born live love die

As a veteran, one of the things that has irritated me the most is the speed with which the US Government, under the Bush Administration so speedily turned into depraved psychopaths and started directing individuals to be tortured.  This torture was overseen by people in the highest levels of government.  A speechwriter for President Bush has written a book.  It is reviewed in Slate by a former military interrogator.

My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster, was: “Why is a speechwriter who’s never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?” Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush’s abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you’re not an expert on a subject, shouldn’t you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists. Not once does he cite Army Doctrine—which warns of the negative consequences of torture and abuse. Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense’s opening statement in a war crimes trial.

While many of Thiessen’s opinions are appalling from a moral perspective (he justifies torture and abuse through the religious writings of St. Thomas Aquinas), the book is comprised of errors, omissions, and a whopping dose of fear-mongering. I’ll concentrate here on his worst misstatements and why his conclusions ultimately make us less safe.

The review proceeds to this conclusion.

Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare. He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit information without resorting to medieval abuses. The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security. It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty. It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or “detained persons”). America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights. Yet, inCourting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights). Thiessen’s ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.

Our current president is keeping us safe by denying al-Qaida the ability to recruit. President Obama, unlike Thiessen or his former boss, understands that you don’t win this conflict by stopping individual terrorist attacks. You win it by choking off the terrorists’ lifeblood: new fighters. We will never be able to measure how many American lives are saved because of President Obama’s leadership on this issue. But even if lives saved were the only justification for brutal interrogation, more Americans will be endangered by this experiment with torture than saved. This, like so many others, is a fact Thiessen conveniently ignores. Or, perhaps, his book has less to do with courting disaster than courting fear.

I feel the need to repeat the opening of that paragraph.

Our current president is keeping us safe by denying al-Qaida the ability to recruit. President Obama, unlike Thiessen or his former boss, understands that you don’t win this conflict by stopping individual terrorist attacks. You win it by choking off the terrorists’ lifeblood: new fighters.

Word.

I see things like this headline and my pulse goes up.

Irving Kristol saved the right from intellectual bankruptcy in the ’60s. Who will save it now?

What a crock of shit.  Irving Kristol was a gas bag and so is his son.

The root of all evil is not the love of money.  The root of all evil is the willingness to lie and call it the truth.  Representative Ryan of Wisconsin is calling his tax plan fair, but here are the highpoints:

• Provides individual income tax payers a choice of how to pay their taxes – through existing law, or through a highly simplified code that fits on a postcard with just two rates and virtually no special tax deductions, credits, or exclusions (except the health care tax credit).
• Simplifies tax rates to 10 percent on income up to $100,000 for joint filers, and $50,000 for single filers; and 25 percent on taxable income above these amounts. Also includes a generous standard deduction and personal exemption (totaling $39,000 for a family of four).
• Eliminates the alternative minimum tax [AMT].
• Promotes saving by eliminating taxes on interest, capital gains, and dividends; also eliminates the death tax.
• Replaces the corporate income tax – currently the second highest in the industrialized world – with a border-adjustable business consumption tax of 8.5 percent. This new rate is roughly half that of the rest of the industrialized world.

Note that there are no taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends or estates.  He calls it the “death tax” to make it sound gruesome, but what is clear is that those people who earn income on investment and not labor would pay no tax.  The people who make the most money on investment are rich already, and this tax plan would not tax them.  The entire tax burden would be shifted down to those who earn income by labor.  So the guy working as a greeter at Walmart would pay more tax than a billionaire.

Rep. Ryan is lying.  He is an evil man.

I just finished “Rubicon” by Tom Holland.  I don’t have time to write at length about it, I found it to be very interesting.  Rubicon is a historical narrative about the end of the Roman Republic.  I thought I knew something about Roman history, having been married to someone who was ABD’d in Roman History, but this book filled in some gaps and painted a different picture of things.

I think Holland was trying to draw subtle comparisons between Rome and the United States.  Or maybe I am inferring them.  Stories about Roman generals marching off to pacify the natives in one region or another seem ready made for comparison with similar American exercises.

Holland makes a point that there was an ideological basis to the actions of the Roman demi-gods and I think that another point of comparison is in order.  The Romans tried to see themselves as moral and the supporters of a moral code, even while spreading bribes around to secure judgements at court.  They carefully whittled away until they had a code which could support both honor and whatever self-centered gambit crossed the threshold.

The author’s style wore on me, but it was a good read.

I want to see Frank Rich go toe to toe with George Will on the Sunday morning TV shows.  Rich would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  It would be beautiful.  I think that Rich is pretty good with the right cross too.

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass — or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a “Tea Party terrorist.” But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack’s credo — rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, evenrationalized Stack’s crime. “It’s sad the incident in Texas happened,” he said, “but by the same token, it’s an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it’s going to be a happy day for America.”

