With President Bush about to make his fifth speech in three days basking in the imagined milestone of Thursday’s Iraqi election, the majority of us will have his robodundant mantras reverberating cold-sweatingly through our psyches – which are beginning to collectively grasp the reality of the moment as a result of prolonged and forced disconnect.
The president signed John McCain’s anti-torture bill Thursday, after it glided to Congressional approval, despite the BushCo argument that the bill’s too tight a harness on intelligence operations by Bush, Cheney, Dana Rohrabacher, and the handful of other government officials who exist in a certain state of paranoia dominated by inevitable disaster.
You see, this president has never vetoed a bill, and he never will.
Because he doesn’t have to. By Friday, but one half day after Bush’s photo op with the oft-Rovictimized John McCain, David Addington, Scooter Libby’s successor as Cheney’s chief of staff and co-creator of the new hit video game “Grand Theft Democracy: Above the Law,” authored a presidential order PRACTICALLY VOIDING the torture-banning content of McCain’s bill.
Eric Schmitt quietly broke this story in the packed Saturday NY Times:
Mr. Addington, who was a primary architect of the presidential order, argued in the debates earlier this year that by explicitly prohibiting evidence obtained by torture, the administration would raise an unnecessary red flag. suggesting at least implicitly that prisoners in American custody were, in fact, being tortured, officials said.
Not to implicate that President Bush is a “flip-flopper,” as I understand that he must often change and disguise his actions and statements to protect our national security. See, if HE foils the next 9/11 plot with his secret plans, he’ll be able to one up the CIA, FBI, DHS, and Defense when he saves the day, inevitably defusing an active bomb MacGyver-style with seconds before RFK Stadium — or as some national security mavens have suggested — San Francisco, is blown into dust.
In what I wish I could say is completely unrelated news, NBC coincidentally reported last week that the Pentagon has been abusing its privileges by failing to destroy the records of domestic citizens under surveillance within the required six months.
President Bush is “stealing our civil liberties,” posts Pacific Views.
Rumsfeld’s 22 minutes of talking about “whatever is is we’re doing,” in which he insists that in every war, what the public views as bad turns out to be good in the end. “Just read a Civil War book,” he says.
Frightening when the leader of the military is basically making a halftime speech in the first game of the season, conceding to his team that when they end up in the playoffs, nobody will remember how brutally we got our ass beat in the first game.
Sadly, many Americans will agree, only because its easy to say, “he’s right,” when citing historical patterns. But to rely on hopes that history will probably repeat itself is the most disconnected and frightening thing I’ve ever heard. This BETTER not be science! As I understand, history includes EVERYTHING that has been recorded to have happened in the history of humankind (or, since the first Intelligent human was Designed, it wouuld seem very important to argue). But when past leaders, mob bosses, islamofascists and even the offspring of God have decided to stay the course with ideas or actions that were widely frowned upon — the only GOOD things seem to come out of it when THEY are history.
Rummy even goes back to his ol’ “I offered my resignation twice,” before saying “what I actually said was, do you believe you’d be better with me in command or not.”
Roger Cressey, former deputy of Counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, offered his analysis in the Sunday Washington Post:
…[W]hen terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and a wing of the Pentagon, “the amount of domestic surveillance is an admission of fundamental gaps in our understanding of what is happening in our country.”
Dr. Sanity has a full diagnosis of the administration’s freshly opened sores.
This moment of suspended disbelief sponsored by our fundamental gaps in understanding…
