Department of duh

There's a "sweeping" new report that '“it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.'

Ho hum. The only aspect of this that's really newsworthy is that a Republican signed onto it.

The Bushists chose to torture.

They wrote memos to exculpate their choice to torture, covering their asses with a thin tissue of lies that redefined the word torture. Torturously redefined the word. (Tortuously, too.)

They have escaped all legal responsibility for their actions. (Like bankers!)

Note that the New York Times is still too chickenshit to call torture torture outside of direct quotes. Instead, they continue to adopt the weaselly newspeak of the Bushists:  "coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush."

Until we restore truth-telling to a position of actual respect, not mere lip service, our cultural decline will continue.

Culpable but not the most culpable

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

But all politics is theater

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The national press corpse (most of it, but obviously not Rachel) eats up theater. The only insight they need to report on it is their subjective impression of how good the production values are. Back in middle school, they already knew enough to write up their feelings about Moby-Dick, so they can surely tell us whether they thought Mitt Rmoney, the charity drive Ahab, performed well in a good show or not. No need to investigate or even question the moral values expressed by his cynical theater, they've got their superficial and banal impressions.

Sure, Rmoney caught a bad break that Hurricane Sandy gave President Barack Obama such an easy chance to look presidential. To be presidential. Never mind how badly past Republicans have muffed that easy chance. But we all know the Mitt is all about ... Mitt, and only his policies are Bushist. You think he's whining behind the scenes about his gosh darn bad luck? While New Jersey and New York recover bodies?

Hurricane Sandy happened. One candidate actually did something constructive. It helped, of course, that he was already President and had that big FEMA club in his hand. The challenger, already on record  as favoring the end of FEMA, tried to appear to help - and utterly failed.

Rmoney didn't keep the Potemkin Village of his theatrical presentation hidden. So the press Villagers will probably hit him hard. He unwittingly let the audience in on the seaminess of backstage.

I'm still waiting for the press to care that Rmoney and his kiss-up-piss-down friends are simply and irrefutably wrong, both morally and practically. They don't care what happens to those who suffer disasters, large or small - because they are safe in their gated worlds, looking down on all of us whose lives are so contingent that one natural disaster can leave us homeless.

If we were Galtian heroes, we'd have as many houses as we needed.

Asleep at the switch

Bushists and neocons might have given their best efforts and still not prevented 9/11. But they didn't even try, despite many warnings:

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

But some in the administration considered the warning to be just bluster. An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration both told me in interviews that the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat. Intelligence officials, these sources said, protested that the idea of Bin Laden, an Islamic fundamentalist, conspiring with Mr. Hussein, an Iraqi secularist, was ridiculous.

Unconscionable.

Chinese water torture

If the U.S. government waterboards suspected terrorists - or someone unlucky enough to have alienated the wrong people in Pakistan's ISS - the New York Times won't call it torture. There are memos defending it!

If the Chinese government waterboards suspected grafters, suddenly the Times finds the word torture in its vocabulary - and not just the lawyered up extreme definition that the Bushists put forward in John Yoo's bullshit memos. (Those memos alone are war crimes.)

When party members are caught breaking the rules — or even when they merely displease a superior — they can be dragged into the maw of an opaque Soviet-style disciplinary machine, known as “shuanggui,” that features physical torture and brutal, sleep-deprived interrogations.

Goldman sacks

Rape and pillage is the order of business at Goldman Sachs, says a now former insider. But we all knew that already. This company, to which both parties cravenly outsource the Department of the Treasury, was thoroughly exposed as double-dealing and untrustworthy in the aftermath of the Bushist financial crisis. The SEC:

Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement [at the SEC, said,] "Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party."

That privatization of a Cabinet post, until proven otherwise, is why no one - no one! - went to jail over this allegedly legal billion-dollar fraud, for which Goldman Sachs's contracted vig was a paltry $15 million.

Investors in the liabilities of ABACUS are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion.

The SEC's complaint charges Goldman Sachs and Tourre with violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5. The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.

If you're going to lead a life of crime, white collar crime is the way to go, and the rigged game of Wall St. has the highest reward-to-risk ratio. Hell, if your fraudulent investments go sour in a big enough way, the Secretary of the Treasury will insist the middle class bail you out - without clawing back your immense and undeserved bonuses.

The SEC didn't even seek prison, only civil penalties. The Wall St. billionaires have written the securities laws so that their fraud is often only moral, not legal.

