independent alternatives to the malestream media
Latest poll on Torture President’s standing with the ‘murkan people:
Why the hell are pollsters so frigging polite? Here are some words I wish they’d asked people to rate Dubya on:
And those are just the polite ones.
Leon E. Panetta says that “no president can conduct a war without the support of the American people and without the support of the Congress. That’s the lesson of history.”
Bush says, “Watch me”:
Bush struck a defiant note in an interview to be televised tomorrow by CBS on 60 Minutes. Asked if he believes he has the authority to send additional troops to Iraq no matter what Congress wants to do, Bush said: “I think I’ve got - in this situation, I do, yeah. And I fully understand they will … they could try to stop me from doing it, but I’ve made my decision, and we’re going forward.”
I think we need to consider the possibility that Bush actually wants to be impeached. It’s possible that the man’s inexorable drive to fail will not let him rest until he has achieved the nadir of presidential fortunes. That means not just impeachment — it’s been done, twice now — but impeachment with a guilty verdict. Given Bush’s record in office, it’s likely that he’s had his eye on this goal for some time.
But that probably won’t be enough to satisfy him, either; if there’s anything this president is known for, it’s a completely over-the-top approach to failure. Most aspirants to presidential disaster would be happy with just a handful of Bush’s achievements — say, bankrupting the treasury and destroying America’s standing in the world and trashing the Bill of Rights. But on top of that we’ve got illegal invasions, war crimes, torture, spying on citizens, signing statements, graft, corruption, environmental destruction, reversals on women’s rights, blocks on scientific and medical progress, the Katrina clusterfuck, and on and on and on.
This is why I think it’s almost a given that Bush is going to start a nuclear war. It would be the perfect capper to his administration and give him a permanent lock on Worst President Ever. In fact, future linguists will have to come up with new terms to describe the Bush presidency: “worst” just won’t be enough. Entire new classes of nouns and adjectives will have to be devised just to express the maximum worstfullness of All Things Bush. That could actually be a nice activity for us while we’re living in the underground caves eating canned food and watching our skin fall off.
“I’m George Bush, and the fact that I’m making this speech from the White House Library means that everything will be different now in Iraq. But I’m still a homicidal maniac.”
Most bizarre moment in the speech: “To step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear that country apart and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale.'’
Okay, George? That train left the station about four years ago, when you invaded the fucking country. Remember?
Collapse of Iraqi government? Check!
Country torn apart? Check!
Mass killings on an unimaginable scale? Check!
Bush says failure in Iraq would be “a disaster” for the United States, cleverly omitting to mention that we’ve already failed in Iraq; that Iraq is already a disaster for us, for them, for the entire world; that Bush’s obscene and criminal invasion of that country is one of the most disastrous missteps in the history of American foreign policy.
But 20,000 more soliders will turn it all around he says, blah blah, crucial moment, blah blah, al-Maliki, blah blah, I believe, blah blah.
What the fuck is going on here? Seriously, what is the real reason for this absurd escalation? Why does Torture President insist on sending more soldiers to Iraq when even his own generals think it’s a shit-for-brains move? Dan Froomkin explains:
[A]s Abramowitz, Wright and Ricks point out: “In going for more troops, Bush is picking an option that seems to have little favor beyond the White House and a handful of hawks on Capitol Hill and in think tanks who have been promoting the idea almost since the time of the invasion.”
So how did it come to pass? Well, during White House deliberations, “How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme.
“As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton.”
And: “In the end, the White House favored the idea of more troops as one visible and dramatic step the administration could take.”
Do you suppose any of that will make it into the official condolence letters to the families of the soldiers who will die as a result of this “visible and dramatic” political maneuver? Sorry your husband was killed in action. Good news, though: he died so the President could look “distinctive” from the Iraq Study Group. A grateful nation thanks you.
Here’s your drinking game for the evening: count how many times Torture President and the bobble-head pundits use the word “surge” to describe the escalation of the war in Iraq.
It’s not a surge. It’s an escalation.
From Eric Alterman at the Center for American Progress:
As Vali Nasr wrote late last month at TPMCafe—making a point few have made in the mainstream press—the new troops being sent to Iraq aren’t meant to prop up the Malaki government or provide more security, but rather as a greater offensive force. “New troops will be in Iraq not to police the streets and hold the line against the creeping violence,” he said, “but to expand the war by taking on the Shia militias. This is an escalation strategy.”
But don’t tell that to CNN’s talking heads. They continue to cast the move in purely partisan terms. Correspondent Elaine Quijano declared on Monday that not only are Democrats seemingly the only opposition to the “surge” plan, but they’re “seeking to cast a surge as an escalation of the unpopular Iraq war.”
No, actually it’s the Republicans who are seeking to cast the escalation as a surge.
Truth is, the Democrats don’t need to “seek” to cast the escalation as anything other than reality shows it to be—namely, a ramping up of a war that, according to every major opinion poll, long ago lost both the confidence and support of the vast majority of Americans.
