Treason.
[Mukasey is] wrong on torture—dead wrong.
—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), shortly before voting to confirm Mukasey as our 81st Attorney General
You know, if somebody’s wrong—dead wrong—on torture, then politesse demands maybe you think a good long minute before going ahead and pissing all over them when they’re on fire. What you don’t do is vote them in as Attorney goddamn General.
Maybe it’s just me.
No man
No madness
(Though their sad power may prevail)
Can possess
Conquer
My country’s heart—
They rise to fail.
She is eternal
Long before nations’ lines were drawn
When no flags flew
When no armies stood
My land was born
And you ask me
Why I love her
Through wars, death and despair
She is the constant
We who don’t care
And you wonder
Will I leave her—
But how?
I cross over borders
But I’m still there now
How can I leave her?
Where would I start?
Let man’s petty nations tear themselves apart.
My land’s only borders lie around my heart.
Oh, all right, one more,
but really, this has to be the last, okay? F’reals. Because the thing to take away from Glenn Greenwald’s bizarre exchange with Colonel Steven Boylan is the terrifying glimpse it gives us of the world to come: a politicized, evangelical military, glowering in the corner of our right-wing echo chamber, and thus our polity. (A sitting senator threatened her husband’s life when he was president; you really think it won’t be a thousand times worse when they have more on their side and even less to lose?) —That’s what should set you shivering, see, but all I can do when I read Greenwald’s followup (as a thousand points of McVeigh try to park rhetorical Ryders full of fertilizer on his post) is giggle at his peerless snap:
…right-wing blogger Howard Kurtz…
God, we’re so frickin’ witty, sipping tea here on the lip of the Abyss! (And what the fuck else should we do, huh?)
Politics as she is spoke.
Yes, it is interesting to learn that the Feds began wiretapping us in February of 2001 (though I coulda sworn we found that out like, last year already or something). But: you want to stop the warrantless wiretapping now? Don’t bother pointing out it was no fucking use at all in stopping 9/11. They don’t care, and anyway the rhetoric’s metastasized. —Point out instead it was no fucking use at all in stopping the Republicans from losing Congress.
I know you are but what am I.
As you know, Bob, they only accuse us of that which they themselves are doing, or mightily wish they could do—so maybe we might want to get a tad more concerned than usual with recent trends in rhetoric from the dextral reaches of the Islets of Bloggerhans.
The explanation you deserve.
Yeah, see, apparently? There was this football scandal or something was it last weekend or the weekend before where some guy from one team videotaped some guy from some other team and got caught and I’m not real clear on what the whole videotaping thing is about, maybe copyright violation or something, except I’m not sure how that’s cheating, I haven’t really been paying attention, but I haven’t paid much attention to football since the Superbowl Shuffle, to tell the truth, but anyway, football isn’t so much germane to the explanation you deserve.
Football comes into it because I read the Poor Man and he goes on about football and today he linked to a Gregg Easterbrook column about the whole cheating videotape thing and I know, Gregg Easterbrook, gah, but hear me out, okay? In the middle of this column on the whole cheating videotape thing which apparently is as important as that MoveOn ad in the scheme of things entire (though I am being unfair, perhaps, as Gregg Easterbrook is a sports columnist, and what are else is a sports columnist to write about but sports? Perhaps how the numinous might impact superstring theory? Ha ha), but anyway, in the middle of this column, Gregg Easterbrook said the following:
And if you’re tempted to say, “Gregg, at worst this is just cheating in some dumb football games,” here’s why the affair matters: If a big American institution such as the NFL is not being honest with the public about a subject as minor, in the scheme of things, as the Super Bowl, how can we expect American government and business to be honest with the public about what really matters?
And ever since I read that, I’ve been screaming and screaming and screaming and I cannot stop and that’s why I’m trying to pound my head through your wall I’m sorry but there it is aaaaaaaaaaaaa—
Then again—
I always was too hopeful for my own dam’ good. (Shorter 2007: so I was wrong about the year. —I wonder if it’s the one that’s aimed at my old house?)
Blessed is the peacemaker.
One takes one’s humor where one can: the cosmic hilarity that ensues, for instance, when one reflects that Sen. Larry Craig (R) may end up doing more for world peace than all the rest of us combined.
Hyperbole.
i think he’s wrong; i think they’ll back down if we fight. i also think that the real radicals—the cheneys and boltons—are far fewer than the civil war analogy suggests. it’s not a country divided. it’s a big country against a small band of wackos.
our situation now is roughly analogous to that of the passengers on flight 93. when the right hijacked the first airplane, in 2000, we were caught completely by surprise. we thought it was more important to keep calm and not panic. so they flew the country into a building. they did it again in 2003, and we were still placing too much value on staying calm.
We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court.
—David Addington, Cheney aide, on FISA
The Reproof Valiant.
You realize, of course, that “the art of the possible” isn’t the art of doing what’s possible. It’s the art of making things possible.
The all-too-common tragedy of the foreseeable unforeseen.
As a Republican state senator in Montana and as a human being, I am offended by Senator Craig’s existence. Why oh why are most of the perverts that get caught Republicans? Are there more of them or are they just stupid? The thought of a US Senator chasing love in all the wrong places makes me think longingly of the Ayotollahs in Iran. They would just kill the turkey.
