June 2005 Archives
I was so proud of Dick Durbin until yesterday He lasted a week without apologizing for saying something that needed to be said, if perhaps in a more delicate way. When I read what he said in the Congressional Record it didn’t read at all the way it was being played in the news and by many people in Washington. Here is exactly what he said,
“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.
What I think when I read this is that Durbin is condemning a broad strategy of torture handed down from the upper-reaches of the military and the administration (i.e. the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States). By using the broad category or Americans, Soviets and the generic regimes, it is obvious he meant to compare the actions of apples to apples (government to government) not apples to oranges (government to individual soldier).
It is sad that the opponents of honesty in Washington were able to manipulate the Senator’s words, with the full cooperation of the media, into such a hysterical farce.
For a while I have been trying to think of a word to describe President Bush’s public relations strategy. Nothing had been coming to me until I watching Finding Neverland with Baby a few days ago. I will now call the president’s approach the Peter Pan method — it consists mainly of making something true by believing it a lot and out loud. For example, despite continued dreadful conditions in Iraq, the insurgency is in it’s “last throws,” the present administration practices true “spending restraint,” and Bush doesn’t condone torture.
The president and most of Congress lives in fantasy world like the one that J.M. Barrie created for the four sons of his true love. Only this world is created for special interest groups, moral conservatives, big spending legislators, and neoconservatives. Here’s a good example, President Bush and Congress have restrained spending so much that it has only grown by 33% during his tenure.
Today, we know that compassionate conservatism is really just big government and changing the tone means his veto pen is buried under the ground. The last four years, total spending has risen 33 percent - a figure larger than Clinton’s two terms combined. Adjusted for inflation, one would have to go back to Lyndon Johnson to find a larger increase. Moreover, real discretionary spending increases in FY2002, FY2003, FY2004 and FY2005 are 4 of the 10 biggest annual increases in the last 40 years.
Someone needs to find that man a pen and a stamp ASAP. We can’t afford to live in Washington’s collective dreamland anymore. For so many reasons.
Yet more proof that capitalist pig and democrat (with a little dee) are no longer synonymous (if they ever were): users of MSN China’s communities feature are not permitted to use words that may be considered sensitive in that country. Words like democracy, freedom and human rights are prohibited.
[via Yahoo! News]
I just heard about an interesting story on the AP wire today that wonders
At a time when the U.S. is tightening its borders, how could a man toting a bloody chain saw be allowed to enter the country?
The answer is, easily. A man carrying “a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained by what appeared to be blood” was permitted to enter the US from Canada in April. The border guards confiscated his weapons but failed to detain him because “Being bizarre is not a reason to keep somebody out of this country…” Adding, “We are governed by laws and regulations, and he did not violate any regulations.” The man subsequently murdered two people, stabbing them to death and decapitating one victim, leaving his head in a pillow case under a kitchen table.
Do you think that if this guy hadn’t white he would still have gotten in to the US? Probably not. I can hear the civil liberties groups clashing with the border patrol now if this guy had been, say of Arab origin, and been stopped.
I have grown almost as tired of hear about Deep Throat as I have about the latest updates from the Machael Jackson trial. The former is 30 years gone and the latter is great giant waste of the media’s collective time. Nevertheless, I did read one thing about Deep Throat that I thought needed a bit of light shed on it. WSJ editorial page columnist Peggy Noonan, who is rather conservative, published a piece in which she attributes Pol Pott’s genocide in Cambodia and the collapse of American efforts in Vietnam as well as growing Soviet threats to the United States all to Mark Felt’s revelations about President Nixon. She also manages to fully implicate most media outlets, especially the Washington Post.
What Mr. Felt helped produce was a weakened president who was a serious president at a serious time. Nixon’s ruin led to a cascade of catastrophic events—the crude and humiliating abandonment of Vietnam and the Vietnamese, the rise of a monster named Pol Pot, and millions—millions—killed in his genocide. America lost confidence; the Soviet Union gained brazenness. What a terrible time. Is it terrible when an American president lies and surrounds himself by dirty tricksters? Yes, it is. How about the butchering of children in the South China Sea. Is that worse? Yes. Infinitely, unforgettably and forever.
Essentially Noonan is indicting Felt and the media for speaking out and being honest about an American presidency “out-of-control.” Nixon was too distracted by being investigated and impeached to see to his duties as president. If that is true then let’s see what follows in a more recent public trauma.
Bill Clinton spent the better part of three years being investigated and impeached by (mainly) republicans in Congress for an affair and a lack of moral values, essentially. In that time he
- failed magnificently to stop genocide in Rwanda (read Pol Pott 30 years ago).
- watched while al’Queda grew into a huge threat to the entire world yet did little to stop it (read Soviet Union 30 years ago).
- didn’t stop the Taliban in Afghanistan and terrorists in the Sudan (because when he tried to bomb terrorist training camps it was attributed to his desire to draw attention away form the Lewinsky scandal not a need to quell terrorist threats).
Do we now call everyone who participated in or supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton essentially un-American? Is it fair to blame every misstep during a period of trauma for the president on those who revealed it? Of course not, it’s absurd logic. Any president cannot be let off that easily and those who do the right thing (at the risk of implying Clinton’s impeachment was right) by the country cannot be blamed for everything that happens afterward. I mean, I learned about post hoc fallacies in 10th grade, Peggy.
It is all too easy to blame the media or the other side of the political isle for a president’s failures and mistakes, but at some point we just have to hold politicians accountable for what happens on their watch, unless we have legitimate and well-reasoned arguments to excuse them. In the case of Nixon and Clinton I can see no such evidence.
For as long as I can remember it has taken an act of Congress to get me up in the morning. When I was still living at home and my mom would come in to wake me up, she would flick the light on and off several times and half-shout, “Up and at ‘em, sleepy head.” It was not cute, and it didn’t work. I still slept up until the very last possible second, and often several minutes past. Mom is the early riser in the family, but that is going to change now. Starting yesterday I am starting a new regime. Every day I am going to get up at 6:30A and go to sleep at whatever time I get sleepy. No more of this staying awake until 1A and waking up at 8:45A (maybe).
I’ll be posting regular updates because I know you are all waiting with baited breath to find out how this new plan is going.
By the way, I got the idea to do this from a post on Steven Pavlina’s blog.