Now to Greg Smith's conscience. Where was he when it mattered? Raking in the dough that he's probably planning to retire on...

If you read his claim of conscience, the first thing you'll notice is what a piece of self-serving bullshit it is, even if its headline is true. I don't know about you, but I was not in need of reading a puffed up resume of all Smith's selections and glory and value. He was almost chosen to be a Rhodes Scholar. Whoop-de-doo.

It sounds to me as though the fundamental problem of Wall St. is overweening self-regard that leads to smash and grab ethics and short-termism. Masters of the universe, bitches! That's how they view the world.

Smith is a terrible writer who won't put himself at risk to do more than generalize. He'd have to violate confidentiality to illustrate his piece with names, dates, and deals, and that would put his retirement at age 33 or so at risk. No way!

He's not so much whistle-blowing as horn-tooting.

Update: Satire!

Thank god

Thank god we don't have any armed lunatic wingnuts here in America.

Police identified the suspect as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, a right-wing fundamentalist Christian, while acquaintances described him as a gun-loving Norwegian obsessed with what he saw as the threats of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration.

Hmm, lots of familiar grievances... Unemployment, however, is below 4% in Norway and not part of Breivik's grievance list. Damn socialist economy!

Will this attack damage Norway's social democratic consensus, as 9/11 and the Bushists' exploitation of it did ours?

Thomas Hegghammer, a terrorism specialist at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, said the manifesto bears an eerie resemblance to those of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, though from a Christian rather than a Muslim point of view. Like Mr. Breivik’s manuscript, the major Qaeda declarations have detailed accounts of the Crusades, a pronounced sense of historical grievance and calls for apocalyptic warfare to defeat the religious and cultural enemy.

It's worth noting that 93 dead (known so far) from a total population of under 5 million has close to twice the demographic impact of 9/11. In their awful grief, Norwegians now have the chance to show resoluteness or panic, just as we did ten years ago. Most likely, they will show a mix, just as we did.

Hot breath of doom

America is choosing to slurp up plutocratic bullshit:

[H]ow do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

If you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. ... Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

If you are Alan Greenspan, you retreat from your 2008 epiphany in which you acknowledged your “state of shocked disbelief” that “the whole intellectual edifice” of your deregulatory ideology had collapsed. ... [A]fter driving the economy over the cliff, you offer to give driving lessons.

If you are JP Morgan’s chief investment officer, you refute the statement that your chairman and chief executive, Jamie Dimon, made to the FCIC in 2010 blaming the failures of major financial institutions on “the management teams 100 percent and . . . no one else.” ...

If you are most congressional Republicans, you turn a blind eye to the sad history of widespread lending abuses... You refuse to acknowledge what went wrong and then try to stop efforts to make it right.

Societies that fail to learn true and hard lessons from events, fail. Failure is the path that our richers and betters have chosen for us. They have propagandized vast portions of the population into believing that liberals are blame, when we are the exact people who have been most right about how to structure an economy to nurture the middle class and grow the fastest. Instead, like the Russians before us, we are destined for oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the end of the American dream.

I think we're past the tipping point. After the Bushists fucked up everything, and Democrats swept into office in droves, Karl Rove's thousand-year permanent majority for government by wealth is tantalizingly within reach for the forces of reaction. And all Democrats can do is dither and cave.

Republicans will buy the 2012 election, the Supreme Court has put it on the block. They will own all three branches of government. They will kill the filibuster, as we should have, and consolidate their already firm grip on the federal judiciary. They will sweep away the twentieth century to restore the Gilded Age, despite the repeated clear and dismal failures of their economic policies. But this century's Vanderbilts and Rockefellers will be ecstatic. That's what they're buying.

Sex rated R, violence a lovely PG-13

Think of the graphic, frightening violence we permit in our entertainment and our foreign policy. But a penis is out of bounds. That's the wrong kind of first person shooter.

Again, I'm not defending what Anthony Weiner did or the complete foolish narcissism of the way he did it. I just think, as Glenn Greenwald does, that our response to Weiner's peckerdilloes should have been derisive laughter and an immediate move to the next topic. Instead, moving on is what we did on behalf of Bushists who openly admitted doing things that in all previous circumstances had been war crimes. Ho hum, we said.

