October, 2007 archive
What Digby Said 0
This is another edition of What Digby Said.
The Second Silent Debate 0
Aren’t they the best kind? Harry Shearer:
Jon Swift Brings Conservative Clarity to the Torture Race 0
Check it out:
If we do win this war and Western Civilization survives, no doubt future generations will look back on this debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. “That’s not so bad at all,” they’ll say, “compared with what we do today.”
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
Yeah, I know it’s an oxymoron.
In this post, I linked to a post by Phillybits about an American soldier’s wife who faces deportation because, by God, she got married.
Check out the follow-up, in which Phillybits discusses the reaction he’s gotten from red-blooded American bigots commenters.
Now it’s time for the Maalox.
“We Don’t Torture,” Says He 0
Dan Froomkin searches for the truth (emphasis added, because it echoes what I’ve been saying). Follow the link, read the whole thing, and wonder what have we allowed to happen in our names.
How the United States became associated with torture is not just a matter of historical interest. And that’s all the more clear today, with the publication of a major New York Times story describing the Bush administration’s ongoing circumvention of national and international prohibitions against barbaric interrogation practices.
In other words: It continues.
Finding out what our government has been doing in our name, and openly debating our interrogation policies, should have been high on the national agenda since the disclosure of the shockingly inhumane treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Few other issues speak so clearly to how we see ourselves as a people — and how others see us.
But the White House’s non-denial denials, disingenuous euphemisms and oppressive secrecy have repeatedly stifled any genuine discourse. Bush shuts down discussion by declaring that “we don’t torture” — yet he won’t even say how he defines the term.
Shame on us all for tolerating this, this, this vile gaming.
SCHIP, Reprise 0
Eugene Robinson on the lies (emphasis added):
(snip)
Bush’s stated reasons for vetoing the SCHIP bill left even reliable congressional allies — such as Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Charles Grassley of Iowa, both of whom supported the legislation — sputtering in incomprehension. As for me, I don’t know what to call the president’s rationale but a pack of flat-out lies.
Gamers 1
It came to me this morning as I was cooking breakfast.
It’s a game.
They sit there in their easy chairs, punching buttons.
Avatars move about the screen. It doesn’t matter what happens to the avatars because, you see, they are inexhaustible. New ones leap up when old ones are gone.
The power pills give the gamer eternal life.
And the avatars, well, they have no personal lives. They exist only to be manipulated.
There need be no reason for the game.
The game exists for its own sake.
It exists only to give the gamers the thrill of control, the illusion of mastery.
And, as it is fantasy, rules and laws don’t mattter. The gamer can do whatever he wants, because, after all, it’s his game.
Any hack or cheat he can get away with is okay, because, you see, he is in charge and no one and nothing else matters–not lives, not laws, not right and wrong.
Here’s where they hang out.
My friends, we are being gamed every day.
Dishonor (Updated) 1
I could probably improve on the essay below, but it’s not worth the effort.
I’m so disgusted I could spit.
But I’m not surprised.
On second thought, I don’t feel disgusted.
I feel soiled.
Soiled by what these thugs have done in your name, in my name, in our name.
The New York Times stops just short of using the “T word,” preferring to call it “severe interrogations.” But let’s not beat around the bush: Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department secretly approved torture — even as it told the rest of the world it didn’t, and as Congress was passing laws to ban torture
In a long investigative piece, the Times digs up two classified opinions issued by the department under Gonzales’ reign to prove it.
The first, issued soon after Gonzales’ arrival as attorney general in 2005, for the first time provided “explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including headslapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.”
(That “simulated drowning,” by the way, is the technique known as waterboarding: “pouring water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.”)
Meanwhile, the department’s official stand to the public was the one it issued in 2004, calling torture “abhorrent.”
Later in 2005, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion declaring that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
If they didn’t violate that standard, they at least produced some of the tainted results torture often yields: confessions to crimes the confessor probably didn’t commit.
