Calling All Wingnuts

For the last year, right wing radio, when they weren’t defending Tom Delay and Mark Foley, spent much of their time decrying illegal immigration. To hear them tell it, Al Qaeda has been invading us via Mexico (which is really laughable because Canada has a much larger and more radical Muslim population than Mexico does, and their border is every bit as porous. but we never hear calls for a 3500 mile northern border fence… funny, that…)

Anyway, you really need to read the first two parts of the incredibly disquieting series profiling Dick Cheney.

An aside: can Dick, please, please, please, be a disqualifying first name for any future executive office applicants?

Dammit, I didn’t want to go there…

Uhm, White House applicants?

The series, so far, really does lay out the case that Cheney believes he’s untouchable. I’m fairly certain he’s made the calculation that after the impeachment of Clinton, he can get away with just about anything because the Democrats aren’t about to take us down that “very, very damaging path” again. My money’s on him - every day that passes without an impeachment inquiry further proves the point…

So he’s taking advantage of this moment in history to consolidate maximum power in the office of the President. From authorizing torture, to creating a novel detainee status that provides cover for the circumvention of the Geneva Conventions, to refusing oversight, to reserving the prerogative to decide for himself which laws of the land apply to him…

Cheney’s clearly established himself as a man above the law.

So… Who better to solve the immigration problem? As I said to Lars, he can go down to the border, shoot a few Mex’cans in the face (and waterboard them afterward) and, in general, announce that he was gonna be in charge of dealing with the filthy fucking immigrant problem… With Dick snarling across the Southern border, I’m quite sure the immigration problem would solve itself pretty quickly…

Lars didn’t want to talk too much about that, so the conversation morphed to whether or not torture is OK. Sometimes, speaking slowly doesn’t help. Lars, and I suspect the vast majority of his mouth-breathing listeners, is either playing obtuse or he’s dumb as a developmentally disabled dung beetle.

The truth is that torture is always counter-productive.

He threw up the ticking time-bomb scenario (this one came with a mushroom cloud at no extra charge!) Of course, it doesn’t matter how immediate the threat is… it doesn’t matter what brand of torture you choose… the plain and simple fact is that if a craven and self-centered lying scumbag like John McCain can withstand torture, a terrorist willing to wear a suicide belt or plant a nuke is going to be equally able to gut it out. All it takes is a commitment to your cause; in McCain, he (at that time) did it (presumably) to preserve his honor, his family’s honor, his father’s pride and his nation’s gratitude. To think that a religious fanatic has any less strength is just stooopid. I mean, seriously… How many people have you heard tell you that they draw inspiration and strength from their God?

But that’s not really the point either. Suppose pulling fingernails could get your average terrorist to crack… What makes you think you’re gonna get the truth from them? Hell, if somebody invaded and destroyed my country, tried to impose an absolute failure of an economic regime and allowed the equivalent of a 9/11 to happen almost every day… well, they could torture me all they wanted; if I had info they needed, I’d simply lie. I’d send them on a wild goose chase… And there’s nothing anyone could do about it…

I didn’t get the chance to say it but the cost here is enormous. Every story of torture that gets out is repeated across the world. The world has seen an obstinate child of a man (our PResident) start a war unilaterally, crawl into a spider-hole of denial for 4 years, alienate his closest allies, tacitly condone torture and maintain an unlawful torture camp/prison that he refuses to close. It’s no wonder at all that by the end of the Bush administration we will see many thousands more terrorists than we had at its inception.

One last thing. After this call, I emailed Lars to tell him I’d be posting this and to thank him for making his endorsement of Abu Grahb perfectly clear. He emailed back saying that Abu Grahb wasn’t “official torture”; that it was a low-level crew run amok.

We do not know that to be true.

General Taguba, the flag officer assigned to the investigation, was expressly denied authority to investigate beyond the reserve MP unit at the bottom of the chain. He wasn’t allowed, for example, to ask what the military intelligence unit’s directions to the MP’s were. He wasn’t able to inquire as to what instructions General Miller - the General that Rumsfield transferred to Iraq from Guantameno - brought with him (though it did come out that the use of dogs was one of his fortes).

And, oh yeah, back to the beginning… He wasn’t able to ask if Cheney authorized torture.

Now, as a result of the Washington Post reporting, we know he did.

For him, that’s OK though… Impeachment is out of the question.