Follies

On Fox, Karl Rove - no doubt trying to make peace between the Bushists and the teabaggers - says something kinda, sorta complimentary about Sarah Palin. She's supposedly smart to take her book tour into Iowa. Smart? It's completely basic Presidential politics, nothing wrong with it, but nothing newsworthy either.

Yet CNN reports this non-story, this piece of internal Republican politics on their sole-purpose propaganda channel. Because they looove Sarah Palin, at least her picture.

The more she whines about the attention, the more they put her every dingbat tweet out to the public. But! She's wearing leather with lots of zippers!

Psst, is there a bondage angle? CNN could merely ask the question and keep Palin in the ticker for three or four more days with the back and forth. (Palin: "I took a fashion tip from Danica Patrick, but the eastern egghead elite lamestream vegan media doesn't get NASCAR or the natural beauty of animal products.") Ooh, what a schweet dream!

This is the news coverage we deserve. Unfortunately.

Duhbya's boom

Don't you remember the incredible boom in GDP and entrepreneurship that Duhbya's tax cuts brought about?

Neither do I.

The tax cuts didn't create a huge surge of jobs either. And they didn't increase tax revenue.

More Bushist bullshit promises made and forgotten.

Yet the Republican Party continues to make exactly the same promises and the media thinks they're plausible.

Pelham 123

Republicans promise they'll hold hostages in April. They're fighting total war, while Democrats still think everything is negotiable.

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

The Senate Democrats need to find unexpired statutes of limitations and hold hearings on the Bushist abuses that compete with the House Republican kangaroo courts.

It is what it is

Like it or not, election day gives an answer. It did in 2008, and belligerent wingnuts never accepted the result. In six days, it will in 2010, and I'll accept the result, though not for a femtosecond its wisdom.

Nationally, voters are poised to bring back the jackass Republican policies that in 8 years screwed America up completely - unjustified war on lying pretexts in Iraq, torture as an instrument of policy, financial deregulation that led to the meltdown, huge spending and tax cuts for the very wealthy that turned a surplus into a raging deficit.

We Democrats only had 2 years to fix that legacy of complete failure, which is incredibly unfair (but fair don't goddamn enter into it). We failed because we were too timid. We should have rammed the whole package of liberal reforms down their throats. We should have mocked their screams and smacked around their immense lack of insight.

But the revenge of the morans [sic] will be a fact. And, as a liberal, I deal with reality, rather than bullshit conservative fantasy.

The TV-driven fad of angry stupidity will bring back exactly the same Republican Bushist policies that created our serious problems. Still, wingnuts are going to win nationwide. Congratulations, idiots, you will win.

The returning Republican policies are based on obviously idiotic principles.

• The wealthy don't get enough rewards to keep them working (if you can call creaming off all the best tidbits working), even though their share of the pie has grown to the point where the top 20% own 84% of America.
• Public borrowing, even at microscopic interest rates, can never lead to a larger economy - even though private borrowing to advance private interests is a common and orgasmic fetish of the right.
• The only positive thing that government can do is to lower taxes and reduce the deficit (yes, two contradictory thoughts at the same time), even if conservatives are never willing to name spending cuts that they would make to balance any budget.
• Financial institutions that have just brought America to the edge of the precipice of depression can be trusted - constrained by the "free" market - to not do it again. Because every John Galt is perfect. (Though egoistically amoral in the original...) Never mind the experience of 2008, which would make wingnut heads explode if they didn't have Barney Fag to blame.
  
• America is a Christian nation, never mind that the Constitution says, "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States," and the Bill of Rights says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."
• Freedom means liberals can't make snide comments about wingnut bullshit.
  
• IOKIYAR!
  

Keeping the Senate in Democratic hands hardly even matters, though I believe it will happen. The cowed remnants of a 60-seat, then 59-seat, majority that couldn't even pass a public health care option will not kill the filibuster, no matter how richly it deserves to join legislative appointment of Senators in the ashcan of history. Republicans will filibuster any judicial appointment who even hints of the center, much less the left, never mind two-plus centuries' precedent of advise and consent.

These so-called conservatives are actually radicals. Their rank and file don't realize it, but their objective is no less than the return of aristocracy.

So the wingnuts will have a lot to celebrate, even though the triumph of ignoramus Teapublicans that they celebrate will be a disaster for America. Check back in two years, six years, ten years. It may be too late for the noble American experiment in liberty and self-government.

