looks like a mob boss, sounds like a mob boss

...and works for Bush.

I know its not like there isn't plenty to write about. I've been laying low to work on a new look and maybe break in a new voice or two but some shit passes all powers of forbearance.

Driving home today [its a car pool OK? and it was 10 degrees F here this morning] I caught a minute or two of NPR's coverage of an interview Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scolia gave the BBC. If I let this go without remark, however repetitive that may be, I have winked at my country's debauched new cruelty.

To get right to the point, I was disgusted to hear Scolia mincing words about torture. He wriggles around like any other Bush Leauger, finding that somehow, while torture is cruel and unusual punishment for those convicted of crimes it might be OK to "smack somebody in the face" to prevent an act of terror. Such emotionalogic from a Supreme court justice? He steals lines from that idiot we can't manage to impeach. Just think what he is saying:

• To say it is not OK to hurt people convicted of crimes but it might be OK to hurt people you suspect have information about an as yet uncommitted crime is ridiculous and uncivilized.
• His words presume the culpability of the torture victim when in fact we usually have the wrong guy. [Six are to go on trial for the events of September 11 2001...HOW many more than that have we tortured?]
• It is true that US laws and that tattered doormat under Bush's feet, the Constitution, only explicity protect US citizens from cruel and unusual punishment but what is the value of US law if the US rips up international laws like the Geneva Conventions. Isn't the idea "rule of law", not "rule of some laws some times and mostly whatever Prez sez".

I got home and found that Froomkin and others writing at Talking Points Memo were incensed. Listen to the interview if you pop up the sound player on the NPR page [and if you can stand it] because I cannot convey the tone, the glib and slippery equanimity with which the man is excusing torture. He is horrific in that ho-hum way we often see depicted as a trait of third reich functionaries. You should shudder to think this creature is one of nine who has final say over what the US government can get away with when, in the soul discretion of its executive and the intelligence operatives it employs, it thinks it wants a certain answer from a certain prisoner.

I understand the emotional appeal: what do you do if you are desperate to prevent death and destruction? What Scolia does not seem to understand is that desperation is not a fit policy, not a routine situation and torture condoned from the top and from the outset makes us as evil a nation as the evils we claim to be fighting: We Lose! [ or is this more of those "values" that got Bush elected coming to the fore?]
NOW DO YOU UNDERSTAND why this election is so important? 8 years of Obama, for instance, and we can hope to see a change in the balance of the court to muzzle these turd-hearted Bush appointees.

[photo credits to BBC]

Creeping toward the exit

...patting myself on the back as I go.
I have spent enough time reading and getting upset and posting and finally blowing hours I should spend working just to do a particular kind of blogging. Not Jewish, not Buddhist, not Humanist, not wise, not even witty, just political outrage. The time has run out, and not been well spent. I bore even myself. This post is not my last but I hope it is the end of the perfunctory, egotistical repeating myself and others. I don't have time to write this...something must be boiling over somewhere in my so called life.

I will plead that it is easy to become obsessed. The rewards however are scant. I can, with no better sources than a few on-line newspaper articles, develop a slight sense for what crap should hit the fan next, or at least, writing two million characters of indignant posting, a few sentences are bound to match a footnote or a headline somewhere. Yesterday I protested we should be told what deals Cheney cut with the oil companies. Today TPM peels back the wraps on those old meetings. A few weeks ago I sarcastically suggested we give Bush a third term. The idea is so nauseating, MoveOn, coincidentally, used it in an email plea last week that began:

Dear MoveOn member,

What would a third Bush term look like? Endless war in Iraq, continued torture and spying, more ultra-conservative judges, more and more people without health care, and so on...it'd be awful.

But that's impossible, right? Well, maybe not...

