Am I repeating myself here? I searched the site, and couldn’t find them. Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker Rick Gretch, and Stevie Winwood. Blind Faith, In the Presence of the Lord.
And as a bonus, Clapton and Winwood together more recently (better audio quality for sure) reprising a song from Blind Faith, Can’t Find My Way Home:
Republicans must be immune from cognitive dissonance. There are plenty of examples, but here’s one that truly needs to be more widely known.
We are told by Rove and his ilk that Democrats would be criminalizing “policy differences” if they so much as think about investigating the Bush era war criminals.
At the same time they threaten to filibuster someone who is on the other side of that policy divide, Obama’s nominee to head up the Office of Legal Counsel, who happens to oppose torture. Make no mistake about it, their reasons for opposing her, after you strip away all the bullshit, is that she is anti-torture. So, a person who is anti-torture is fair game for Republican attacks, but actual torturers are off limits.
Speaking of hypocrisy and inability to see ourselves as others see us, someone with time on their hands could have a good time taking apart Arlen Specter’s recently published article in the New York Review of Books entitled The Need to Roll Back Presidential Power Grabs. When I read it I was stunned. If I didn’t know better I would have thought, based on this article, that Specter was a fearless opponent of the Bush power grabs, standing up for truth, justice and the American way. He even makes a pitch for keeping the courts open to lawsuits against the phone companies (substituting the government as the defendant) after he enabled that unconstitutional immunity statute in the first place. Specter is in a bind these days. He is tacking to the right to protect himself in the Republican primary, but he badly wants to protect his unearned reputation for moderation and independence. In fact, when push came to shove (or even just to poke) he always caved. The article is full of the self congratulatory use of the personal pronoun. It would be the work of a weekend, at least, to do the googling necessary to demonstrate how mendacious his article is. It is just jam packed with lies, distortions, and special pleading. Unfortunately, this is not a weekend that I can devote to this worthy endeavor. Here’s hoping someone will.
The Cheney “defense” to torture is that committing that crime enabled his henchmen to obtain information that “saved lives”. That may be, but probably is not, true. Of course, if we’re going to tote up lives saved, we also have to tote up lives lost to the terrorists our torture tactics created.
But today we find that in fact, Cheney wasn’t looking for facts, he was looking for cover. He ordered prisoners tortured to get evidence for something the CIA told him was not true: that there was a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. There was no such link, but Cheney ordered more and more torture in order to get “evidence” for what he wanted to hear. We should also note in passing that we are not talking the “ticking time bomb” scenario here. The standard Cheney justification for torture-necessary in order to get information about an imminent attack-doesn’t apply.
The torture techniques employed were perfectly suited to get the evidence Cheney was seeking, since many of them were developed by the Communists to wring false confessions out of their prisoners. For my own part I’ve always believed that all forms of torture are designed to get false confessions, since generally speaking the torture only stops when the torturer hears what he wants to hear.
If true, and we all know in our hearts that this all these charges are true (and to prove it I suggest we waterboard Cheney and ask him) this is further proof that Cheney has committed war crimes of the highest order: he ordered people tortured in order to get them to lie. It is self evident that such lies will save no lives, though they may cost many lives, as they surely did. Even Cheney’s inadmissible defense is inapplicable to the case.
Let us hope that the organ that passes for Cheney’s heart keeps beating at least until the jury comes in with the guilty verdict and the prison door slams behind him.
UPDATE: I must respond to one of my right wing commenters, who claims that torturing helped foil a plot to bomb the Library Tower in Los Angeles. In order to accept that, one must accept the proposition that time goes backwards:
Some in the media have interpreted the memo’s statement that the use of harsh interrogation techniques on Mohammed “led to the discovery” of the Library Tower plot as evidence that the use of these tactics was necessary for intelligence officials to thwart the plot. But as Slate.com’s Timothy Noah noted on April 21, that claim conflicts with the “chronology” of events put forth on multiple occasions by the Bush administration. For instance, in a February 9, 2006, White House press briefing that Noah cited, Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend noted that Mohammed was not captured until more than a year after the individuals planning the Library Tower attacks had concluded that the plot had been “canceled.” Noah also noted that a May 23, 2007, Bush administration fact sheet stated that the administration “broke up” the Library Tower plot “in 2002” — before Mohammed was captured.
But I’ll say it again, using a timeworn cliche, the end doesn’t justify the means, particularly when one doesn’t know beforehand what end one is likely to reach. We are no more justified in torturing than Osama bin Laden is in killing innocent people in order to bring about his Caliphate. And I would ask my right wing friend, are our enemies allowed to torture our soldiers when they capture them?
Hillary Clinton has turned out to be a brilliant pick for Secretary of State. Here she is pointing out the obvious to a Republican spouting a Drudge inspired talking point.
We’ve come to a sorry point when the Secretary of State has to defend the president for not acting like a jackass when he meets with world leaders, but that’s where we are these days.
Now that Obama is inching ever so slowly toward prosecuting the torturers in chief, Dick Cheney’s bizarre behavior grows ever more perplexing. One would think that a potential criminal defendant might keep his mouth shut, rather than admitting all the elements of the crime with which he may be charged. Perhaps he should consult with competent counsel.
