeem for a little plastic frog at the skeeball ticket counter.

Third, the right is perfectly happy to acknowledge Christian intolerance. They call it their base.

A.

Obama's Fault

Our president has managed to drive racists insane.

Because the fact that they might want to shoot up a museum dedicated to remembrance of brutal murders isn't a sign they were nuts ANYWAY.

Also: You stay classy, Free Republic:

Especially since it sounds like he was one of you, or at least found a warm reception among you.

By the way, if TV commentators want to start talking about the Freepi, let's not forget Bush invited them to the White House to party with him.

A.

Holy Shit, Does This Thing Still Work?

Hey hey, everybody.

Sorry I've been a ghost lately.  Things have taken a turn for the busy, and I don't really have lots of computer time for a bit. 

Oh, I've had things I've wanted to comment on.  From the usual right-wing stupidity, to what-the-fuck stories regarding economics, or various statistical illiteracies.

But I couldn't not say something about George Tiller.

And, right now, I don't have full-throated outrage to share.  I'm not even really shocked.

I'm just sad.

That will change, I know, because there's work to be done.

But I'm sad that this bullshit still goes on.  That a group of fucking busybodies have decided that people that they've never met making decisions about potential people they'll never meet is the worst sin ever in the history of the universe.  And they wave their bloody fetus pictures, and shout that "abortion is murder," and feel smug and righteous because, basically, they've never (by and large) had to make any hard decisions in that arena themselves.

Dr. Tiller was one of three late-term abortion providers--not in Wichita, not in the state of Kansas, but in the fucking United States of America.  Roughly speaking, that means there was one late-term abortion provider for every 50 million women (of all ages) in the US. 

Listen, anti-abortion people.  Late-term abortions aren't frivolous things.  Nobody says to themselves, "You know, I've been meaning to get an abortion, but then it was football season, and things picked up with my social life, and I just couldn't get around to it.  I think today I'll go get my nails done, get that late-term abortion, then go shopping for a new swimsuit."

Okay?  It's not a trivial consideration.  It's a serious medical procedure, and entails no small risk to the woman who has to undergo it.  But, sometimes, it's the least worst option people face.  That you can't see that--that you can't understand that these are human beings making painful and unpleasant choices about their own lives--indicates that you have no empathy (to use a lately much-maligned word), and no understanding that women are, in fact, humans with decision-making agency.  Killing doctors will not, ever, change those underlying conditions.  What you are doing (apart from making spouses, friends, and relatives grieve unnecessarily) is making life far, far more difficult for people who already have enough difficulties to last a lifetime.

This needs more fleshing out, but I have to be off to my job now.

So I'm sad.

But that'll pass.  There's more work to do.

So What?

I don't get this idea that if Pelosi knew about torture it makes torture okay. It doesn't. It just makes Pelosi suck. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and did nothing as a Democrat. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and approved as a Republican. You do not get a free pass AT ALL. The stupid right-wing fuckmooks pushing this argument can't comprehend that this isn't a partisan issue to those of us who truly give a shit about the rule of law.

If Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it that doesn't mean anybody arguing against torture loses the argument and should go home and we should keep torturing. It isn't about Republicans torturing, it's about America torturing, and anybody who approved of it and/or knew and didn't stop it should be drummed out of public life forever.

Any other stupid bullshit need dealing with today? Oh, yeah, there's this:

The tribunal system — set up after the military began sweeping detainees off the battlefields of Afghanistan in late 2001 — has been under repeated challenges from human rights and legal organizations because it denied defendants many of the rights they would be granted in a civilian courtroom.

In a statement late Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Obama's decision to revamp and restart the tribunals a step toward strengthening U.S. detention policies that have been derided worldwide.

"I continue to believe it is in our own national security interests to separate ourselves from the past problems of Guantanamo," said Graham, who has been working with the administration on issues related to detainees. "I agree with the president and our military commanders that now is the time to start over and strengthen our detention policies. I applaud the president's actions today."

Graham was an Air Force lawyer and is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Another member of the panel, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., welcomed Obama's decision, saying the president "has reinforced that we are at war, and that the laws of war should apply to these prisoners."

You know, in the reality-based community, when you've pleased Linds and Holy Joe, you're having a pretty shitty week.

A.

Department of Well This Had Better Be a Joke of Some Kind

It's not April Fool's and this shit isn't funny. What is it, Piss Off Everybody Week in the White House? We're celebrating International Suck and Fail Day? Seriously, this is even an option?

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The proposal being floated with members of Congress is another indication of President Barack Obama's struggles to establish his counter-terrorism policies, balancing security concerns against attempts to alter Bush-administration practices he has harshly criticized.

[snip]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who met this week with White House Counsel Greg Craig to discuss the administration's plans, said among the proposals being studied is seeking authority for indefinite detentions, with the imprimatur of some type of national-security court.

Sen. Graham said he wants to work with the administration to pass legislation to increase judicial oversight of military commissions, but noted the legal difficulties that would arise.

"This is a difficult question. How do you hold someone in prison without a trial indefinitely?" Sen. Graham said.

YOU DON'T YOU FUCKMOOK.

Any other questions?

Before the day is out somebody better nip this shit in the bud. What the hell is going on over there?

A.

America Needs Proof

This is particularly sad and pointless:

The Defense Department was set to release hundreds of photographs showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the images we remember from Abu Ghraib," the president said on the South Lawn of the White House. "But they do represent conduct that didn't conform with the Army manual."

Obama said the publication of the photos would not add any additional benefit to investigations being carried out into detainee abuse -- and could put future inquires at risk.

"In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would further flame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger. ... I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse," Obama said.

