Sarah Palin went to a Hong Kong and bashed the president. When the Dixie Chicks did this to W, they got death threats and were blacklisted from radio stations and concert venues. The wingnut bloviators went ballistic (How dare she criticize the commander-in-chief at at time of war?) Don't hold your breath waiting for the right-wing commenters to slam their very own centerfold.
The horror the Bush administration perpetrated continues to become clearer and clearer. The savage attacks on liberty, decency and the rule of law, that the Obama administration is now a party to.
Watch this interview with Lakhdar Boumediene, a former humanitarian aids worker, then hold your hand over your heart and try to remain proud of a country that would keep an innocent man in a cage for seven years, torture him, then release him and tell him he cannot be compensated for this atrocity because it would violate state secrets.
Be aware that Creepy Joe™ Lieberman voted to keep men like Boumediene behind bars, without cause, for as long as we damned-well felt terrorized. Be aware that the Obama administration favors a policy of preventive detention (I need someone with a shred of credibility to explain to me how the Constitutionalist Obama feels this is justified). Be aware that we used to be able to say, "land of the brave and free," without a trace of irony in our voices.
With some smug satisfaction George Bush must be clearing brush in Crawford and thinking, "Shit, I did it. I plunged America into a war that will never end."
Of course, I'm not a mind reader. And even if I were, I'd be able to polish off Bush's volume in under an hour. And disturbing reading it would be.
But isn't Obama's recent backsliding on Abu Ghraib photos, military commissions and expansion of a war in Afghanistan a symptom of a trap that was laid for him, for us, by the manipulative warmongers of the Bush administration?
If you haven't read Chris Hedges, War is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, you should. If you don't have the time to plow through 230 harrowing pages, then spend ten minutes reading this essay.
Of necessity. For our country, the world, our sanity, our society we need to extricate ourselves from the immoral, unnecessary wars foisted upon us by the Bush administration. Obama is a good and thoughtful man with his ankle in a bear trap. He needs to ignore the political pain and move us to a standing of peace as soon as is possible.
Both Glenn Greenwald and Dan Froomkin have taken the Obama administration to task for Obama's sudden reversal about releasing further photos taken at Abu Ghraib.
Greenwald admits to puzzlement over a public which seems to agree that our government should not release evidence of its own wrongdoings. It's what the Bush administration did, again and again. To see the Obama administration walk this path is frustrating, angering and impossible to understand.
It's pretty clear. Either we tortured, or we didn't. And the answer to that question, inevitably seems to be, "we tortured."
And if we tortured, then we broke laws, we allowed immoral, unethical behavior in our names, and the people who put us in this postion need to be revealed, at all levels, and brought to justice so it never happens again.
As a torturing country we are in the company of Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Idi Amin's Uganda, Saddam Hussein's Iran, Marcos Phillipines.
Each and every one of us needs to stare hard at what our leaders ordered the men and women of the military to do. Then, only after we've seen every photograph, should we decide whether men like Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush belong in a cell.
The three caballeros, McCain, Lieberman and Graham have sent a love note to President O, asking him to follow his own advice in "looking forward to solutions, not backward to recriminations."
It seems they don't want anyone prosecuted as a torturer, even torturers.
Shame on McCain, who for good reason, has come out against torture in the past. Lieberman, who might consider it torture if he had to walk twenty paces with a pebble in his shoe, or miss a meal, doesn't have the perspective that McCain has. Graham, he's from South Carolina.
Seems the unholy trio is afraid of "a deeply chilling effect on the ability of lawyers in any administration to provide their client -- the U.S. Government -- with their best legal advice."
In other words, it would scare lawyers shitless to tell their government bosses that it was okay to commit a crime.
Barack Obama is learning, perhaps sooner than he expected, that Connecticut Senator Creepy Joe™ Lieberman is not a man to be trusted.
Obama showed his own good graces when the graceless Lieberman slandered him from Iowa to Minneapolis, and President Obama still stood up for the little stinker.
I saw a bit of Barack Obama's live webcast virtual town hall (a rebroadcast doesn't yet seem to be available) on the web today, and I was basically impressed. We have a smart, engaging leader who is determined to use the communications tools at hand to get connected with constituents, of which he doesn't seem to be afraid. George Bush always gave the impression that he was waiting for someone to throw a shoe at him.
What's with the stupid hand-held stick mic the president carried around. This microphone made Obama seem like a Maury Povich or Jerry Springer wanna be. There are very elegant, functional lavalier (clip on lapel) mics that would have let him wander both hands free, instead on taking the locked crooked elbow look of some cheesy talk-show host.
More egregious was the joking dismissal of a web question voted to be one of the top vote getters on the White House website. The White House compiled thousands of questions, narrowed them down, then let web visitors vote on those they wanted to be addressed. More than three and a half million visitors cast votes.
So when Obama said he needed to at least acknowledge a question that rose to the top of the list, it was a shame that he dismissed it with a laugh. The question concerned wheter the president thought the legalization of marijuana would help the budget by reducing law enforcement costs, and by opening a lucrative, taxable trade.
Obama laughed and said that he didn't know what the question said about web users, but that no, he didn't feel the legalization of marijuana would help the economy.