On a smaller scale, I'll have some wins to celebrate too. At least half of the various districts for which the Venn diagram includes my small precinct will choose good judgement over inchoate outrage at sincere and well-reasoned Democratic efforts to help, most of which have succeeded, even if they were not successful enough.

But then, I live in Massachusetts, where reason, though not ascendant, still has a fighting chance.

Fool me twice

Click image for full Elena Steier/Center for American Blogress cartoon.

Blind faith is practice for conservatism

There's no possible doubt that many people choose the beliefs they take to be true. Reason, as I'm learning the more I read about neuropsychology (currently, How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer), is only part of the decision to believe.

Often, a very small part. Some believers intentionally push reason aside for a heady brew of reflex, prejudice, and blind faith in received wisdom. Even if that wisdom was only slightly wiser than the violent and tribal surrounding society of 2000 years ago...

Bushists believe that Duhbya went to church a lot, not because it's true but because they know it. Facts - he didn't - and memory - his absence was reported in real time - don't bleedin' enter into it. Duhbya talked about Gawd all the goddamned time - and talked about prayin' and blessings and reading Scripture (capital S, by gum). Flaying his faith like Elmer Gantry, they're sure that he surely must've been sitting in a pew nearly every Sunday, not just Christmas, Easter, and National Prayer Day. Even if their senses should tell them that he wasn't.

Who you gonna believe - faith or your lyin' eyes?

When Duhbya recently met some soldiers at the Dallas-Ft. Worth airport on their return home on a two-week break from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other, unspecified billets, one of my Facebook friends, an evangelical Christian, commented about how much the Bushes love our troops. I bit my tongue and didn't ask her for evidence. You can find more of her faithful compatriots among the commenters on the Dallas Morning News site.

There was one previous time that Duhbya greeted returning sailors. Mission accomplished!

But Bush was in office for more than seven years while our troops were in combat in Afghanistan and for nearly six while they were in combat in Iraq, and I don't recall any other time that he greeted them. He never went to greet the fallen in their caskets at Dover AFB (something President Obama had done already ten months ago), and he only went to Walter Reed to see the wounded after the scandal of the grim conditions there broke.

But Duhbya loves him some fighting men (and women).

If you are practiced well at believing in your own personal Jesus and you thank him every time another Vicodin relieves the pain of your kidney stone (Facebook again), you're well prepared to believe that a man who got 4000 Americans killed and many more maimed in a war of choice loves the troops.

They all do it

Politicians all need room to maneuver. Sometimes they have to take half a loaf or less and spin it as great. The Democrats just did on health insurance reform.

Sometimes they have to reverse themselves. Unlike Duhbya, as coached by Karl Rove, it is possible to learn something while in office (or in Duhbya's case, learn something anytime at all).

Compromise is what the Greens don't get - and especially supporters of the inflexibly perfect Ralph Nader. In democratic politics (heck, even in aristocratic politics), you don't get everything you asked for at the outset.

Democrats, on the other hand, get the necessity of compromise far too well. The insurance reform law they just passed (two cheers!) is a case in point. Had President Obama not started by compromising, we would have wound up with far better and more effective law, and it still would have received zero Republican votes.

For all the nasty things I say about the Bushists (and will continue to say), even Duhbya understood that you don't start negotiations by trying to choose a compromise that your adversary might accept. He'll just want to split the difference again in his favor.

The honest politicians have core convictions and reveal them to the voters. Sure, all pols, even the honest ones, confront from time to time the dirty job of trying to make a sow's ear into a silk purse with the right trimming and spinning. Cynical voters often conclude from this occupational hazard that all pols are insincere hacks whose only goal is to continue suckling at the public teat.

These cynical voters are not wrong about every pol.

Mitt Romney is a craven pol who is so insincere that even the Republican base, which generally shows ovine credulity whenever anyone says what they want to hear, could tell that Romney has only one principle - himself. He was pro-choice for Massachusetts. He was anti-abortion for America. He put on his new outrage like TV makeup. He was a resident of Utah for tax purposes. He lived in Massachusetts for political purposes. He loved his, ahem, home state until he had to vilify it to gain the approval of mouthbreathing yahoos on the national Republican campaign trail. He despised tax increases but raised every state government fee in sight.

Now he rails against the Democrats' health insurance reform:

Romney is taking a hard line against Obama's health care bill, and calling for repeal. "America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power," Romney said in a post at National Review. "President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation -- rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends."