I'll say to this president what I would have said to the last one. Do you really think they don't know what we're doing? I'll grant you they haven't seen images, not the new ones, anyway, but since when was proof of monstrosity ever required to turn someone, something, somewhere, into a monster to frighten children? Do you really think keeping back the photos will keep back the hatred of America that power-hungry lunatics use to subvert poor and desperate people and turn them to violence? Do you really think this is going to make any difference at all?

Do you really think that, having seen proof after proof after proof in the past eight years that we are not remotely who we say we are that a bunch of new photos will be the straw that breaks it? I'm taking your argument at face value here, Mr. President, do you really believe this is how it works? That having heard there are terrible photos of terrible things, terrorists will only react and use such information if they actually see the photos released? You think this isn't already in the recruiting brochure, that they're holding the printing pending artwork? Seriously? Not for nothing, but if American commanders were so concerned about the consequences of images of brutality getting out, they might have worked a little harder to make sure that a) there was no brutality and b) people weren't taking snapshots of it like they were at fucking Disneyland.

I ask this in the face of all the experts with their expert knowledge, I ask this because to a girl with a web site who doesn't consider herself exceptionally intelligent or anything this is a really, really, really incredible argument to ask the American people to swallow. Maybe you're making it in all sincerity. I don't really care. It's a bullshit argument and it's insulting to all of us. I say this as someone who voted for you. I say this as someone who voted for you and fully expected to be disappointed by you, many times, and I expected to tell you so, loudly and often, because that's how this works. In some cases you've done better than I would have hoped, in some cases you've done worse. This isn't me saying OH WOE IS ME I WUZ BETRAYED BY DEMOCRAT SOCIALIST JESUS. This is me saying, you blew this fucking call.

Al Qaeda may not need proof of our perfidy to use our misdeeds against us; those predisposed to hate us may not need proof to be enraged. America needs proof of what's been done because our national capacity for self-delusion has not yet reached its zenith, and until you shove something in our faces a thousand times we're pretty damn happy to pretend it doesn't exist. America needs proof because until we see it we don't believe it, and we need to believe this if we're ever to stop it from happening again. You're not in the job of protecting people from the consequences of their country's history, you're in the business of serving this country, and we need to see what happened. Do you really think the Taliban are the ones that need the proof?

A.

Some Other Mother's Son

Richard Cohen asks several stupid questions:

But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.

You comfortably situated loudmouthed ponce. The point wasn't that it worked or didn't work. The point wasn't that Jack Bauer sometimes had to torture people to stop a ticking time bomb. That was NEVER the point. It was, on occasion, an addendum to the point which is YOU DO NOT DO THIS EVER, whether it works or not. Not because your enemies don't deserve to get it but because you don't deserve to dish it out. Among "those on the political left," who by the way have been right about everything in the past eight years while you sat on your hands for fear of looking like a pussy, the point wasn't about the efficacy of torture, it was about the rule of law.

Dumbass. I don't care whether the CIA tortured people because they really thought it would work or they really thought there was a ticking time bomb or because it was Tuesday and they were bored and yes, they wanted to do it for the hell of it. I am supremely uninterested in the why of what they did. I'm interested in the what, and the who, and the when, because that's the sort of stuff you need to know to know if they BROKE THE LAW.

Cheney is a one-man credibility gap. In the past, he has said, "We know they [the Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons," when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. He insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming" that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the "evidence" was virtually nonexistent. And he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had a menacing nuclear weapons program. As a used-car dealer, he would have no return customers.

Still, every dog has his day, and Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture. He says he knows of two CIA memos that support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved. "That's what's in those memos," he told Schieffer. They talk "specifically about different attack planning that was underway and how it was stopped."

You know, I've met people who can't commit to a job, or a house, or a person. People who dither over the menu and fret about what to order at the bar. I know people with commitment issues but I swear to Peanut Butter Jesus that I have never seen anybody as unwilling to commit to a conviction as the premiere "liberal" columnist of the Washington Post.

Cheney sucks and has always been wrong about everything, but maybe he's right about this, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt I do not deign to extend to any of his dreadlocked pot-smoking protester critics, because they're not real men like Dick and me.

Inescapably, it is about life and death -- not ideology, but people hurling themselves from the burning World Trade Center. If Cheney is right, then let the debate begin: What to do about enhanced interrogation methods? Should they be banned across the board, always and forever?

YES.

Next?

In political terms, Cheney has been a free man ever since he eschewed any presidential ambitions. He became the most impolitic of politicians and continues in that role, taking neither a vow of penitence nor a vow of silence in his vice presidential afterlife.

How selfless of him. How kind of Dick to continue to favor us with his impartial insights now that all he has to care about is his immortal, noble soul. It's so sweet, it almost makes me forget how he GOT A LOT OF PEOPLE DEAD AND LIED ABOUT IT. And all he has to care about is that his reputation is now somewhere on the global scale of ick between chlamydia and genocide, so naturally he has no interest in anything but making America better with his magic words.

Kill me now. Really, what the fuck does he have to care? It won't be Richard Cohen's children being waterboarded. It won't be Dick Cheney's children under the lights, in a box with bugs, hooked up to electrodes and made to scream for his amusement and estimation of his manhood. It'll be other people, who they will never have to meet, so it will be perfectly all right for them to continue to talk about how it's noble to torture people and have them deported in secret because their imaginations make it okay. They'll never have to know the cost. I think even if you shoved the bill under their noses, they'd just push it away.

A.

Torture

What Diane said.

A.

Like Watching a Dog Do a Math Problem

Richard Cohen, ladies and gentlemen:

On April 16, President Obama released the now-infamous torture memos along with a covering statement that said the CIA's old interrogation methods not only failed to "make us safer" but undermined "our moral authority." A week later, a woman holding the hand of a child walked into a throng in Baghdad and blew herself up. Apparently she had not heard of our new moral authority.

