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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Impotent Old Men
Posted by Jill | 5:07 AM
No, I'm not talking about the Vatican this time. I'm talking about the Three Stooges of Faux Toughness, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham, all of whom are every day that the story of the New York car bomb develops resembling more and more the old Al Franken/Tom Davis SNL sketch in which two politicians run ads trying to outdo each other on how tough on crime they'll be. It ends with one ad which has the candidate saying, "We'll kill 'em BEFORE they can commit a crime."

You have to wonder about guys like these three -- two Sore Losermen and a closet case -- and oh, hell, let's throw Dick Cheney in there too while we're at it, who have this hard-on for torture and for eviscerating due process and the Constitution in the name of "toughness" and "strength." Their "strength" is that of the schoolyard bully who still has to wear a diaper in bed at night. Where "strength" became equated with running around like a chicken with its head cut off, screaming "OMYGODTHETERRORISTSARECOMING WE'REALLGONNADIEOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!", I have no idea. But somewhere along the line, Republican politicians decided that there way hay to be made among residents of towns in flyover states that have a near-zero risk of actually being the target of a terrorist attack by keeping them in a constant state of fear. Lieberman is a particularly heinous example of this, and he's not even a Republican (though he might as well be). It's appalling that a Jewish politician whose sole concern in regard to terrorism often seems to be the safety of Israel, a country founded to assuage Western guilt about looking the other way while Hitler massacred Jews, would advocate summary stripping of citizenship and presumable deportation if the government doesn't like the crowd with which you hang out. Given the flexible government definition of terrorism in this country, which does not seem to include nurderers of women's health practitioners and white guys who want to overthrow the government, I'm not sure we can trust politicians to decide who should retain citizenship and who shouldn't. We are all Emma Goldman now.

That these guys are continuing to beat the waterboarding-and-torture drum, while Faisal Shahzad is singing like a canary even AFTER having his Miranda rights read, just shows that for them, the whole Bushian torture-and-military-tribunal thing isn't about our safety, it's about a bunch of impotent old men being able to feel that they can still get it up.

Once again, Rachel Maddow debunked the efficacy of this model, which may make John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham feel like Biggus Dickus, but is actually a less effective way of dealing with suspected and actual terrorists than the law enforcement model they deride:


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Anonymous Anonymous said...
Any time that I think that someone adult might be rising in the US political system, I remind myself that the Democrats ran Lieberman for VP in 2000 and Republicans ran McCain for President in 2008.
5/6/10, 12:15 PM  
Anonymous mandt said...
Is Joe Lieberman an alien mealy bug?
5/6/10, 8:07 PM  
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