When the C.I.A. caught Khaid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators were “haunted by uncertainty.” They used a variety of “tough interrogation tactics” about 100 times over two weeks on the man known as K.S.M., and got all kinds of confessions. The problem is, intelligence officers say that “many of Mr. Mohammed’s statements proved exaggerated or false.”
Reacting to the Times story, a White House spokeswoman said: “Our intelligence agencies legally obtain information. This country does not torture.”
The only way they can say “This country does not torture” is that they call it something else. Like Ralph or Fred or Betty.
That’s it. “Let’s take them to the Ralph room.”
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
ASZ.
Late to the Party 1
But I can’t resist. It must have been some to that sublimal projection stuff:
Wide stance? Check.
In Minneapolis? Check.
Prison stripe-wearing? Check.
Starry eyed? Check.
As for the elephant humping the “2008”…
Are they going for a “Still screwing the country in 2008” theme, or is it a reference to hypocritical adulterers like David Vitter and just about the entire Republican presidential field?
Cooking Up Trouble 1
From El Reg:
The three hour lockdown in Soho saw a Hazardous Area Response Team Unit and firefighters wearing breathing apparatus engaging in a 24 style hunt for the source of a cloud of acrid smoke, The Times reports.
However, instead of trapping a bunch of wild-eyed ne’er-do-wells who hate us because we’re free, cops instead surrounded a huge cooking pot primed with 9lbs of smouldering dried chillies at the Thai Cottage Restaurant.
Sounds like my kind of place. Pass the habaneros.
SCHIP 0
I’ve stayed away from this issue because it makes my brain hurt, but, fortunately for me, Jon Swift has cut to the crux of the matter:
Support the Troops, Bushie Style 0
I’m not going to try to summarize.
Just go read it.
And think, think seriously, about why some folks, like the Mark Krikorian quoted in the post, are so full of hate.
They’re Doing It Again 0
Attacking the messenger. It’s sure sign that truth is not on their side. Dan Froomkin analyzes the evasions:
All Perino would say was that President Bush is seeking a diplomatic solution — precisely what the White House claimed as it set the Iraq war in motion in late 2002 and early 2003.
Hersh, who has a history of well-sourced, groundbreaking reporting (he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for his uncovering of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam), writes that Bush is seriously considering limited strikes against Iran, ostensibly in defense of American troops in Iraq. The real attraction of such an approach, Hersh writes, is that Bush and Cheney believe it could be readily sold to the American people.
Plans for broad bombing targeting Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities are being replaced with plans for a more limited attack, Hersh writes, after Bush and his aides “concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign.”
Criswell predicts that, when all is said and done, Hersh will have another Pulitzer and the rest of us will have another war.
Brendan Makes a Phone Call 1
Of course, Joe Biden, who actually is a fairly decent–and extremely smart–guy, has this problem of engaging his mouth before putting his brain in gear, leading to some of the memorable gaffes in modern American politics.
Hoof-in-mouth disease apparently extends to his staff, also.
Complicated by an inability to diagram a simple sentence.
“Put Down That Joni’s Butterfly and Slowly Step Back with Your Hands Where I Can See Them” 6
Phillybits has a screed on this decision by the Supreme Court declining to hear a case about the prohibition on selling sex toys in Alabama.
(It is, of course, a stupid, silly law, but, if the Alabama government does not want Alabamians to have more than the Reverend(struck per Opie) Dobson-decreed amount of fun while creating more Alabamians, I guess, judging by this ruling, that is their right.)
Back when I worked in Philadelphia, I used to enjoy visiting the Pleasure Chest on Rittenhouse Square (I don’t think it is there anymore–their website mentions boutiques only in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago).
It was particularly fun to visit in December, when persons (most usually of the female persuasion) were coming in on their lunch hours to buy gag gifts. As they walked in the store, it was apparent that they had never seen any place like it before.
Their expressions were precious.
Then, as the shock and surprise wore off, they would get really, really, really interested in the merchandise . . . .
Oh, and Joni’s Butterfly? Here (Warning–Adult Content).