So, wait, releasing the memos was supposed to stop all terrorism ever? DAMN, no wonder people are so upset about them, because that hasn't worked at all!

If the threat of torture works -- if it has worked at least once -- then it follows that torture itself would work. Some in the intelligence field, including a former CIA director, say it does, and I assume they say this on the basis of evidence. They can't all be fools or knaves.

Why not? There's no shortage of them at the Washington Post.

But it is important to understand that abolishing torture will not make us safer. Terrorists do not give a damn about our morality, our moral authority or what one columnist called "our moral compass." George Bush was certainly disliked in much of the world, but the Sept. 11 attacks were planned while Bill Clinton was in office, and he offended no one with the possible exception of the Christian right.

Hah hah hah ... wait. What? This argument is stuffed so full of straw you might as well stand it up in a field to scare the crows away. Obama didn't say releasing the memos would make us safer, he said torture didn't make us safer. Does a girl with a web site really have to explain the difference to a Washington Post columnist? Also, I just have to jump in to juxstapose a few sentences here:

If the threat of torture works -- if it has worked at least once -- then it follows that torture itself would work.

[snip]

If Obama thinks the world will respond to his new torture policy, he is seriously misguided. Indeed, he has made things a bit easier for terrorists who now know what will not happen to them if they get caught.

Follow all that? The threat of torture may or may not work, so knowing all the horrible things that might happen to you or not happen to you at American hands if you do terrorism will make you more likely to do terrorism, because that's not in any way the threat of torture. I don't want to hear one more word about standards and rigorous edting of newspapers from anybody at the Washington Post.

The horror of Sept. 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station -- the memorials still fresh -- without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day -- yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance -- and that ember glows within me still.

SO GO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT or shut the hell up. God. The world is not a vengeance buffet from which you can either choose an option or bitch that there's nothing there you like. I'm sorry if the torture served up by Head Chef Bush didn't tempt your appetite, Rich, but there's plenty of places down the street for you to nosh.

I mean, really, you want vengeance? Teach some Afghan school children to read. Hell, teach some children around here to read. I don't know what the hell it is with guys like this, who seem to be waiting for the proper avenue for their holy rage, but the world is not short of stuff you can do to piss the Taliban and Al Qaeda off, not the least of which would be to stop being such a wanker all the time.

I know it is offensive to compare almost anyone or anything to the Nazis, but the Bush-era memos struck me as echoes from the past. Here, once again, were the squalid efforts of legal toadies to justify the unjustifiable. Here, again, was a lesson that needs constant refreshing: Before you can torture anyone, you must first torture the law. When that happens, we are all on the rack.

This whole column is just so typically Cohen: "I'm against torture, but not like a pussy or anything about it, because I swore eternal vengeance the likes of which the world has not seen, said vengeance to be expressed mostly in writing about how hippies suck. Torture works, in fact the threat of torture works, but releasing memos that basically point out you're fucked if Americans catch you terrorism-ing willl never work, because Obama hasn't stopped all suicide bombings ever. So there."

Schmuck.

A.

Projection

I really think I hate this about our pundit class more than anything:

To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price.

So I’m wary of the clamor for retribution. Congress failed. The press failed. The judiciary failed. With almost 3,000 dead, America’s checks and balances got skewed, from the Capitol to Wall Street. Scrutiny gave way to acquiescence. Words were spun in feckless patterns.

Well hey, so long as everybody screwed up, it's all fine! So long as there wasn't a single voice raised in opposition to what was done, so long as we didn't shout down anybody who had a different idea of things, so long as nobody who spoke up against this bullshit was punished, drummed of public life, called a traitor on national television or demonized for daring to opine that instituting a regime of torture was pretty fucking stupid, so long as we are all equally complicit in this there's no need to punish anybody. Because if it's all of us, then it's none of us really, and isn't it funny how that always works out so beautifully?

I am just so violently opposed to the idea of transferring your moral cowardice onto the country at large to get it to share the blame for your own wussitude on the fundamental questions of our time. It is just so incredibly cheap and small and mean. Fact of the matter is, not everybody lost their damn minds, and it is a profound dishonor to those who held to their convictions in the face of overwhelming public pressure to go all kill-crazy that we lump them in with the nutballs painting their chests red, white and blue and high-fiving their buddies while they beat up Arab shopkeepers.

Cohen would like us to think of this time in our nation's history in the passive voice, or at the very least with the royal we. He refers to Sept. 11 and its aftermath as a "national trauma," and declares "There but for the grace of God go I." No. Absolutely not. We didn't all go mad and even if we had, collective madness is still madness. You are not exempt from responsibility because your neighbor went nuts too. That isn't how this works. There not but for the grace of God but for the love of country and ironclad devotion to its principles went many, and to pretend you could just as easily have gone the other way, to pretend it was something akin to luck or a miracle you didn't ... it's monstrous. For all his canting about forgiveness in that piece, Cohen's not advocating reconciliation. He's simply expanding the blame.

Via Balloon Juice.

A.

9-12 People

So I was watching the re-run of the Colbert Report last night and they were playing this bit that Scout linked to earlier:

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From the site of the crazy:

The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the greatest nation ever created.

That same feeling – that commitment to country is what we are hoping to foster with this idea. We want to get everyone thinking like it is September 12th, 2001 again.

You do? Really? God, I know it shouldn't surprise me at this point but the narcissism, honestly. It took 3,000 dead people to make Glenn Beck and his fellow freaks feel like they had a purpose in life and were I his or their therapist I might feel inclined to explore that further but as someone who was walking around on Sept. 12, 2001 all I can say is it's completely fucking sick.