So far, George WIll has written nothing about Andrew Stack.

Silvia, the fat gray cat of this household, caught a rat last month and today caught a bird.  I think this proves the process of evolution, because only a really slow rat or a really dumb bird would have gotten caught by the tub of lard named Silvia.

But catch a bird she did and she released it in the house.  It was a sparrow and she chased it all over the house, bird in the air, cat on everything.  There are feathers spread everywhere but the kitchen and the bedrooms.  I blocked the doorway that leads to the bedrooms and got a tennis racket out to try to confine the bird to those parts of the house in which feathers had already been left.

I managed to separate bird and cat and opened the door to the patio wide.  Silvia got the bird and ran outside.  She left it by the back door to the family room.  I got Silvia back in the house and walked to the store, exiting via the back door of the family room and stepping over the bird.  The bird was on its side, gasping fitfully.  I was wondering about the most humane way to dispose of the bird because it was clearly suffering.  When I came back from the store, it was on its feet, eyes closed.

I wondered about the ethicality of leaving the bird to die or be picked off by another cat.  I thought that perhaps it was best to let Nature take its course and if I needed to help Nature along later, I would.

After a couple of hours, Silvia started to make a commotion and cry at the back door of the family room.  I tried to ignore her abut after a while, I decided to let Nature take its course on that one also and let her go back outside.  I let her out onto the patio and then ran to the back door of the family room.  I opened the door and the bird, startled, hopped into the air and flew into a nearby tree.

Fly away, little bird, fly away.

One of the things that the Internet has provided is a lot of bad writing, writing that would not pass a freshman English course.  I have generated some of it, but this is my little blog and I really don’t give a damn if people like it or not.

HuffPo is one of the larger sites on the net.  I think that they have people there who edit stories, but maybe not.  This gem is on the site today.  It is an essay about circumcision.  For those readers who were not around at the beginning of the Internet, there were issues on USENet that were guaranteed to start a flame war and circumcision was one of them.

The author of this post, purported to be a doctor, seems to be one of the people who learned from those flame wars.

Routine female circumcision, which has been practiced in some cultures, is completely unacceptable. Few people would argue otherwise. In fact, the United Nations has issued a decree against it. Circumcision is a form of sexual abuse whether it’s done to girls or boys.

The author wants to make a case about male circumcision and starts off with female circumcision.  To call what is done to girls ‘circumcision’ is correct in that there is ‘cutting around’, but the removal of the clitoris and labia minora is not the same as removal of the foreskin.  But she states the thing she is trying to prove, that circumcision is a form of sexual abuse, as an axiom, thinking that she is covered by referencing female ‘circumcision’ first.  Fail.  I can wrap up her entire essay in a few sentences: Circumcision is sexual abuse; if you don’t agree with me you are wrong.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The authors biographical blurb is a gem too.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., a board-certified ob/gyn, is a visionary pioneer, beloved authority in women’s health and wellness, and the author of the ground breaking New York Times bestsellers….

Following a 25-year career in both academic medicine and private practice, Dr. Northrup now devotes her time to helping women truly flourish on all levels through tapping into their inner wisdom.  Through her exclusive Women’s Wisdom Circle, Dr. Northrup shares cutting-edge medical and lifestyle advice.

Let me see if have this straight: she practiced medicine for only 25 years?  Either she got a late start on it or she quit early.  There is more to that story than she is telling.  Visionary pioneer?  Or just another flake who couldn’t stay focussed?  Cutting-edge lifestyle advice?  Like, what kind of shoes should I wear with my bald spot?

I think that people write on HuffPo because they are trying to drive traffic to another site, and HuffPo publishes these pieces without putting them through an editing phase.  But I don’t know.

CPAC just finished in Washington DC.  Glenn Beck was the headliner.  He bills himself as a conservative, but what kind of conservative is he?

When I think about conservatism, I reflect on the Frisch play, “Biedermann and the Firebugs” (Biedermann und die Brandstifter). The play was written at time when Germans were trying to answer the question, “How could the Nazis have happened here, the land of Beethoven and Bach?”  There are people who adopt the label “conservative” because they prize a morally upright life, insofar as they can perceive moral uprightness, who find themselves lumped with fiscal conservatives or conservatives of other stripes.  There are a lot of conservative firebugs who are trying to start fires, not because the fire serves any conservative purpose, but because they like fires.

Glenn Beck is one such firebug.  So is Newt Gingrich.

Mr. Gingrich made a rock-star-like entrance, wading into the audience to the throbbing beat of the song “Eye of the Tiger,” a searchlight flashing across the crowd as he shook hands with well-wishers.  He predicted that the Democrats would lose the House and Senate in November and Mr. Obama would lose in 2012, undone by “the coming massive conservative majority.”  He said that the Democratic health care proposals — all 4,500 pages from the House and Senate combined — “are among the worst legislation” ever to emerge from Capitol Hill.  Mr. Obama should begin the summit by tossing out those bills and starting from scratch, Mr. Gingrich said, and Republicans should have the same amount of time that Democrats will have to present their views.  “Let’s test the president’s willingness to be bipartisan,” he said.

