Needlenose

Via Raw Story, another media figure has had to learn the hard way that water torture — excuse me, waterboarding — really is torture, after all:

Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture. It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul.

… “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. [...]

… “If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.

Mancow joins Christopher Hitchens and at least two other journalists in learning what Steve Benen points out should be obvious to anyone (“If this wasn’t torture, we wouldn’t have done it. The whole point is to do something so horrific that the detainee would feel compelled to give up information.”).  But even if this is the least efficient way in the world to teach people morals, maybe in these times we have to settle for what we can get.

Matt Yglesias nominates Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard to be next in line for personal education, but I think most of the rest of us would agree the most worthy “volunteer” is Sean Hannity of Faux News.

However, I’ll hasten to add that I understand those who argue that these grotesque experiments should stop. First of all, waterboarding is wrong.  It’s torture, and that’s nothing to joke about.  Even worse, the more people think of it as something that’s “cool” to try, the greater the odds that some teenager somewhere will do it carelessly and die.

Even so, there’s a point to calling the bluff of the posturing phonies who advocate torture publicly.  As anyone familiar with framing understands, the purpose of their argument is to shore up the right-wing pose of being morally self-assured tough guys who are willing to do what it takes to defend America.

The truth, which isn’t brought up nearly often enough in the cable back-and-forth, is exactly the opposite:  At a time when America was tested, these cowards folded, throwing in the hand on the precise values they should have been protecting.

So I’m not above rude tactics in pointing out their weakness, their irresponsibility, and their hypocrisy.   If Sean Hannity and others won’t back up their talk about waterboarding, I’m fine with humiliating them using the same derisive language they’ve been aiming at the left for years.

They’re cowards, and moral failures.  And they need to be told that to their faces.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I’ve spent the last 8 years called the Republicans the Repugs.  But the Dumbocrats are also screwed up.  The one thing their devilish counterparts had going for them was party unity.  As wrong as they always were, they worked together like pack animals to destroy America.

Check out the Dumbocrats – on the eve of having a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate – they can’t back their own man in the White House – the stupid jerk-wads won’t close Gitmo.  WTF?

Harry Reid has got to go!

As you might have guessed after years Shrubyian neglect, US students are falling behind in the life sciences.  And if you guessed this phenomena was regional, you’d be right:

The report grouped states into four categories based on performance in the four areas measured: leaders of the pack, second tier, middling performance and lagging performance.

Leaders included eight Northeast and Midwest states, including Ohio, while those lagging in performance consisted mainly of Southern states.

You think maybe if those states taught kids proper science instead of creationist bullshit, and that Eve came from a zygote rather than a man’s rib, they would do better on their life science exams?

In thematically-related advice, Jeebus might save your diabetic kid’s life you if beg enough, but administering insulin is generally considered more effective.  The Lord helps those who help themselves!

"I particularly liked the child soldiers and flower-lady suicide bomber!

After much effort, the Sri Lankan government has finally decapitated the so-called Tamil Tigers, one of the more odious groups of guerrilla warriors in recent times.

Now is the time for the government to heal the rift caused by decades of a pointless and deadly civil war by reaching out to its Tamil  population and address their legitimate concerns for civil liberties and representation in commercial and political life.

Jeremy Scahill of AlterNet claims that torture and brutality are alive and well at Gitmo under Obama:

“…IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner’s head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them — sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.”

And speaking of Obama carrying on evil Shrubyian policies, in spite of his attempt to suppress the release of the additional Abu Ghraib torture photos from yesteryear, some of them have been leaking out.  Follow this link if the ‘classic’ Abu Ghraib pics didn’t make you queasy: http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2006/02/15/1139890768716.html.

In all the commentary surrounding Cheney’s latest media blitz, most observers I’ve seen have missed the most pertinent thing about his argument. That argument can be boiled down to a few simple messages:

- we were right to use torture
- torture kept us safe, and gave us intelligence that saved lives, and
- Obama’s decision to forego torture (and all the other extralegal escapades of the Bush years) puts us at risk.

The fact that Cheney is taken seriously as a commentator on this topic, after he, his party, and their firmly-held beliefs plunged us into two losing wars and The Great Recession, demonstrates the impotence of the “liberal” media. The fact that he, and the Republican party, have succeeded (partly through the bumbling ineptness of Pelosi) to turn this conversation to what Democrats knew and when they knew it, illustrates the inability of the Democratic Party to stir the pot on these issues like the deeply experienced Republican machine can.