How self-involved do you have to be to make a terrorist attack about how you felt about your inner Republican? How tiny and selfish and pathetic do you have to be to need a national disaster, a terrorist attack, to give your life meaning? What on EARTH are you doing all day every day if it takes THAT to wake you up? We heard this over and over starting about two weeks after, a parade of jackoffs on the local news autowittering on about how 9/11 made them go back to church or love their families more, and all I could think then and now was what the chocolate croissant fuck is the matter with you that you don't love your family now?

(And hey, maybe your family sucks. Should all their suckitude go away because somebody else's family got dead? Is that how it works?)

Tragedies that happen to othe people can be wake-up calls to us all, sure, but to cant about it in public, to make that tragedy out to be some kind of benefit to you and thus make it okay? To talk about the silver lining of a mass murder? Think, people, reason. Is that ever something anyone should do? In front of the people who actually did suffer? That's fucking parasitic. Take your neediness elsewhere. To your shrink's couch, maybe. That's the only person obligated to give a shit.

If your life doesn't have meaning, if you don't value the people who love you, if you lack purpose in the world and a sense of dedication and direction, Glenn Beck can't fix that for you and 9/11 sure as shit can't. And if you need reminding what you are all about, you need to carve out some space in your schedule to figure it out without picking up a burning Twin Towers T-shirt at Ground Zero.

More than that, I really do dispute the idea that we've all lost our way here somehow. News to the north, but a pretty healthy portion of Americans have always valued their lives and their work and the people who loved them, have always loved their country and always felt closely tied to its purpose and their own. The critical assumption Beck and his mouthbreathing followers are making is that everybody sucks as much as they do, and I think I can speak for the rest of America when I say thanks for your concern but we're doing just fine with our sense of self-worth out here.

A.

ps. Oh, and some of us, on 9/12? Were fucking assholes.

Time To Think About Torture

It's becoming an exercise in masochism, reading back over what was said in the early days of the Bush administration, back when many people still thought the president was due the benefit of the doubt. Jonathan Alter, who still gets invited to all the right parties, for example:

In this autumn of anger, even a liberal can find his thoughts turning to... torture. OK, not cattle prods or rubber hoses, at least not here in the United States, but something to jump-start the stalled investigation of the greatest crime in American history. Right now, four key hijacking suspects aren't talking at all.

Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of dying rabbits or high-decibel rap? (The military has done that in Panama and elsewhere.) How about truth serum, administered with a mandatory IV? Or deportation to Saudi Arabia, land of beheadings? (As the frustrated FBI has been threatening.) Some people still argue that we needn't rethink any of our old assumptions about law enforcement, but they're hopelessly "Sept. 10"--living in a country that no longer exists.

[snip]

We can't legalize physical torture; it's contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

I got pointed back to Alter's toolier prose (yes, he was at one time toolier than he is now, though I know it's hard to fathom) by this:

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA...."

This lengthy article, by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, appeared in The Washington Post on December 26, 2002, only months after the capture of Abu Zubaydah. A similarly lengthy report followed a few months later on the front page of The New York Times ("Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World"). The blithe, aggressive tone of the officials quoted—"We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them"—bespeaks a very different political temper, one in which a prominent writer in a national newsmagazine could headline his weekly column "Time to Think About Torture," noting in his subtitle that in this "new world...survival might well require old techniques that seemed out of the question.

The reason we here left blogtopia get so het up over faux-liberal put-upon pussitude like Alter's is that we've been listening to it nonstop for like nineteen thousand fucking years, for fuck's sake. It's been going on forever, it's the same dumb pose it always was, and Mark Danner's piece demonstrates pretty clearly that it bore real consequences in the form of people having the shit kicked out of them. People Jonathan Alter has never met, probably doesn't care to meet, and has forgotten he wrote about them in the first place, if his current crop of columns bemoaning the death of true bipartisanship are any indication.

Either it never occurred to them that if they were wrong about this whole badass Manly Men Kick Tied-Up Dudes For Fun pose they'd look like just the world's biggest dicks, or they didn't care because eight years later we'd all be freaked out about something entirely different and thus wouldn't give enough of a shit to try to get them fired for being the world's biggest dicks.

Either way, seems to be working out pretty nicely for Alter. Not so much, for others:

A naked man chained in a small, very cold, very white room is for several days strapped to a bed, then for several weeks shackled to a chair, bathed unceasingly in white light, bombarded constantly with loud sound, deprived of food; and whenever, despite cold, light, noise, hunger, the hours and days force his eyelids down, cold water is sprayed in his face to force them up.

Nobody said this was going to be pretty.

A.

The Challenge

WaPo:

Once detainees are sent home, even to friendly nations, the United States has very little influence over what happens to them. Convictions are not guaranteed. Neither is surveillance by home countries. And for those allowed to go free, assistance in resuming a normal life is rare.

Although the United States may never say so publicly, it is likely to want more explicit promises from the countries where detainees are repatriated, and the administration will seek the establishment of rehabilitation programs, along the lines of one in Saudi Arabia, that provide former jihadists with jobs, homes and money to pay for dowries.

But there is also a view in some quarters of the U.S. government that cases such as Ajmi's are the inevitable result of locking up 779 foreigners in an austere military prison, without access to courts or consular representation, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques that detainees say amount to torture. Some of them are bound to seek revenge, these officials believe. The challenge is figuring out which ones.

That's the challenge, huh? Locking up 779 foreigners in an "austere" military prison and subjecting them to interrogation "techniques" that the GENEVA CONVENTIONS say amount to torture, and our "challenge" is figuring out which ones we need to keep torturing after we "release" them?

God.

While we're at it, thanks a bunch, President Obama, for making me agree with Right Wing News and its ilk that this is some bullshit. Of course, they think about this primarily in terms of how liberals owe them an apology for being so OMG MEEN:

All statements from Barack Obama come with expiration dates. That's something that the HopeandChangizoids have begun to learn just a month after the dawning of the Age of Obama. A lot of them owe Bush -- and us -- apologies.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Pwned booyah foam finger that's how we do things downtown bitches, because the rule of law was never a matter of principle, or we would have voted for John McCain.

