Segregation academies

Conservatives are frothing at the mouth (again! You'd think they'd run out of froth) about President Obama's completely innocuous comments about schools and communities separated along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland.

The reason our homegrown American paranoid wingnuts are angry about this - other than anger being what they do - is that they've spent the past forty years building separate institutions parallel to public and secular institutions.

Their building started as a way to keep their delicate little white babies from having to learn with colored chillun. You never know what might happen when children sit next to each other in class. They might become friends! Or those dark boys might deflower innocent Southern girls. Mongrelization, miscegenation, race-mixing, and bastardization of America!

Feh.

After resegregating K-12, of course, the racist wingers needed "higher" education that would permit their smallworldview to go unchallenged all the way through college and even grad school. But you can't say cadres for Christ - that sounds too much like the Bolsheviks. Hence Bob Jones University (BJU, unintended double entendre foreshadowing teabagger) and Liberty University. Too bad Oklahoma's ORU wasn't named for a televangelist named Oral Richards.

Then of course, the conservatives built their own media, intended from the beginning to get their story our, never mind what's true. Fox pretends to be news to pump out propaganda. Rush and his ilk of haters purvey unguested confrontation and won't countenance any response on their bullshit programs.

Well, not quite never mind what's true. Some viewers need a little convincing. So billionaire wingnuts built tax exempt foundations to provide a thin veil of propaganda for the alleged truth of their views. Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Accuracy in Media, and all the various denier "think" tanks on climate change, tobacco, and the so-called free market, etc.

Conservatives hate what Obama said in Northern Ireland because they've graduated from advocating separate but unequal for black folk into advocating separate institutions for themselves - and, oh by the way, the destruction of public institutions for the rest of us.

Sick of sycophants

The media continues to be a handmaiden to, well, not power but past power. Nothing exposes better their bias to give Republicans a pass, despite the rankest and most obvious bullshit, than their continuing polite refusal to choose the word torture to label even waterboarding - check out the audio clip. Instead, they weasel back to "some call it torture." The GOP has (mostly) stuck to a Minitru vocabulary that dismisses Bushist crimes as merely harsh interrogation - and who could be against that, girlfriend?

The media heaves a sigh of relief and hews to their so-called professional goal of blind, unjudgemental he-said-she-said stories. The big media appetite for bullshit is a journalistic failing that cannot be laid anywhere but the feet of the vaunted big media conglomerates. Their reporters, editors, and publishers did this as a response to fifty years of wingnut whining (see "Accuracy" in Media) about bias. Atrios would and probably has sarcastically called for a blogger ethics panel.

The pretense that there's a controversy over the meaning of the word torture doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. It's a well-known word with well-known past applications that led to punishment when Americans were outraged by Nazis, Japanese, and communists doing the torture. (Yes, that's whose company we have joined. Sorry to tell you the unpleasant truth if you've been storing your unused head up your-- uh, somewhere warm, moist, and dark.)

There is no news balance whatsoever in being unable to use the right word for fear of offending those who advocate the results of torture. As adults (allegedly), we at least ought to have strong enough stomachs to ask the question whether the intelligence Darth Cheney claims might possibly outweigh the monstrous moral crimes that elicited it. We should have strong enough stomachs to look straight at what was done by the President and the Vice President in the name of all Americans.

It's a blight and stain on our honor. Was it worth it? Should the confessed torturers who ran the White House - and DOD, State, and the OLC - walk?

I, of course, don't think so. I still believe that the rule of law is possible, though it's obviously honored less in the observance than in the breach.

As a society that still believes or at least pretends that it can govern itself, we owe ourselves the truth, at least. Without the truth, voting is largely an exercise in American idols instead of American ideals.

We need to ask questions intelligently. The right question about the efficacy of torture is not whether it ever led to good intel. The right question is whether it did at a higher rate or faster than legal means of interrogation.

There's another crucial question: Did the practice of torture lead to the birth of even more terrorists and thus to even less safety?

We need a fearless investigation. We need an uncompromising investigation. We need the truth.

I hope the truth would lead to criminal prosecution. This would not be the criminalization of policy differences. This would be the prosecution of criminal policies.

Wingnut insanity

Accuracy in Media is and always has been a misnomer for an insane wingnut pressure group. They aren't interested in accuracy. They are propagandists.

Their December newsletter contains:

• The Ultimate Vindication of Joe McCarthy (a book review)
• an attempt to manufacture a scandal about the UN and AIDS relief funding
• slams at global warming concerns because the UN holds them
  
• hysterical claims that a return to the Fairness Doctrine (which isn't going to happen anyway) would silence conservative voices
• a Christmas and New Years wish

Except for the last, Cliff Kincaid is a loon.