Hmmm.  The reason we send people to the legislature is to work on policy.  After a year of work, in which the Republicans did everything they could to obstruct that work, Republicans now want to scrap the work that was done.  Gingrich keeps using the word bipartisan, but it does not mean what he thinks it means.  But I digress.

Back to Beck.

Mr. Beck, a recovering alcoholic, drew a parallel to addiction recovery programs and said that the Republican Party had to admit it was in trouble.  “Hello, my name is the Republican Party, and I have a problem!” he declared. “I’m addicted to spending and big government,” he said, drawing cheers from the audience in a ballroom of the hotel where the conference was held.  But both parties are to blame, he said. The Democrats tax and spend, while the Republicans just spend.  He also said people were losing a fundamental belief that things would get better.  “It is still morning in America,” he said. “It just happens to be kind of a head-pounding, hung-over, vomiting-for-four-hours kind of morning in America. And it’s shaping up to be kind of a nasty day. But it is still morning in America.”

Morning in America.  Beck is using the Reagan meme, but is clueless to the fact that Reagan raised taxes.

On another note, half of the attendees were students.  Many of them were trying to find jobs or find hookups.

CPAC is similar in function to Netroots Nation.  I wonder how many students go there to look for a job or to find a mate?

Scott Horton writes about Dick Cheney’s recent escapades.

“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Cheney said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. He went on to explain that Justice Department lawyers had been instructed to write legal opinions to cover the use of this and other torture techniques after the White House had settled on them.

Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the application of torture techniques. Prosecutors have argued that a criminal investigation into torture undertaken with the direction of the Bush White House would raise complex legal issues, and proof would be difficult. But what about cases in which an instigator openly and notoriously brags about his role in torture? Cheney told Jonathan Karl that he used his position within the National Security Council to advocate for the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques. Former CIA agent John Kiriakou and others have confirmed that when waterboarding was administered, it was only after receiving NSC clearance. Hence, Cheney was not speaking hypothetically but admitting his involvement in the process that led to decisions to waterboard in at least three cases.

What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants.

Amen. It is about time that Dick Cheney was brought before the bar to answer for his crimes.

The Tea Partiers get down to cases. It is not hard to read between the lines in this piece and see that the way they see the Constitution is, “Me, the People of the United States”. They act as if they are the final arbiters of the democratic form of government and that everything that happens must satisfy their ideas about government. And are they informed? Not so much.

Pam Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.

Mrs. Stout forwards along petitions to impeach Mr. Obama; petitions to audit the Federal Reserve; petitions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.

Meanwhile, she and her husband are studying the Constitution line by line. She has the Congressional switchboard programmed into her cellphone. “I just signed up for a Twitter class,” said Mrs. Stout, 66, laughing at the improbability of it all.

She gets her political instruction from Fox News. Are she and her husband also consulting any of the reference material that is available with regard to the Constitution? Are they trying to get a historical perspective? I hope so.

These questions of strategy, direction and leadership were clearly on the minds of Mrs. Stout’s members at a recent monthly meeting.

Their task seemed endless, almost overwhelming, especially with only $517 in their Tea Party bank account. There were rallies against illegal immigration to attend. There was a coming lecture about the hoax of global warming. There were shooting classes to schedule, and tips to share about the right survival food.

The group struggled fitfully for direction. Maybe they should start vetting candidates. Someone mentioned boycotting ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC. Maybe they should do more recruiting.

“How do you keep on fighting?” Mrs. Stout asked in exasperation.

Lenore Generaux, a local wildlife artist, had an idea: They should raise money for Freedom Force, a group that says it wants to “reclaim America via the Patriot movement.” The group is trying to unite the Tea Parties and other groups to form a powerful “Patriot lobby.” One goal is to build a “Patriot war chest” big enough to take control of the Republican Party.

Not long ago, Mrs. Stout sent an e-mail message to her members under the subject line: “Revolution.” It linked to an article by Greg Evensen, a leader in the militia movement, titled “The Anatomy of an American Revolution,” that listed “grievances” he said “would justify a declaration of war against any criminal enterprise including that which is killing our nation from Washington, D.C.”

Mrs. Stout said she has begun to contemplate the possibility of “another civil war.” It is her deepest fear, she said. Yet she believes the stakes are that high. Basic freedoms are threatened, she said. Economic collapse, food shortages and civil unrest all seem imminent.

“I don’t see us being the ones to start it, but I would give up my life for my country,” Mrs. Stout said.

She paused, considering her next words.

“Peaceful means,” she continued, “are the best way of going about it. But sometimes you are not given a choice.”

Gee, they sound just like Black Panthers.