We are torturing people in secret lawless prisons, and the Washington Post thinks the challenge is to figure out who we need to keep torturing and who we need to buy off, and the wingnut brigade thinks the challenge is that people need to send them Hallmark cards. It's 8:34 a.m. Monday where I am and I am already exhausted.

A.

Impossible

An impossible position?

Not really. You just have to do the right thing, the thing you promised to do, the thing you know is the right thing to do, no matter how the wingnuts howl and the Very Serious People lecture and your desire for political expediency nags you. It's not that impossible. You have to be willing to override every idea of the past eight years, that "what if" is enough to violate someone's rights, that secrecy is always better than openness, that the benefit of the doubt is always due government in these cases. But it's not impossible.

Let's not begin the Obama administration by setting the bar so low we might trip over it and calling something impossible when it's just very, very, very hard and painful. I say this all the time: Don't tell me you can't do that. Tell me you don't want to, or you don't feel like it, and at least I'll respect your honesty and know what I'm arguing with is just laziness and not blindness, but don't insult both of us but claiming something's impossible when it's not.

The nightmare scenario in cases like these, by the way, is not that those on the side of openness are wrong, and someone somewhere is proved to be a terrorist let go on a technicality. The nightmare scenario is that those on the side of openness are right, and let their fear of a mistake dictate their actions, thus keeping an innocent or unjustly accused person from freedom.

A.

May the Road Rise to Meet You in the Face, You Treasonous Son of a Bitch

A couple of weeks ago I posted up a site that allowed you to post your goodbye letters to Bush.

This is mine: 

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

Goodbye, President Bush.

As you ride off into the sunset of whatever life is left to you, I find myself wishing many things. I wish, for example, that I believed in the afterlife described by my childhood priests, so that I could imagine the orderlies in Hell preparing you a bed. Which would be chained to the wall by the way, and you chained to it, as a hurricane bore down upon you.

I wish I believed in the courage of Congressional Democrats to investigate and prosecute the wrongs you directed be done in America's name.

I wish I thought we'd figured this out, and would be smarter the next time some shallow snake-oil salesman comes by to tell us government sucks and we should elect him so he can prove it. 

I wish I could cling to some notion of cosmic justice that would give you yours threefold back again, so that at least you wouldn't get to stand around and smirk that once again, you lazy, fratty asshole, you've gotten away with something.

Most of all, though, I wish you had been a better president. I wish you had done the job well. Contrary to the arguments made by your defenders, I didn't root for you to fail. I never did. I greeted your installment by the Supreme Court with exhaustion and resignation, and your first few months in office with general skepticism, but I never thought, "Boy, I hope he just falls on his face and kills a lot of people and wrecks our economy and blows holes in the sand for five years." I thought, "Maybe it'll be okay. Maybe it won't be so bad."

And when 9/11 happened I said to myself and those around me, Democrats all, "Well, let's see what he does now." My life has not been devoid of stories about unlikely heroes arising from feckless halfwit princelings, so I was prepared for that to happen. Hopeful, even. Who doesn't want everything to be okay? Who doesn't recognize that you being a terrible failure would hurt us far more than it would hurt you?

I wish you had done the job. I wish you had found and tried and executed Osama bin Laden, and rebuilt Afghanistan the way we should have decades ago. I wish you had given us real security, not this dance of removing our shoes and putting lotion in a baggie. I wish you had told us to conserve and sacrifice, not spend and eat. I wish you had listened to those in the armed forces and those in Congress and those on the street when they said, don't invade Iraq. I wish you had listened to Iraqis, afterwards, when they said, help us stop the looting and violence.

I wish you had listened to the Gulf Coast's people when they called out for help. I wish you had listened to the sick and their doctors when they asked you to grant research to cure their disesases. I wish you had listened to women when we said, we value our autonomy.

I wish you had listened to us all when we said we are more than this, we are better than this, ask us and there's nothing we won't give you. I wish you had had faith in us equal to that which we placed in you. And I wish you had been worthy of what we wanted from you, and from ourselves.

I wish you had done and been all of this, but you didn't and you weren't, and so what we're left with are the memories of the dead, the horrors of the living, with boarded-up houses and empty streets, a place so broken we barely recognize it anymore. It's hard to imagine punishment fitting for that. It's hard, having wished all this for you, to wish anything more, but I do:

May you live a life of quiet contemplation of every single one of your failures. May you live a life hemmed in by those you hurt, in a cell physical or otherwise, papered with the faces of your dead. May you be  sheltered from the rain of rotten tomatoes and sour heads of cabbage by a small, broken umbrella. May you be gnawed upon by the hunger you fostered in the poor, chilled by the cold from which you refused to shield the homeless, beset by the illnesses you refused to help cure, subjected to the indignities you inflicted upon others.

May your life be long, and healthy, and full of everything you gave to America and the world. May you come to know exactly who you are. May you come to recognize the face in the mirror each morning.

May it give to you a fraction of the nightmares you deserve.

No love at all,

A.

As we do bid Bush farewell, however, Echidne reminds us that it isn't just Bush to whom we need to say goodbye:

Of course the real blame must be shared. Shared by voters who wanted a leader who would never, ever change his mind for any reason whatsoever, and who confused that with leadership. Or voters who wanted a godly man as a leader, which turned out to be a man who thinks that god talks to him in private. Or voters who decided that they would never vote someone smarter than themselves into that office and that beer and hot dogs was the way to judge someone's suitability in leading the so-called free world.