Not only did he insult the very people who made the webcast town meeting successful, he dismissed out of hand, an idea whose time has come.
Sorry Barack, but you tripped twice on that question.
As Keith Olbermann reported last night on Countdown, the Obama administration is strangely continuing some of the Bush administration's worst decisions - rendition of suspected "terrorists" to foreign sites for interrogation, imprisonment of "enemy combatants" without the right to appeal the imprisonment, and the continuation claim of executive privilege to protect emails sent by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
What gives? This is neither openness, change or hope.
Barack Obama is proving to be something of a catalyst. On his campaign trail he made a star out of a fibbing, non-plumber who called himself Joe the Plumber.
Today, in a speech in Fort Myers Florida, where the housing market has dropped so precipitously as to make it frightening, he encountered another young man, Julio Osegueda, who made the most of his moment in the spotlight.
I can't see how someone who seems to understand the need for the United States to adhere to the letter of the law can allow a policy which allows secret U.S. agencies to kidnap people from the streets, anywhere in the world, and throw them into jails without the benefits or personal freedoms, or guaranteed representation and due process.
It's a shameful sin of omission in Obama's current attempts to resurrect the reputation of America, and restore the rights we are all guaranteed by the Constitution.
An Obama spokesman said: "Obviously you need to preserve some tools – you still have to go after the bad guys."
Sorry, but I'm not willing to allow any administration to define who the bad guy is, if the bad guy doesn't have the right to declare that a mistake may have been made.
Helen is understandably fired up with anonymous shit flingers who accuse her of being too positive about the inauguration of Barack Obama. So she invites them to buss her posterior.
I have to keep reminding myself to remain skeptical, but Barack Obama keeps making me smile.
Yesterday he continued his repudiation of Bush administration policies regarding secrecy, influence, communications and openness. He took a stand against lobbying. He told his staff that they were working for you and me, and not for themselves. He declared that he was willing to talk to Iran and other enemy governments, without preconditions. And the day before he put a hold on military tribunals
"Notice anything about the front page," Susan Campbell asked when visiting my radio show this morning.
"I did," I answered.
In this morning's print edition of the Courant the logotype crawled from its vertical position along the left gutter, and pulled its way horizontal above the half-page photo of Barack and Michelle Obama.
Is this a readjustment that layout editors hope will be disguised in our inaugural-distracted states, after which we will forget that we ever mistook the front page for an overly-art-directed "Living" section.
Or, is it merely an accommodation for that very same photo, and tomorrow we will be disappointed to find that the logotype has slid sideways again.
BTW, in searching for newsphotos from the Netherlands yesterday, I noticed that at least a half dozen Dutch papers bore the "Courant" name. Considering our city's Dutch heritage my lifelong curiosity about that spelling was suddenly sated.
More than once in these past few months I've heard the financiers who have torn our economy asunder for their own personal gain called "terrorists." And rightfully so.
Our nation, the world, our way of life is teetering on the brink so that these guys could get facials before their board meetings, and so their families could fly to Courchevel for a skiing vacation.
Undermining our government by destroying its financial base (isn't that what they've done), is treason.
I've heard others who have suggested, seriously, that the crimes against the Constitution by Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and David Addington, among others, could also be called treason.
So what is Barack Obama suggesting the country do about the treasonists and terrorists under our noses?
"We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law." Obama said. "But my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward."
And while he plans to close Guantanamo, he's willing to somehow bend the rules laid out in the Constitution to hold, indefinitely, prisoners who have been accused of doing bad, or who have been tortured to admit they have done so:
"It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize," the President-elect explained. "Part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it's true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up."
Glenn Greenwald doesn't see this as particularly promising, and I have to agree.
Obama today rather clearly stated that he will not close Guantanamo in the first 100 days of his presidency. He recited the standard Jack Goldsmith/Brookings Institution condescending excuse that closing Guantanamo is "more difficult than people realize." Specifically, Obama argued, we cannot release detainees whom we're unable to convict in a court of law because the evidence against them is "tainted" as a result of our having tortured them, and therefore need some new system -- most likely a so-called new "national security court" -- that "relaxes" due process safeguards so that we can continue to imprison people indefinitely even though we're unable to obtain an actual conviction in an actual court of law.
Worst of all, Obama (in response to Stephanopoulos' asking him about the number one highest-voted question on Change.gov, first submitted by Bob Fertik) all but said that he does not want to pursue prosecutions for high-level lawbreakers in the Bush administration, twice repeating the standard Beltway mantra that "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" and "my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing." Obama didn't categorically rule out prosecutions -- he paid passing lip service to the pretty idea that "nobody is above the law," implied Eric Holder would have some role in making these decisions, and said "we're going to be looking at past practices" -- but he clearly intended to convey his emphatic view that he opposes "past-looking" investigations. In the U.S., high political officials aren't investigated, let alone held accountable, for lawbreaking, and that is rather clearly something Obama has no intention of changing.
We've only got one Constitution, and nowhere does it allow us to lock a prisoner up and throw away the key when we don't have legitimate proof of guilt.
(An extraordinary rendition flight. Note the flag.)
Helen is understandably fired up with anonymous shit flingers who accuse her of being too positive about the inauguration of Barack Obama. So she invites them to buss her posterior.
