The Correction of the Day Concerns a Donald Who Was Worse Than Trump.

I just stumbled upon this correction to a July 14, 2005 Washington Post article about the use of Abu Ghraib tactics at Guanatamo before the low-level Abu Ghraib scapegoats for the widespread US torture program made the mistake of using a digital camera.

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE

A July 14 article said that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved the use of certain interrogation tactics against a detainee who the government believed was to be the "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Rumsfeld approved the use of aggressive tactics against Mohamed Qahtani, but he did not specifically approve attaching a leash to Qahtani's chains or forcing him to wear women's underwear on his head, tactics that were authorized and used by interrogators on the prisoner in late 2002.

Rumsfeld just said "underwear"; he didn't say "women's underwear."

Flip Flopping on Gitmo is the Mavericky® Thing to Do

Watch John McCain from 2008 give all the reasons why Guantanamo Bay's prison camp should close:

"So, I'm for closing Guantanamo Bay. It may be one of the nicest places in the world to live in, but it has become a symbol and we need to close Guantanamo." 

So why has this ex-Prisoner of War decided now, six years later, that Gitmo is A-OK with him?

I'm sure that this new John McCain would be perfectly OK with it if North Vietnam had decided in 1967 that the enemy combatants bombing their country could be held indefinitely without trial in an offshore extra-legal prison camp and grilled for information, wouldn't he? 

All the Way with BHO? (redux)

[I originally posted this on October 1, 2011, but I felt it might be time to trot it out again and place it at the top of the blog. I don't feel like I need to add any specific references to today's debate about unleashing American weaponry against Syria.]

As we get further and further in time from the Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the parts of his legacy that stand out seem more and more impressive: Medicare, Medicaid, the Voting Rights Acts of 1964, 1965, & 1968, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the Department of Transportation, Head Start, the Higher Education Act of 1965, Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1968 inspired by Ralph Nader, the Endangered Species Act of 1966, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and more. The list of programs falling under the umbrella of The Great Society read like a Teapublican's wish list of the main elements of America's 20th-Century liberal legacy that they are working so hard to roll back.

But I remember 1968, and Lyndon Baines Johnson for me was a symbol of everything that was old and illiberal and out of touch, bordering on evil. It was because of one issue that overshadowed EVERYTHING that he did on the domestic front: Vietnam. LBJ didn't start the war and he had wide bipartisan support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (416-0 in the House and only Morse and Gruening voting no in the Senate) that gave the green light for his escalations (think "Surges" in 21st-Century Newspeak), but it didn't take long for that police action in Southeast Asia to tear the country, and the Democratic Party, in half.

There are major differences between LBJ and BHO, beyond the fact that the Obama's Affordable Health Care Act doesn't hold a candle to the domestic achievments of Johnson. First of all, the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq will always be Bush's wars and the crimes of waterboarding and Abu Ghraib will always belong to the previous regime. But the biggest change between the war of my youth and these endless wars of the 21st century is the lack of a draft. If the privileged children of the suburbs planning on peaceful futures saw those futures usurped by their birthday drawing a low number in a draft lottery, then there would have been millions of young people in the street against these endless wars no matter who was living in the White House. There are some rumblings of direct action against the current corporate-controlled power structure which supports the current wars and leans from center-right Democrats to lunatic Teapublican fringe, but "Occupy Wall Street" is never going to motivate millions to hit the streets the way the Moratoriums and other mass marches against the Vietnam War.

He has almost closed down the illegal war on Iraq, but with Barack Obama's failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his willingness to impose the death penalty by remote control on American cititzens this week, his surge in Afghanistan, and his acceptance of the Patriot Act and other assumptions of the so-called "War on Terror", it may not be too long before responsibility for these awful foreign policies starts sticking to his administration. And until the military stops draining our national treasure, he won't have the resources to accomplish even one hundredth of what LBJ did domestically during his brief time in the White House.

The Quote of the Day about the double standards regarding religious extremists

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and I sent a letter to President Obama Friday, urging him to override the DoJ’s decision to try the Christmas Day Bomber in civilian court and designate him as an enemy combatant, so that he might still be interrogated in order to glean critical intelligence that might avert a future terrorist attack.

--Sen. John Cornyn
Texas GOP Vote blog, 24 January 2010

So if the Republican right-wing leadership and their teabagger shock troops were intellectually consistent in any way they'd want Scott Roeder waterboarded at Guantanamo to find other murderous Christianist terrorist cells, wouldn't they? I guess that, in certain world views, successfully shooting a doctor in a church is much less of a crime than unsuccessfully lighting your underpants on fire.

But there are many on the Right supporting the murderer of Dr. George Tiller during services at his Lutheran Church back in May. Just look at the comments on this Fox News article supporting Christianist extremism and murder. Even the judge is considering allowing the jury to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter if this admitted murderer can prove he held an "unreasonable but honest belief" that he had to use force to protect another. What if Islamist extremists were allowed to make the same argument in an open court? Imagine the volume of the squeals from Cornyn and the teabaggers.

Disassembling a Presidential Sentence

I couldn't believe the last sentence of this quote from today's "News" Conference when I heard it on NPR this afternoon, so I had to look it up in the transcript:

BUSH: I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation.
The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way.
It's just an absurd allegation.
In terms of, you know, the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees.
It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble, that means not tell the truth. [emphasis added]

No, it doesn't, George. It means "to take things apart". Dissemble, on the other hand, does have a meaning very close to "not tell the truth," only it's a little more subtle than that. Calling you a dissembler, for example, when discussing your intentions toward Iraq in the summer of 2002, would probably be closer to the truth than calling you a liar. Calling you a disassembler, on the other hand, would refer to your intentions toward Social Security and the United Nations and every other piece of FDR's legacy to this country.

But I can't help thinking that this easy emphasis on the presidential abuse of the English language, on his funny little "Bushisms", takes away from the heart of this ridiculous complaint about Amnesty International: "...they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention. . ." Does this mean that the torturers and other legal authorities are the only people Amnesty International should listen to? The victims should have no say? When Solzhenitsyn challeges Stalin and Khruschev, we should ignore him? There's the real Bushism in this sentence. Maybe we should start parsing, deconstructing, and disassembling, his language more carefully.

--True Blue Liberal

The real Captain Kangaroo would not approve of Guantanamo Kangaroo Courts (but this imposter would)

The New York Times > 7 March 2005>
"Bush Picks Critic of U.N. to Serve as Ambassador to It"

"Mr. Bolton is widely quoted as having said at a panel discussion in 1994 that 'if the U.N. secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.' And in 1998 he dismissed a vote at the United Nations as irrelevant, saying, 'this will simply provide further evidence to many why nothing more should be paid to the U.N. system.' "

Obviously, Bush the Younger has almost as much respect for the United Nations as he does for Social Security. Is it only a coincidence that both are keystones of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's liberal legacy? -- that both are rare instances of our attempts to make our country and our world more equitable and more peaceful?

This abrasive Captain Kangaroo lookalike may have the moustache, but he does not have the dear late Captain's heart, or soul. He'll undoubtedly be confirmed without debate by all the little yes men in Congress, but he is obviously no diplomat and he is NOT MY AMBASSADOR to the world.

Just wanted to get that on the record,
True Blue Liberal