The blame must also be shared by those in the Republican Party who let a fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction take over all practical policies, thus turning them into one the greatest engineered social and political experiments of our times, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands (at least). That fanatic and out-of-touch neoconservative faction, with its free-market religion, also had its hands in kneading the dough from which our current recession was baked. So when we don't get our daily bread, remember why not and avoid that same mistake in the future.

And the blame must surely be shared by the Democratic Party, too, those who sat quietly, triangulated furiously and cowered helplessly in the shadows while trying to save their own political careers from oblivion. Never mind that the country itself has turned towards Oblivion on its arc through history.

Last but not least, the media (with few exceptions) has spent the last eight years pressing Bush's head against its collective bosom, instead of alerting us to the dangers of the heedless policies of the government. It took several major disasters for any of that to change. I hope the media stays on their toes and aggressive in the future, even though it will look as if Obama is getting a shabbier treatment than Bush did. Indeed, I hope that all future presidents will get a shabby treatment from the press, if by 'shabby' we mean a vigilant and critical stance.

An informed, engaged, empowered, energetic citizenry would not have allowed this to happen. Could not have allowed this to happen. I'm not calling everybody lazy; I'm calling the club of the most of us paralyzed, so unaccustomed to such staggering incompetence that when it came, all we found ourselves able to do was stand open-mouthed in shock at the brazenness of it.

And when the shock wore off, when it became "okay" to express doubt again, to express opposition again, to say things like Bill Maher and Natalie Maines said, well, by then it was too late, wasn't it? By then they were dug in, and those of us who did stand up, who did yell and scream, who did march and write and call, who did actually vote, especially in 2004, who did try to stop this from continuing, didn't stand a chance. Understand I'm not saying I'm not glad we did it, because people, on balance you're gonna get screwed anyway so you might as well act like grown-ups if for no other reason than you need to be able to look at yourself in the mirror in your cell, but we were pushing against the granite cliffs of the earth trying to move it, by the time we tried at all.

I hesitate to make lessons out of the Bush presidency. I don't think horrific things that happen are supposed to be assigned a purpose that makes them okay. That's cheap, and exculpatory, and gross, when those who truly paid for Bush's folly are still coming home in boxes, still trying to rebuild their houses, still learning how to walk again. I don't think I get to tell them, "Here's what you suffered for, this greeting card I'm about to impart." But if we do not learn, then why go on? Why keep working and fighting and marching and calling and writing if we do not change and grow and push upward?

If there is a lesson here, it is that hesitating, even for two seconds, in the aftermath of a crisis and granting extraordinary deference to those who we should always regard with skepticism, to hold back even for a moment, is to hold back too long. To talk even for a moment about political expediency in matters of lives and war, imprisonment and torture,  to talk even for a moment about it being unwise to speak out against injustice, to advise anyone even for a moment to hold his or her tongue because it would upset people, is to blight the soul of this country, no more, no less.

There have been examples of great courage in the past eight years. Examples that I cannot forget. I remember the week before the Iraq war began, and protesters shut down Lake Shore Drive here in Chicago, stopping traffic with their bodies to try to stop what was coming. I remember being jammed into the Cook County Clerk's office, covering the marriage equality march that had begun outside and ended with people sitting on the floor, holding hands, quietly insisting, "Marry us, or marry no one." I remember standing outside a polling place in 2004, having cast my vote for John Kerry, thinking, "This man has taken a lot of crap on our behalf and I do not feel like we deserve it." As it turned out, we didn't. I remember watching Richard Clarke testify before the 9/11 commission. I remember hearing Chris Dodd stand up against FISA. I remember readers of this blog slamming hammers into drywall. I remember Denver and Grant Park and Washington, DC. I remember this.

But the examples that will stay with me are those of great cowardice. Great hatred. Great fear. Smallness. Divisiveness. Rage. Contempt.

I remember watching, horrified, as Katrina struck on the Gulf Coast, and as Bush strummed his guitar and ate cake with John McCain. And I remember driving around in a van with Scout and Mr. A and the First Draft Krewe, around the streets I'd seen on television, two years after the storm, and I remember how quiet it was. I remember asking someone, are you allowed to take down the markings on the doors, that say if bodies were found inside the houses or not, and a man who lived there responded, "allowed?" and laughed, because there was no one to tell anyone the outlines of this world anymore.

I remember pulling a fax off the machine, at my newspaper, that said the Bush administration's legal argument in an INS case was that the judicial branch of government had no jurisdiction to "second-guess" the decisions of the executive in matters of national security. I remember handing it to a colleague to read, asking, "Does this say what I think it says?" I remember it being 2003, and nobody caring all that much that the administration was breaking the law. I remember it being 2005, and suddenly everyone discovered separation of powers and the administration's lawlessness, and I remember thinking, "This has been going on so much longer than you think it has." I remember that being the beginning of the end of it, for me, the end of being able to convince myself it was going to be okay.

I remember hearing Michelle Malkin and John Hinderaker call journalists murderers and terrorists. I remember Liberal Hunting Permits. I remember Rope, Tree, Journalist. I remember the Freepi calling me an ugly whore. I remember all the fights I had with people I thought were my friends. I remember all the fights I had with my family. I remember how it became okay to say that war heroes shot themselves, families of the dead were hookers and pimps, interfaith marriage was weird, gays and atheists were evil, poor people were whiners, and most of all how there was nothing, literally nothing, you couldn't say and get away with it, so long as it was meant to silence somebody trying to speak out.

The heroism doesn't erase that. It doesn't salve or soothe it. It doesn't make it okay, and you know why? Because we barely know who the heroes are yet. There are stories that haven't been told because they can't be and won't be, for years. My grandchildren will be hearing the recently declassified tales of all those who were silenced and stifled these long eight years, and coming home from school and saying, "Did you know?"

