| Sorry for the long silence. I went on a spontaneous trip with the kids who had spring break, to visit my folks. Life happened. I wrote little.
I did manage to catch the local Tea Bagging party in downtown Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There were a couple dozen protesters with the expected anti-tax signs. There were more people at these things than I had expected, tho' still shy, nation-wide, of a single day of anti-war marches in a single day in New York or San Francisco in the days before the invasion of Iraq. I was also surprised at the number of people who appeared to be equally disparaging of the GOP at these things. Yes, there's lots of anger over the bailouts and the government spending, but Obama and the Democrats aren't necessarily the focus of the ire, which probably worried the folks who put on this campaign a little. It's pretty obvious the protests were an attempt by the talk show/Fox News crowd to place themselves firmly at the center of the next wave of Republican politics.
To be fair, I expected to be disappointed by the protesters' arguments, and I was. A whole lot of people were complaining about taxes -- but Obama's budget will give most of 'em a cut. Did they know? Or were they out serving their economic betters' interests?
I am, of course, speechless at the recent revlations of the Bush administration's legal work on behalf of torture and the craven apologists that defended what happened. Andrew Sullivan, who's been decrying the US use of torture for ages, was the man to go to when the memos were released. There's a lot to digest, even though a lot of these techniques were known and the Bush administration's involvement understood. Here's a little something:
The torture techniques were all the more brutal in order to push back against the reputation of the US even in the minds of Qaeda or alleged Qaeda members. What Mukasey and Hayden are arguing for today is a scheme whereby, in secret, the US government credibly allows captives to believe they are in an endless, bottomless pit of extra-legal terror. This is the state of mind they are trying to construct by torture. That's the point of the sensory deprivation, the disappearances, the sequestering from the Red Cross, the endless solitary confinement, the IRFing, the hoods, the nudity, and all the other sadism. It is precisely to persuade the barbarians that we are as bad as they are and have no limits and no qualms in doing to them whatever we want.
Looked at from a distance, the Bush administration wanted to do two things at once: to declare to the world that freedom is on the march, and human rights are coming to the world with American help, while simultaneously declaring to captives that the US has no interest in the law, human rights, accountability, transparency or humanity. They wanted to give hope to all the oppressed of the planet, while surgically banishing all hope from the prisoners they captured and tortured. And the only way they could pull this off is by the total secrecy they constructed and defended. So we had a public government respectful of the rule of law, and a secret government whose main goal was persuading terror suspects that there was no rule of law at all. It is hard to convey just how dangerous this was and is.
Moreover, this was done by the professional classes in this society. It was not done by Lynndie England or some night-shift sadists at Abu Ghraib. According to these documents, almost nothing that was done at Abu Ghraib was outside the limits agreed to by Bush - and much of what was done at Abu Ghraib was mild in comparison. So when the president acted "shocked" at what we all saw, and said it was not America, he was also authorizing far worse in secret - and systematizing it long after Abu Ghraib was over. He was either therefore a fantastic liar on one of the gravest matters imaginable or so psychologically compartmentalized and prone to rigid denial of reality and so unversed in history, law and morality that he had no reason being president.
If you want to know how democracies die, read these memos. Read how gifted professionals in the CIA were able to convince experienced doctors that what they were doing was ethical and legal. Read how American psychologists were able to find justifications for the imposition of psychological torture, and were able to analyze its effects without ever stopping and asking: what on earth are we doing?
Sort of puts the manufactured hysteria over imaginary tax oppression in perspective, doesn't it? |