What does it mean that my anger becomes tuned to the anger of the reality based? What have I sunk to? What have we all sunk to? Am I so different from or any less formulaic than a Limbaugh or a Coulter? Did my hit counter's success not hang upon the outrageousness of my topic vis-a-vis our liberal values more than upon its significance to any wider audience or even its accuracy? Judgments of accuracy may be a matter of perception to some extent but I call myself a liberal because I found more accuracy on that side. What have we given up in order to get a little attention? Are we damned from the start when we decide that to slant things a bit is justified if being ignored is the alternative? Must hyperbole and emphasis of only the grotesque be adopted if those are the techniques of the other camp? I do confess I hate those who push corrupting and degrading half truths but why would that make their methods worth emulating?

For example, look up some puddle of poo like this presumably real plea for a third Bush term. Easy to find with google. Easier to throw rocks at. So easy I get tired of it. This could become habit forming but it is not respectable blogging. Enough.

I have heard you can dislocate your arm trying to pat yourself on the back but I am good at it. There is a callus back there big enough to make me look like Dumas' bell ringer. But the hunchback did not let his soul become grotesque.

Let's give Bush a 3rd term!

I am about half serious here. Just think of how it would play out...

If it doesn't kill us all, Cheney and his chimp are not only their own worst enemies but supply endless proof of the toxic consequences that grow from the polluted "principles" and vacuous "values" hacked up from conservative stink tanks over the last two decades. Leave these cowards and corrupters no room to claim they were stabbed in the back. That would indulge one of their favorite political passion plays involving their martyrhood which is a recruiting tool of savage effectiveness. Don't let them see even the appearance of an excuse that they were held back from fully implementing their "reforms". Leave the "reformers" now in jail where they are. But, since one of the things struck and killed by the triumph of conservative will is the US Constitution, wink away the 22nd amendment and insist that the blame duck serve his nation as farsightedly as ever, insist that his looting lieutenants ignore reality until the last soldier dies or deserts and the Chinese foreclose on our national debt.

The 25% who still suck up to him and his coterie of fascists might be reduced to 10% in another three years. There will always be some small percentage who will go down into the bunker with Cheney at the end, bearing cans of gasoline for their gotterdammerung bonfire. That remnant we can kick to the curb and get on with the impeachments. The die-hard dimwit conservatives of Rove's patchwork coalitions will be slow to learn what a majority of us have been appalled at for the last 6 years. But it may be worth the pain of more deaths in Iraq and more Katrina-sized domestic neglect to open the eyes of an undeniable majority, larger than the 51% who "lost" the election in 2000. It may be useful to have a yet deeper and even more dramatic divide between the small wealthy class, who might think Bush an idiot but a very useful idiot, and the rest of us who earn our shrinking dollars. The rest of us may be ready to dine on the one percent who will be able to actually afford health care in a third Bush term. Change will finally flow from every vein rather than be coaxed by wily political stratagems. We must do better than having only the Thom Hartmann's and a few economists join the hardy liberals in wonder at a tapped out nation with its staggering no-growth economy in the shadow of a record Dow Jones average. If we just leave the corpse of neoconservative administration to hang right where it its lines to heaven have tangled around its neck and leave it there long enough, the stink will be undeniable and inescapable.

It is a shame. Many of us wised up long ago or were never fooled at all but not enough of us. It will be a much healthier country when a solid 80% or more of us repudiate the warmongering and the privatizing: the dumbass foot dragging congress will be gone and the obstructions to peace, the sabotage of domestic infrastructure and education can be steamrolled. The whiny neurotics like Jonah Goldberg who have made a living for the last 20 years scripting and enabling our nascent tepid American fascism will have the truth shouted in their faces even by children: a majority of the people who want their taxes spent for the common good is NOT fascism.

Nothing like a long painful hangover to give you a long term aversion to drinking...or picking a president primarily because you thought he'd be more the more fun guy with whom to share a drink.

---

Note from my shrink: Greensmile, you did not have enough time to do any proper blogging or gather corroborating links this week but events and news have wrought their usual toll on your equanimity. Even without benefit of any particular factual news items or insight, it will do you good to rant as though fresh and specific outrages burn you up. What are blogs for anyway?