Did I know? No. I hoped. I believed. But I didn't know the full fury of what had been done in my name. These things stain forward in time, discoloring everything. We can't absolve anyone today. Bush may be getting on a helicopter and he may be flying away from us, but what he's leaving behind we hardly know about yet. I am not happy, today. I am not relieved, today. I am still enraged. I am still afraid. I am still jumping every time the national phone rings, still jerking away every time somebody reaches out, still sure that, like the last eight years, the next eight will be a trick of some kind.

If Bush leaves a legacy, at all, that is it: The after-image of fear and suspicion, like the ghost of a light bulb lingering in the darkness after you close your eyes, like a national retina burn. 

A.

Gitmo: Closed

Quit fucking around:

They've just successfully moved the goalposts. We are now engaged in a battle to persuade Obama that he must unequivocally and publicly disavow what those two jaded, decadent sadists just suggested was necessary lest he risk Americans being killed. Good luck to us on that. Considering Obama's propensity for consensus, I would guess that he will find some way to appease them. (Maybe he'll vow to make sure that the torturers don't enjoy it, as a sop to the liberal freaks.)

But I would suggest that Obama contemplate one little thing before he decides to try to find "middle ground" on torture. It is a trap. If he continues to torture in any way or even tacitly agrees to allow it in certain circumstances, the intelligence community will make sure it is leaked. They want protection from both parties and there is no better way to do it than to implicate Obama. And the result of that will be to destroy his foreign policy.

If the man who represents the second chance this country's been given around the world to repudiate the horrors of the Bush years is revealed to have perpetuated the same horrors, his credibility and foreign policy will be in shambles. And there are many people buried in the intelligence and military establishments who would be happy to make sure that happens.

I'm going to be more blunt about this than Digby is. Quit imagining there's a way around this that doesn't make you the jerk. Quit trying to figure out how to do this without being accused of setting known terrorists free by sticky Republican pusbags who are trying to get work in the wake of Norm Coleman's office being Krazy Glued shut. There is no way out of this that doesn't make you the guy that has to say this:

We have had the debates over our justice system over 200 years. Those debates continue to an extent, but we have endlessly tried to perfect it so that they offer fair trials based on evidence without compromising civil liberties. There is simply no need to invent anything new. To the extent that "evidence" against detainees has been tainted because it was extracted through torture, that probably should have been considered before the torturing. Evidence obtained by torture is inadmissable in every civilized court in the world, and it would simply be unconstitutional to create a system that allowed it, not to mention distasteful.

So the new president had best just say that, get it over with, let the monkeys fling shit at each other until they run out of shit or their arms get tired, whichever comes first, and then get back to work. Enough already. There's no other way out of this that makes sense.

A.

'A Unified, Unifying, Pearl Harbor Sort of Purple American Fury'

My bookshelves were a mess.

I worked at a used bookstore right after college and they basically paid me half in money, and half in pages, so I left Madison, Wisconsin ten years ago with fourteen boxes of books, to marry a pack rat with ten boxes of his own. We lived first in a town with a limited library but with proximity to the great bookstores of the city, so we added to our collection accordingly. Friends wrote books, gave us books, lent us books, we lent books back, and when we last moved, six years ago, we had forty boxes. I shudder to think what will happen if we ever move again.

I do not organize books. I take them down and put them back and count on my increasingly faulty memory to tell me where I put them. I lend books, books are lent to me. I read history, mystery, novels, poetry, plays, I save newspapers and magazines and they all wind up piled on the shelves in our spare bedroom until the place looks like what arsonists dream about. The shelves were messy, and today, when our brunch plans were canceled by a friend's unfortunate cold, I decided to make myself useful, yank every single volume down, dust, straighten and organize.

In the process of which, I was going through all the magazines we saved after 9/11, or rather the magazines Mr. A saved; I was too busy writing then to read. And so I'd never really sat down with Time's 9/11 Tribute or Memorial or Whatever issue until this afternoon. Good God. I mean, good vanilla chai buttercream God. Here's Lance Morrow:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage. What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. … Elián … Chandra …) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, "Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn't he, about modern technology?").

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness—and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

Which is, incidentally, exactly what happened. Lots of people got good and righteously pissed off. Then about a third of them, unfortunately the third on TV, decided to have a little contest to see if anybody was insufficiently angry, and to use one or two people who weren't amped up enough about a war to smear the two-thirds of the country that wasn't still functionally insane two years later.

Anybody who said, "Erm, about Iraq, shouldn't we try not to blow it up if we can't un-blow it up afterward ..." was the equivalent of a dolphin-fucking vegan, or something, meanwhile we were torturing people in secret prisons and it was gauche to mention it. The New York Times politely withheld a story about how we were illegally wiretapping ourselves and Bush got re-elected, just so nobody was offended or "political," and Natalie Maines said fuck your war, except she didn't, but you have to wonder if after they bulldozed her CDs she wished she had. It was like that thing they put the bingo balls in, that goes around and around, and every number they pulled was worse than the one before.

Morrow goes on:

It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen." America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media, at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished.

I would like to ask Morrow if he is astonished today.

The mistake they made, the mistake all those people who so solemnly declared the age of triviality over made, is assuming the new solemnity wasn't a reality show all its own, wouldn't become the new Gary Condit topic, wouldn't get just as trivialized as everything else gets, when you put these fucking morons in charge of presenting it to us on TV every night. Assuming that everything that came with a chyron and a soundtrack wasn't the same, wouldn't start to sound the same after a while. And couldn't be treated the same, then, trivialized, until we'd believe anything we were told so long as it appeared on the program as scheduled.

The presidency of George W. Bush did indeed begin then. It ends next week, and in the interim? The intervening eight years? You sons of bitches. You motherfuckers, who did this to us. I wish I had something better than that to say. Maybe I will, later on, as we get closer to this being over, I think, but then I think about the people whose stories we don't even know, and I can't think it will be over, ever, ever be over.

