The Party of God, con't

My, my, the family values crowd sure is adding some fine euphemisms to the language these days, aren't they?

"Hiking the Appalachian Trail" means fucking your mistress while leaving the wife and kids at home.

Pulling an "Ensign" means fucking your employee while leaving the wife and kids and home.

Iran

In Iran, it’s an old story, the people against the thugs, the goons, the fascists. Of course, the thugs have some people behind them too… I am constantly struck by the similarities of the American right -- a nativist, reactionary populist, fundamentalist peasantry combined with insecure shopkeepers who both act as the myrmidons of their own oppressors and masters in the corporate elite -- and the Iranian right. Bush and Ahmadinejad, now weren’t they twins? Both stubborn little men of surpassing ignorance claiming a hotline to god, Manichean in their malignant simplicity, and driving their nation off a cliff.

One difference of note, when Bush stole an election, Americans rolled over and turned the channel.

P.S. This article about Iran, written before the election, is excellent.

The party of hate?

Is the “lone gunman” one of American’s contributions to world civilization?

A couple of months ago, the feds released a study saying that domestic right-wing terrorism would increase in coming years. A no-brainer, really, with gun and ammo sales skyrocketing, and the Republicans stoking reactionary populism and coddling the lunatic fringe – just remember those ugly McCain/Palin rallies, where anti-Obama shouts of “kill him” and “terrorist” were heard and racist iconography seen. But the GOP, in high dungeon (they are only too eager to exploit the crazies, but unwilling to accept responsibility for them) had the report withdrawn. With the murders of George Tiller and Stephen Johns, the GOP’s sickening dependence on fundamentalists, anti-government/conspiracy freaks, gun nuts, racists, anti-Semites, and misogynists, stands out in stark relief.

Tortured War

Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was an Al Qaeda member captured in Pakistan in late 2001. The FBI questioned him, using their time-honored good cop techniques, and evidently got useful information out of him. But Bush and his puppet-master Dick Cheney wanted more. They wanted proof that Saddam Hussin and Al Qaeda were working together. They wanted WMDs.

So their little whore-lawyers wrote some memos, the “gloves came off,” and al-Libi was tortured by the CIA and its mercenary goons. Then he was delivered to the tender mercies of Egyptian state terror. Unsurprisingly, al-Libi told them what they wanted to hear. That it was false was irrelevant. They were, after all, fixing the evidence for their already-agreed upon plan to attack Iraq. Good soldier Colin Powell, who was just following orders, took al-Libi’s false confession to the U.N. as the centerpiece of his argument for attacking Iraq.

Dick Cheney is right. Torture, or whatever prettified name he prefers, does work. It got him his smoking gun.

As Jonathan Schell reminds us, the American torture program evolved out of a Cold War counter-torture strategy. In Korea, the Chinese came up with techniques to make American POWs make false confessions of war crimes for propaganda purposes. They used sensory deprivation and other methods to produce mental breakdowns. The US military later tried to train soldiers to resist these methods with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. Bush and Cheney flipped SERE on its head, and returned the methods back to their original use: the making of propaganda, not the gaining of information about mythological ticking time bombs, not the oft-spoken protection of the "homeland."

American Taliban reveals its terrorist heart again

I remember doing clinic defense in Iowa City back in the late ‘80s, when I would help the local women’s reproductive health center withstand the bused-in anti-abortion hordes. Coming face-to-face with members of the American Taliban, I saw murder in their eyes. Of course, I didn’t know the term “Taliban” back then. I knew that all fundamentalisms are united by their desire to control sexuality, and by extension reproduction, which means, in their primitive minds, a focus on women as those most in need in segregation, control, and regulation. Not that gays, lesbians, and, heaven forbid, more non-canonical manifestations of sexuality like the transgenders, are to be left out of the religious loop. Nor, of course, are men, since you only have to scratch the surface of the “pro-life” (a euphemism that beats “enhanced interrogation methods” hands down) crowd to see their desire to ban all forms of contraception.

Bybee/Torturer

So Jay Bybee, torture memo signer, is really just a swell guy, not ideological at all, say his pals on this NPR piece. He shies away from controversy, so he passed John Woo’s “legal” reasoning for torture because he didn’t want to create any waves. Aw, isn’t tat tweet! Big baby Bybee. I bet he has pictures of his loved ones in his office, too. I wonder if he glanced their way when he decided not to upset the authoritarians who were his boss. Wouldn’t want to stand up for democracy and decency and humanity, good gravy no! No, by all means, let’s use torture, the tool of dictators, and fuck everything America stands for. Another gutless bureaucrat on the road to hell, which as ever is paved with the “banality of evil.” Amazingly, this criminal is now a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

IRA the AIG?

Not that I would condone such poor sportsmanship, of course, but why don't we all go over to 70 Pine St, that lovely Art Deco skyscraper that's still the HQ of AIG, and kneecap some of the suits when they come out this evening on their way to the helipad? Here's your bonus, motherfuckers.