Tortured logic, tortured justice

Sometimes, I cannot comprehend how the United States of America has come to occupy the landscape that it has in the year 2009. Growing up, I learned in school about all of the wonderful things that the United States had done for the world. Out of the tyranny that the British Empire had become, our forefathers had the temerity and the moral fortitude to announce to the world that we would be building a new kind of nation-- one in which the rights of the individual would trump government power. People were inherently vested with natural rights, inalienable rights. Our First Amendment- the right to speak freely, to worship (or not) as one pleases, free press, who could ask for a better check on governmental power? Can the government force the citizenry to quarter soldiers? Not here, we've got the Constitution! Governments stopping people for no reason, or on trumped-up charges? No way, we've got the 4th Amendment! To be sure, there were some stark contradictions, but I didn't realize those until I was a little older. I mean, it's a little hard to take seriously those that would lecture on the topic of liberty while being slave-owners, but the overall idea was pretty great. We were the force for truth and justice and all that is right. We proved it, too. We fought tyranny in World War II, the most recent (winning) war. We saw the evil that was done in the name of National Socialism, Fascism, or whatever label you want to use. We saw the evil in those Nazi bastards and we would have none of it-- and rightly so. The indescribable acts of torture and dehumanization were enough to turn anyone's stomach. I read Night, as well as some other works by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and was moved to tears. I looked at the photographs of the concentration camps and saw the shivering, starving groups of people blankly staring at the camera lens. I saw the piles of bodies- massive piles of them! What kind of people could order (or commit?) these horrible, despicable acts? What kind of person could so callously cause the suffering of their fellow human beings? The Nazi experiment was a singular example of the brutality that one group could inflict on another. There is no crime so heinous that it could compare to the atrocities committed by the Nazis. The scale of the suffering defies understanding-- we named it The Holocaust. [More . . . ]

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Moyers: On health care reform, the Democrats are their own biggest enemy

Bill Moyers, spoke about the problems passing health care reform on Bill Maher's show (as reported by Glenn Greenwald):

I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party. This is a party that has told its progressives -- who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform -- to sit down and shut up. That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: "no public insurance option, no health care reform."

And I think the reason for that is -- in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .

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Dense news media is stunned by Republican lies and obstructionism

How dense are our news reporters that they are stunned by Republican lies and obstructionism? Truly we are victims of journalistic malpractice. That's the well-reasoned conclusion of Jamison Foser of Media Matters:

Have these people been asleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for the past few decades? Conservatives buried the last serious effort at universal health care under an avalanche of (media-abetted) lies. And they won the 2000 election on the strength of (media-abetted ... and sometimes media-invented) lies. And they took us to war in Iraq based on (media-abetted) lies. And ... well, you get the point. When was the last time conservatives approached a big fight without relying heavily, if not exclusively, on misinformation and deception? Why would anyone have thought this time would be different? Likewise, the increasingly obvious fact that conservatives aren't actually interested in working toward bipartisan reform -- this seems to have taken reporters by surprise. But when was the last time conservatives made significant concessions in order to win bipartisan support for anything? What makes all this shock really amazing is that so much of political journalism consists of pontification by people who have supposedly been around and understand how things work -- and yet they're constantly stunned when history repeats itself in the most predictable of ways.

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There oughta be a law…

It’s time that America passed a federal law which requires that any time former Vice President Dick Cheney is mentioned or featured in the broadcast media, that the attached “Darth Vader” theme clip from Lego Star Wars be played: If Mr. Cheney actually speaks—which he no longer does because he prefers not to be questioned further about secret assassination squads which he apparently set up and then ordered the CIA not to disclose such actions to the Congress as mandated by federal law. —federal law should require that in every such instance there also be an interpreter to interpret for the Penguin-speak impaired. There should be no expiration date on this law.

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