I looked at the newspapers, the magazines, everything we saved from that week, as I was organizing my bookshelves. Magazines from the days after 9/11, from the start of the war. And I felt the fury Morrow was asking us in his column to find.

A.

Column: Shut Up, Alberto

You morally tone-deaf jackass:

Coburn said he ought to quit his job. I can see why Gonzales was so hurt. Why, it's just like he spent the past four years walking point in Fallujah and came home with fewer limbs than he left with. It's just like he saw all his friends die in pieces around him. It's just like he will spend the rest of his life haunted by the images that passed before his eyes.

It's just like he came home in a box covered with a flag, to a family that will never see his beloved face again. It's a wonder he can feed and dress himself each day, it really is. He's so upset by all this, he told the Wall Street Journal, that he's - gasp! - writing a book about the experience, about how horribly wronged he's been. Just so his children - of course it's about the children - know the truth of his story. That all those mean people who called their dad names were meanies.

Now look, I'm not denying it must have been difficult to sit there and listen while such luminaries as Coburn and Specter - two of the biggest tools in the country's biggest toolbox - said they'd lost confidence in your job performance. But really, to compare oneself to the war dead because of a bad day at work is simply rude. Did no one in his childhood ever recite to Gonzales that line about sticks and stones?

Perhaps one of the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers who are the living, breathing consequences of his and his president's actions, the true casualties of the war on terror, could clue him in, in between physical therapy sessions, of course.

Perhaps a member of the thousands of families of the dead could give Gonzales a quick lesson not just in humility, but in the kind of reality that recognizes there are casualties that come with being called incompetent in public, and casualties that come with headstones.

The consequences Gonzales has faced during and since his tenure are those faced by anyone who did a rotten job: criticism, difficulty finding other employment, people sort of moving away from you when you sit down in the food court lest you get your stench on them. It's not pleasant, sure, but a casualty of war?

If he's a casualty, Gonzales got off with something less than a scratch.

A.

Bush Who?

On the Bush Redemption Circuit:

Lowry: I just want to go back to Richard’s point about the no attacks on U.S. soil. U.S. soil is a big caveat. I mean, that is a key thing. And in our exit interview with President Bush, you’re just struck by the extent to which he was a war president. I mean, that’s what drove him most passionately. And when you talk to him about it, you feel as though he’s just sort of been left behind by the public and by history. And I think that’s because of the very success in preventing another attack on U.S. soil...

Oh, they are so fucking tiresome. It's the same as every other bit of nonsense that they spout, taking a deliberately nasty position and expecting some kind of kudos for it. "Nobody else is willing to say that 'Barack the Magic Negro' is just funny, and I know it's not popular but THERE I SAID IT BOW BEFORE MY COURAGE." They make me want to lay down.

And I think the rest of the country agrees. When Bush leaves office there may in fact be a short burst of affection for the chewy little creep, along the lines of how when Nixon died people struggled to find something nice to say for a minute before shrugging and going, "Eh, asshole." I don't think it's anything to be terribly upset about. The only reason the TownHall and Corner fucktards need to go on their BUSH REUNION TOUR 09 MOTHERFUCKERS trip is that fluffing up Bush gave them the strength of purpose they needed to make catty remarks about liberals without the excuse of The Clenis.

The rest of the country? Already thinks Obama is president, likes him just fine, and anyway does not depend on the opinions of those at the Corner for a reason to get up in the morning.

A.

Forget Jesus. What Would You Do?

'To the bitter end.'

I had this conversation once with my mother, about why "those people" can't stop killing each other. If someone killed me, I asked her, would you forgive him?

No, she said.

Never?

Never.

Why do they hate us? Why do they hate each other? Why do we hate each other? If someone killed you, would I forgive him? No, no, never, never. The point isn't who's right and who's wrong, the point isn't even in the neighborhood of who started it, either, so the arguments about provocation and response are pointless. What would you do, someone killed your children? Your friends? Your neighbors? Your family? What would you do to him? To his children? To his friends? To his neighbors? To his family? This is the oldest story there is, and it isn't a foreign one, no matter what the names on the news tell us. We have our blood feuds here, too. What would you do? If you say you know, you're a liar.

This piece argues Israel and Palestine can't solve this on their own. I'd go further, spin it out to its end: Nobody can solve this on their own. Don't look at what's happening there and say it's particular to there, don't stop yourself from considering it as if in the mirror. They aren't them. We aren't us. It's all one thing.

Be honest. I'll start. There are things about which I am not rational. There are matters on which you can argue until you are blue in the face with me and you will get nowhere because shut up, that's my family you're talking about, somebody who sat at my dinner table and fought my fight and fuck you, basically, you might be right but you might as well be talking to a wall. Those things I'm not rational about, it would take somebody physically shoving me backward, chaining me up, to get me to stop. It would take someone convincing me that I couldn't be the one convincing others, and that would be hard, but it would need to be done.

What would you do? The lure of history and family and loyalty, what would you if it was you? Would you forgive? No, my mother said, never. Multiply by thousands and you have a war. Multiply by millions and you have the human race, loving one's enemies be damned. We say there's a we and a they and an us and a them? How dare we? When we casually declare every day that you ruin the life of somebody I love and I'll spend the rest of my life ruining the rest of yours, is it any more civilized we do it with economics instead of with rockets? Are we really so different, over here?

I'm barely talking about Israel and Palestine, is that making sense? I'm talking about how we as Americans watch this shit on the evening news and think to ourselves, "Why can't those people stop killing each other?" Why don't they just nuke each other into oblivion? Why don't we let them? Hell, why don't we help? I'm talking about how we look at this, how we separate it.

How we say we know what we'd do.

How we lie.

A.