"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Sunday, April 13, 2008

So now that we know that the U.S. is a torturing nation, does anyone actually care?
Posted by Jill | 6:08 PM
So now we know. We now know that the President of the United States, the Vice President, and the Secretary of State -- the one Republicans are slobbering over as a "Twofer Token" running mate for John McCain, personally authorized the use of torture as an interrogation technique, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and international law.

But does anyone care?

If we were living in a sane nation, this revelation would cause sufficient revulsion as to block anyone with an (R) after his or her name from ever holding national office ever again. This would be taken as a sign that the Republican Party had become so deranged and so corrupt and so dangerous that they cannot be trusted with national security.

The problem is that we do not live in a sane nation. Every day since 9/11/01, I've thought of the scene from I, Claudius in which Antonia, describing (I think) the debaucheries of Tiberius, says something similar to "I was born into a world of people and now I live in a pack of mad dogs." When the photos from Abu Ghraib came out, there was little to no revulsion outside of the blogosphere that covered it. It was chalked up to "a few bad apples" where the media deigned to cover the atrocities, but most Americans didn't care. As far as Americans were concerned, and as far as too many are still concerned, everyone in the Middle East who is swarthy of complexion is a terrorist and unworthy of any kind of basic humanity.

The Bush Administration has succeeded in creating a xenophobia so great and so all-encompassing that it has enabled them to get away with massive spying on Americans in the name of keeping them "safe" from these people. It has succeeded in dehumanizing the citizens of Iraq, Iran, and the other Muslim countries to the point that I really don't think Americans care about what it means that we now live in a country whose leaders condone and actively support torture.

For seven years we've been told that we must not use the "H" name or reference the "N" Party or anything involving the word "Reich" when talking about the Bush Administration. But what else can you think of when a sizable portion of our citizenry sees no problem with locking people up without trial and often without evidence and then torturing them? What is the difference, except one of degree, between what we have done to people in the name of the so-called War on Terror, and the gas chambers of Auschwitz?

And while we now know that the minutiae of torture techniques were meticulously discussed by the group of sociopaths who run this country, the media are trying to convince the American people that what matters is not that our country that once was a beacon of freedom and democracy for the entire world is a rogue nation, an outlaw nation, a nation not unlike those we fight, except that we have nukes and are led by people who are just itching to use them. They are trying to convince the American people that the biggest issue facing them is a presidential candidate who drinks orange juice instead of coffee, a candidate with the temerity to point out that Americans have been duped into looking down the socioeconomic ladder and scapegoating the weakest among them while the fatcats who Bush calls "my base" lift their wallets out of their back pockets while they aren't looking. They're trying to convince people that Barack Obama can't be a real American because he isn't a good bowler, that he's a secret Muslim, that he hates America, and whatever else they can pull out of their asses to smear him.

Democrats are fond of saying "The American people are too smart to believe...." -- and they've been wrong every time. Twenty years ago this year the father of the current president convinced over sixty percent of the American people that making the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in schools was a vitally important campaign issue that would influence their vote.

Four years ago the Republicans convinced the American people that a decorated war veteran was a coward and a guy who used family connections to get a cushy National Guard gig and couldn't even show up for that was a military hero.

Does anyone actually believe that we've progressed one iota since then?

Today Chris Matthews is in manlove with a guy who actually WAS tortured in a Hanoi prison -- but voted for torture and supports torture today.

Does anyone actually think that people this incurious and this unaware of what their country is supposed to stand for will care that we are torturing people?

Labels: ,

2 comments
Bookmark and Share
2 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
When everyting your parents took for granted is slowly taken away from you, you grab ahold of whatever is left. But the real victory is how the ones doing the taking have redirected the resentment and bitterness away from themselves.

mikefromtexas
4/14/08, 12:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I wouldn't knock packs of dogs, even mad ones. Most of the time, my dogs are more civilized and actually follow general social rules that protect them from getting hurt or hurting each other, better than most of the people I read about lately. And they'd *never* vote Republican. They tell me this all the time. ;)
4/14/08, 11:03 PM  
Post a Comment
<< Home