And James, Dave Lewis, a very honorable man, did not recommend “death for queers” (your phraseology).
His statement was obviously exaggerated, but I am sure he meant only to display his rage at Craig’s betrayal of his word and the trust placed in him.
Most weeks, three or four people are hacked, stoned, burned or shot to death for being lesbian, gay, bi or trans. The highest Shia religious dignitary Sistani has again promulgated a fatwa calling for the execution of all non-repentant LGBT people—people talk of him as a liberal and in this degree he is—he allows people to repent on pain of death when most of his rivals would just kill. Contacted by the UN about this campaign of murder, the Iraqi government has refused to acknowledge that it is even a problem.
This is a direct consequence of the war—the Saddam regime, vile as it was, was secular in this respect, just as the Ba’athists in Syria still are. No-one does well in a totalitarian state, but LGBT folk were left alone, mostly.
Those who survive, flee. Through a network of safe houses and incredibly brave people and escape routes to the West.
The British home office is disinclined to regard the likelihood of being murdered by a variety of non-state agents as persecution, because it is not the government that is doing it. The leaders of the diaspora queer community are under death threats—again from Sistani—and live under police protection of a moderately minimal kind.
When troops leave, as leave they will in the runup to the British and American elections, there will be no change, except possibly for the worse.
One of the diaspora spoke to us at Translondon this evening.
He said something amazingly moving to the effect that this is not a movement of Resistance so much as a movement of Existence. Because when everyone wants to kill you, staying alive is the most radical form of resistance possible.
We the motherfucking people.
The Edwards campaign will send our forgetful Attorney General a copy of the constitution for every signature they receive on this petition. (Then again, maybe some of those copies could go elsewhere…)
I’m hurting cultchah!
Confidential to Keen in Silicon Valley: dude, I know, he made a lot of money, but you start citing George Lucas as some sort of, Christ, I’m not sure what, a compeer of David Hockney or something, some sort of authority on art, well, you’ve pretty much gone and shot your argument in the face. (via; via)
What do you think of Internet video? Lucas says there are two forms of entertainment: circus and art. Circus is random, he says: “feeding Christians to the lions”—or, he says, as the term in Hollywood goes—”throw a puppy on the highway. … You don’t have to write anything or really do anything. It’s voyeuristic.” In short, he says, it’s YouTube. Art is not random, Lucas says. “It’s storytelling. It’s insightful. It’s amusing.”
Wait a minute—
“I say, old chap, could you explain something to me?”
“I suppose.”
“You see, well, it’s just—this wall we’re building. Of raw meat. The flensed cow-carcasses and such. It’s not I’m complaining, no, of course not, far from it, but it’s such an odd thing to be doing.”
“You want to know why we’re building this wall of raw meat.”
“Bingo! Hit it in one.”
“Well, the tigers, of course.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. The tigers.”
“It’s to keep us safe from the tigers.”
“You know, now the you mention it, I believe I’d heard something to that effect. All part of the initiative, right? Like the duct tape and the surveillance and the torture and that ridiculous television program. Of course. The wall of raw meat. Capital.”
“Well, do you see any tigers around hereabouts?”
“Do you know, I think I have? Why, one carried off poor Maybelline just yesterday. Stacking some butchered pigs on the south side, and it just swooped out of the jungle and with one gulp— Terrible thing. And one does hear them prowling about out there, roaring now and again, much more than one ever used to! Doesn’t one?”
“Precisely! So hadn’t you better keep building this bloody damn wall?”
We only sing about it once in every twenty years.
Everybody’s linking up the “4th of July,” but the only X song for me today is “See How We Are.” And the best post for seeing just that today is Rick Perlstein’s.
What’s the argument? That conservatives’ tragic misunderstanding of freedom has produced exactly what Goldwater feared most: stifling the energy and talent of the individual, crushing creative differences, forcing conformity—and, yes, even leading us to despotism (and I’m not talking about habeus corpus or NSA spying). By methodically undermining the public’s will and ability to underwrite the public good, systematically accelerating economic inequality, and making turning oneself into a commodity—“selling out”—the only possible route for young people who wish a reasonably secure middle class existence, conservatives killed liberty. The canary in the coal mine is the death of young people’s “freedom to live adult lives typified by choice rather than economic compulsion.”
I think I made a decision at some point in the past few days of McCloud Madness; I think I’ll be the better for having done so, soon enough. We’ll see. —Further bulletins as events warrant.
All that is necessary for evil to triumph.
“The attitude among the Democrats and the media now seems to be that, hmm, maybe if we keep our fingers crossed we won’t need a government for anything until 2009, and if we just wait until then, the next president can get everything running again just in the nick of time.” —Phil Nugent
Cui bono?
“‘A group of boys I know were thinking of going to the Lloyd Center on the max to see 28 Weeks Later on Friday night,’ said TJ Browning—a long-time Forum member, this morning. ‘But one of the boys said, “Wait a minute, that curfew thing is going on,” so they chose not to go on Friday night.’ —Browning was, in fact, touting this as a sign of the policy’s success, but to what end?” —Matt Davis
