I've joked for years that when I run for benevolent dictatorship, my campaign slogan will be "Close enough for government work."
Now, in all seriousness, one that I would much,
much prefer to see is simply "Big shoulders." Because that, if nothing else, is what we've lost in the six-plus years since 9/11.
Seriously, now: Are we (meaning America) such a bunch of nancies that a double-handful of dogma-drunk wankers can undermine eight hundred-plus years of the notion that no one is above the law?
Dearest pointed to me to this collection of commentaries on torture, titled
"No torture. No exceptions.", with such bright lights as Jimmy Carter, Leon Panetta, Chris Dodd and more. But it was Wesley Clark who--so far as I'm concerned from a sampling--abso-friggin-lutely nailed it:
Something in the American soul has always demanded fair treatment and respect for the individual. Perhaps it was our flight from the repression of the Old World and the practices of European monarchy. We were different. We expressed it in our Declaration of Independence. We captured it in our adaptation of English common law, in our trials by juries of peers, and in our spirit of justice. We were a better nation for it, more respected, more influential, and more secure. Certainly, we committed historical wrongs that today we wish we could set right, but overall we advanced, step by step, striving to live the values we professed.
Until now. Until weak, fearful leaders had so little belief in our values and principles that they gave away our birthright and proud claim in order to follow a shadowy emulation of the very dictatorships and tyrannies we had struggled against. For shame, America, that we aren't brave enough and strong enough to live our values.
Lest it be lost on my gentle reader, allow me to reiterate the key words: "...weak, fearful leaders had so little belief in our values and principles that they gave away our birthright and proud claim in order to follow a shadowy emulation of the very dictatorships and tyrannies we had struggled against."
In the President's case, weak enough to keep reading a children's book with a deer-in-the-headlights look during the crucial minutes when he could have been scrambling fighters into the air and ordering that all planes that could not answer the friend-or-foe signal be shot from the sky. In the instance of the Vice President, weak enough to scurry off to his secret hideaway--as if the nation could not risk the loss of his *cough* "leadership" *cough*. Very telling reactions from both. Reactions which, by themselves, should have had both on the curb in January of 2005.
But no.
General Clark may have been too polite to mention this, but I'm not. The shame belongs in equal measure to you, reader, if you re-elected this tribe of bullies--meaning cowards--in 2004. Shame too for those who still parrot the PRAVDA that killing more towel-wearing brown people will prevent the next attack. Shame particularly to those who think that there is a wall between what can be done to a foreigner and what can eventually be done to her or him, should s/he fall afoul of what the government considers right-thinking. A "nanny state" indeed, except funny how it's not liberals who are relieving you of the burden of those pesky civil and human rights, now are they? It's not the peacemongers who are Osama's best recruiters and who are--in the ill-defined front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan--teaching Jihadists how to fight Americans.
You @$S#@+$ have, in short, sold the soul of America for precisely nothing. A loss, in the long run.
And it's not simply a crime of gutlessness, it's a crime of pure stupidity.
More people die in forty days on the roads and highways of America than perished on 9/11. Yet you twits still climb into your cars every morning without blinking. Probably into an SUV with an alarming rollover rate and anti-lock breaks that you wouldn't know how to use anyway. In any case, you're too busy alternating between figuring out your cellphone and sucking down a double mochaccino to pay attention to what's actually going on around you.
In other words, the American Right in the proverbial nutshell--the perfect storm of arrogance and willful stupidity.
Why? Because you're idiots that would rather be spoonfed the illusion of "control" and "safety" than (gasp!) assume the responsibility for your own well-being. Which would be all well and good if you were only in danger of wrapping your complacent @$$ around a lightpole. But you've managed to drag me along for the ride. And that I don't appreciate.
I want out of this road-trip. If that means hitching a ride to another country, that's fine. Because if Congress can't scrape together the cajones to say "No" to torture, to stand up to that spoiled rich kid and his twisted old puppet-master, well, then, #$%^&* it. I'm just gonna hafta find me a place that does still have some stones. Not eyeball-deep in mouth-breathing sissies who are willing to not only stand by, but actually cheer while our government brutalizes other human beings.
Bluntly put, if we can't give a fair trial to Lucifer himself, than our Sociopath-in-Chief might as well continue to wipe his @$$ with the U.S. Constitution, just as he's done for seven years. And the pinheads who voted him back into office deserve even worse.