He has been telling the sycophantic Sean Hannity that the torture worked, which we all know is a dubious proposition at best. But from a legal standpoint, it is probably totally irrelevant. A murder can’t defend his act by arguing that the person killed deserved to die. The torture statutes and treaties presuppose that the person being tortured is an enemy of the torturer, and therefore they presuppose that torture might in fact yield something of use. But torture is banned completely, that fact notwithstanding. These issues are ultimately not decided in the court of public opinion, where Cheney would likely lose anyway. They are resolved in a courtroom, and likely a courtroom in Washington D.C., hardly the place I would choose to go on trial were I Dick Cheney.
He really should shut up. If prosecution comes, all the prosecutor might need to do is roll the tapes with Sean.
Now that Obama has kicked the torture can back to Holder, Holder could do the country a favor by kicking it on to a special prosecutor. And who would be more fit for the role than Patrick Fitzgerald, who took down Scooter Libby. He already knows the territory and has proven his bona fides.
Sure, the right-wing would go bat shit crazy, but is that a bad thing? They are already unhinged, and there’s no point in trying to placate them. At this point, it’s probably better to get them into even more of a lather, since their fulminations don’t seem to be doing their cause much good.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
Perhaps one doesn’t qualify as insane if one repeats what others have already done, but if you expect different results when you repeat the actions of others your mental health is still in question.
What to make of the parade of Republicans who have attempted to distance themselves or their party from Rush Limbaugh, only to eat their own words within days or hours. Why go there, knowing what’s happened to those who have trod that path before. And why, if you’re going to try, would you serve yourself a meal of the same words those pioneers have eaten before.
The latest to chow down is Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt, who actually echoed people like Michael Steele, by referring to Limbaugh as an “entertainer”. Not only did he diss Limbaugh, but he used the same terminology that forced Steele to his knees. My own theory for this bizarre behavior is as follows. These questions are usually posed to the hapless Congresscritter in question by rational people. In this case, it was the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. It is very difficult, even for someone as brain dead as a Republican, to admit to sentient humans that they owe fealty to Rush Limbaugh. They can’t bring themselves to do it, particularly if they are speaking to someone who is able to employ the most deadly threat to any Republican talking point: the follow up question. Even for a Republican, it’s not easy to admit that you take your marching orders from a drug crazed guy with serious mental health issues.
So, we have this parade of Republicans, each of whom does the same thing, each of whom presumably hopes against all odds that things will turn out differently this time.
Jay Bybee, who wrote one of the recently released torture memos, is now a federal judge on the Court of Appeals. That’s one step below the Supreme Court, for anyone who’s counting.
Lately there has been a lot of calls for his impeachment, something he would richly deserve. Some members of Congress have even oh-so-cautiously indicated that maybe they should go there.
Whether he’s committed an impeachable offense is a good question. I don’t know if you can impeach someone for an action they took before they assumed the office in question. If so, then he would seem to warrant impeachment and conviction, since he’s guilty of war crimes. As a practical matter, it seems unlikely that a conviction would be secured, since Republicans would argue that conspiring to commit torture is not anywhere near as bad as lying about a blow job, and they would refuse to vote to convict. As we learned in the Clinton case, it takes 67 votes to convict, and this time the super-majority requirement is in the Constitution, and not in Harry Reid’s head.
There is one sanction, albeit an insufficient one, that could be imposed. Bybee is from California, and he’s on the 9th Circuit Bench, there’s a reasonably good chance that he’s a member of the California Bar. If not, he may be a member of the DC bar. Those bar associations, as well as those in a host of other states, might be inclined to take action against him. He should be disbarred. That would be an insufficient sanction to say the least, but it would at least put the legal profession on record, and it would be a humiliating blow to a federal judge.
This is our weekend for party functions. Yesterday we honored Nancy Driscoll and Nancy DeMarinis in Groton. As I said on yesterday’s post, there were actually four Nancys of note there (adding in Nancy DiNardo and Nancy Wyman). I couldn’t get a picture of all four together, for logistical reasons, but I’ll make up a bit for it now with this picture, of three of them (the three Nancy Ds) at the Joe Courtney Fundraiser at Scott Bates’ house in Stonington.
And speaking of Scott, here he is with Joe:
Joe spoke for about ten minutes, and it appears that he’s pretty clearheaded about the political risks to the Democrats going forward. Everything is riding on the recovery plan, and like many, Joe is a little dubious about the TARP side of the equation.
Scott, by the way, has done a great job as our State Central Committee member since taking the post about a year ago.
My wife and I had to head into New London this morning to pick up our latest acquisition at the Hygienic, so we decided to go out for breakfast somewhere in the Whaling City. We searched around on-line and found The Broken Yolk, which is near the southerly end of Montauk Avenue.
In the past, when I’ve recommended eateries, I’ve immediately gotten comments telling me I’m all wet, and there are better restaurants around in the particular category at issue. I’m certainly ready to be educated about New London breakfast places. We took a stab in the dark with this place, based solely on the fact that they had a good web site. We found the service friendly and the food was good. There are tables outside, which were fairly heavily occupied, considering that this is one of those spring days that are comfortable provided you keep moving a bit. I.e., people were willing to put up with a bit of a chill for a good breakfast.
The place was crowded when we went, apparently due to the influx of motorcyclists on their way to some sort of event at Ocean Beach.
Anyway, if you’re looking for breakfast in New London, give The Broken Yolk a try.