Media Matters noted earlier this week that while Quijano made it sound like Democrats were trying to inject politics into the heightening of the war, CNN’s own Bill Schneider noted that the term “surge” is political in its own right. “Why ‘surge’? Why not ‘escalate’?” Schneider asked. “Because ‘surge’ sounds temporary. Waves surge and decline. ‘Escalation’ sounds long-term.”
“Surge” also sounds a lot sexier. As Stephen Colbert explains: “‘Surge’ is masculine. It’s aggressive. Like, ‘he tore off her space bodice and surged into her loins.’ ‘Escalation,’ on the other hand, is what old people do at a mall.”
This isn’t just another instance of “the buck stops here” accountability. This is an instance of direct, personal intervention by the president who countermanded the advice of his experts and ordered something to be done that resulted in nuclear secrets, written in arabic, landing on the internet.
He did this because he listened to the crew of childlike idiots, both in the congress and on the radio and internet, who comprise the heart of his political movement. It illustrates something I don’t think I’ve ever fully understood before. Bush listens to the 101st keyboarders and believes their delusionary drivel. In essence, the nation is being led by Limbaugh, Powerline and Michelle Malkin.
I’ve been running from this picture for a week now.
It’s a photograph of the signing ceremony for the new torture bill. The bill legalizes torture, including rape, and denies due process to anyone the President declares an enemy of the state. Which, of course, could be anyone.
Look how happy they are. Look at their smiles. What are they thinking? Deutschland über alles?
Notice the sign attached to the front of the desk: Protecting America. I think this is the first American administration to use captions. Obviously the hope is that people will believe the caption and not what’s actually happening, which is almost always the exact opposite of what the caption says.
Like “Work Means Freedom.” That sort of thing.
My friends and readers, this picture depresses the living shit out of me. It captures in a single image the essence of banal evil that has gripped our nation. Not banal if you’re strapped to a torture table, of course, but banal for the millions of Americans who slap flag decals on their cars and wear Support Our Troops pins and believe, somehow actually believe, that George W. Bush is a nice man. A patriotic man. Just protecting America.
So a week ago I looked at this picture, and tried to write something, and couldn’t. I fled, instead, to France. (Where else?) Thank you all for accompanying me on that little divertissement. It was fun, wasn’t it? The guessing game, the prizes.
Over the weekend I continued to escape by hanging out on other feminist blogs, hoping for a little emotional solace. Mistake. I love and respect my sister bloggers, but for some reason the feminist-leftist blogosphere has been beset with nasty infighting for months now. The nastiness culminated a few days ago in a bizarre episode at Feministe that was so wrong in so many ways I thought we’d reached some kind of blogular nadir, our own digital Death Valley.
Until someone threatened to murder Chris Clarke’s dog.
Today Torture President signed the bill legalizing torture (including rape) and rescinding habeas corpus.
Do you suppose this is being reported accurately in the national news? If you do, then is there room under that rock for me too? Here are the headline phrases used to describe this bill, piping hot and fresh from my Google news feed:
“Bill Setting Rules for Questioning Detainees” - New York Times
“Military Commissions Bill” — UPI
“Law on Terror Suspects” — ABC News
“Terror Detainee Bill” — CBS News
“Bill to Interrogate and Prosecute Suspected Terrorists” — USA Today
“Military Tribunal Law” — Wall Street Journal
“Law Creating Tribunals for Terror Suspects” — Bloomberg
“Law on Detainee Questioning” — Voice of America
No torture here, nope, none at all. No rapes. Nobody’s rights being denied. No revocation of that funny “haybee” thing that’s supposed to be important for some reason. Nope. The government just wants to detain some terrorists and ask ‘em a few questions, all nice and legal like. What’s wrong with that?
Via Think Progress via Atrios via a comment at Pandagon, here’s Bush’s reaction to the news that 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war:
I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.
Insert your own pithy commentary as appropriate. I’m too busy picking skull fragments and pieces of grey matter out of the carpet to come up with anything myself.
Thursday night Congress passed a bill rescinding the Constitution* and giving the President unilateral power to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder anyone in the world just ’cause he feels like it. All he has to do — though really, do you suppose anyone will hold him to even this minimal standard? — is decide that the individual has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”
Not coincidentally, Friday morning the President remarked that people who criticize the war in Iraq are embracing “the enemy’s propaganda.” There’s your purposeful; running a blog or donating to MoveOn or even just volunteering your time and labor, and you got your material.
*I note that this item is already off the front page of the newspapers and the Google news feed. Tyranny, like the fog, comes on little cat feet.
From the Washington Post (really!):
PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.
Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.
Here’s what I want to ask all these people who think torture is a good idea: When you were a kid watching Masterpiece Theatre about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, did you think, “Hey, it’s a good thing they tortured Mark Smeaton! Sure, there was no evidence that he’d been having an affair with Anne, but under horrible torture he confessed, so you know it had to be true!” Or when you were learning about the European witch-hunts, did you think, “Gosh, all those people really were flying on broomsticks and coating themselves with devil’s grease so they could slip through keyholes — they admitted it under torture! That’s the way to get the truth out of people, by golly!”
HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN YOU BE?