Romney does this despite the Democrats' plan's strong sibling resemblance to his very plan, enacted in Massachusetts. His nefarious spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, argues that that's different, "it was designed for Massachusetts and not the entire country." Well, yeah, that disposes of all the similarities.

Maybe they all do it. But many of them trim and spin in honest furtherance of the causes they advocated when they ran. Not Mitt Romney. He leaves you guessing what he actually believes, other than in Mitt. If that too-obvious fact kills his chances among the Republicans, it couldn't happen to a more deserving cipher in a suit.

Taking sides

Ed Hornick of CNN repeatedly casts Republicans in the best possible light, but he covers his complicity in their lies with a pretense of getting the other side. Here's a clear example:

[Karl] Rove discusses the Bush administration's support for the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which Democrats and others have described as torture.

This is just normal amoral media bullshit about whether waterboarding is torture. John Yoo and Jay Bybee covered this question with a thin tissue of bullshit, and they have now escaped sanction for it, but that doesn't alter at all the plain fact that we have sent our enemies to prison and death for using torture, including waterboarding. Bushist apologists, for whom military opinion is fetish, should consider:

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

Hornick thinks he's being objective. He's really siding with the side of bullshit.

[Rove] defends the use of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs), arguing they were authorized by the Department of Justice in August 2002 and signed off by then-CIA director George Tenet. He also disputes claims that the administration failed to brief members of Congress on the use of these techniques.

"When these techniques were first authorized, Democratic leaders had been briefed about them. Their silence made them complicit in their use," he wrote. ...

He singled out House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, who charged in July 2009 that the CIA misled Congress in a secret briefing she received in 2002. Pelosi said the CIA failed to inform her and others at the briefing about harsh interrogation techniques being used on terrorism suspects.

The CIA responded by saying Pelosi was told about the harsh techniques, including waterboarding, at the classified 2002 briefing.

But the story didn't end there, despite Hornick's willingness to court Rove by implying that it did. Pelosi acknowledged being briefed on the existence of the torture memos but not on the actual use of torture the Bushists intended.

As for whether the techniques were actually torture, Rove says the president "never authorized torture," but rather "did just the opposite" by making sure the techniques "did not cross the legal line into torture."

In sum, Hornick and the big media remain willing to abet the Bushists' claim that a century of settled understanding that waterboarding is torture can still be legitimately disputed. The Bushists dispute it; it must be legitimate. Never mind their self-interested redefinition of the word. Yet Hornick and most of the media accept the word of the CIA, also oft-fetishized by Republicans, based on so-called proof that the CIA itself wrote, that Pelosi is not telling the truth.

Another day, another Republican lie

It's what they do. Dana Perino (on Fox, natch) claims:

• The shoe bomber in 2001 and the penis bomber in 2009 are "apples and oranges" even though both were goofball al Qaeda terrorists who smuggled explosives on board airplanes in their clothing, only to be subdued by passengers, Mirandized, and tried in civilian courts.
• If only the Bushists had had their military tribunals set up, they would have tried the shoe bomber in one of them. They learned their lesson on José Padilla, never mind that he wound up back in a civilian court too, insane to boot.

If there's a more obvious case of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do, I'd like to hear about it, so I can call it bullshit, too.

Perino has a smooth pink complexion, blue eyes, and blond hair. She lies for a living. She's packaging - a spokesmodel. She and Fox are a perfect fit.

Update: Glenn Greenwald had another case of Republican bullshit yesterday. Don't you dare do as I did! says Michael Mukasey.

Thirty years class war

The mainly Bushist record of going oh for the aughts in job creation is the result of thirty years of Washington consensus that the investment class's financial interests are far more important than even the middle class's employment. Our elite leaders didn't set out to stop job creation. They just didn't care enough to make policy that put it ahead of rewarding the creation of fraudulent investment vehicles.

None dare speak its name

Well, none in the big media, anyway:

The breach of "journalistic objectivity" comes not from calling this conduct what it is, but from refusing to do so -- from obfuscating what took place by using soothing euphemisms and according equal deference to the plainly false denials of those who did it...

Torture, war crimes, atrocities. The Bushists did them all in our name. The national media refuse to hold them criminally accountable. The Democrats refuse too.

A culture that cannot stomach calling acts by their well-known names is in deep trouble.