WIth all the petty tit-for-tat, however, it becomes easy to overlook the explosive strategy behind Cheney’s position. The fact that Republicans are influencing the debate in Washington, as evidenced by Obama’s acquiescence in military affairs this week…that’s the short game. The long game is far more insidious – Cheney and his party are betting that there will be another spectacular terrorist incident, and they’re setting the seeds for the only rescue position Republicans are capable of at this moment – the big-daddy, keep you safe party that’s not afraid to ‘break a few eggs’.

Think about the narrative that a terror catastrophe enables. There’s Cheney, reminding the world on “Meet the Press” that he told us so. There’s the elder wise man (believe it or not) George W., reminding regular folks how tough but effective the Bush adminstration was, with all the softening benefits of nostalgia that moves the Palin yokels so effectively. And there is the chorus of neo-conservatives, reviving their debunked mythologies alleging that American power can control the world.

So, Democrats can console themselves all day with the comforting notion that Cheney is the worst possible spokesman for the sinking Republicans, like we see them doing on every talking-heads show, but he may have the last laugh.  If the worst comes to pass, and the forces arrayed against American power are again successful in perpetrating an atrocity, how long will it be before the Republicans, and, unbelievably, even Dick himself, seem like a comfort to a polarized and terrified America?

Betting that another terror extravaganza will hit us, and will benefit their party if it does,  may be cynicism to the nth degree, but remember…this is Dick Cheney we’re talking about.

I did some further reflection on the ‘same tired strategy’ issue, and I think the crux of the problem is ‘same tired premise.’  Although Obama renamed the ‘War on Terror’ to the Global Contingency Operation, nothing has essentially changed.

After the USSR imploded, the reactionaries were left with gays, aborted fetuses, illegal aliens and Libruhls as The Enemy.   Unfortunately (for them), you can’t justify ridiculous levels of defense spending to fight that  enemy, so their corporate masters in the defense contractor sector were unsatisfied.

9/11 gave Shrubya & Cheney all they needed to create a new bugbear to replace Raygun’s defunct ‘Evil Empire’ – a “global conspiracy” of Islamic terrorists, dedicated to destroying Pax America through the use of terror.  They fanned the flames of fear mercilessly through ‘doomsday’ speeches, Threat Level warnings and airport strip searches.

The reality-based community’s arguments that these threats required greater intelligence and coordinated international police actions were laughed at and shrugged off by the Repugs who for a time completely dominated the MSM.

In the case of Afghanistan, the original goal, was to catch Osama Bin Laden ‘dead or alive,’ neutralize the threat of the other architects of 9/11 and their sympathizers, the Taliban, then  install and nurture a Western-friendly government and do some nation building to eliminate the terrorist ‘breeding ground.’   Of course Osama and the Taliban had plenty of time to escape into the ‘failed statelet’ of Western Pakistan, which continually threatens to distabilize the installed Karzai government, forcing us to remain and even escalate our presence just to stay in place.

Osama accepted this status quo and just did his first escalation – I guarantee there will be more.  The original premise – that we are in a life-or-death struggle with a global, violent fundamentalist Islam – remains.  The follow-on reactionary addition to the premise is that this threat can and should be dealt with via military means, and that by doing so, we can make America ‘safe from Terrorism.’

Current reactionary talking points revolve around Dem rule making America ‘less safe,’ for anything from (re)outlawing torture and closing Gitmo, to cutting boondoggle projects from the defense budget.

Obama needs to attack this premise head-on, or it will continue to drive him down the doomed policy path we are currently on.

Here are the reality-based premises that he needs to push forward to counter the reactionary bullshit.

First, the government can’t make us completely safe from terror.  It’s impossible.  It’s a cheap and easy tactic easily employed by malcontents.  Suspending civil liberties and employing harsh tactics internally just create more and nastier malcontents.

Terrorists come in many flavors.  Notice how the reactionaries freaked out over the government’s report on the danger of our own home-grown, reactionary terrorists.  No mystery there – they want us to ignore the Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax Mailer behind the curtain and focus on the Islamic Fundamentalist bugbear.    This is a critical point – even if we were somehow able to magically lock down all of the Islamic world, we still wouldn’t be safe from terror!

I won’t belabor the third point, that massive occupations of jihadi-prone foreigners punctuated by kid-killing blind airstrikes creates more terrorists – that point has been beaten to death over the last 8 years.

This leads me back to the premise specifically underpinning the current Afghanistan policy – if we pull out, the Karzai government will fall at the hands of the Taliban, leading to failed state and becoming another breeding ground/homebase for terrorists.   Here is the crux of the problem – the Al Qaeda home base has shifted to W. Pakistan, a failed statelet, and neither Shrubya or Obama hase the inclination to take the war there.  Ergo – stalement.

How is that different from just letting Afghanistan fall again?  It’s just a slightly bigger breeding ground.  And going back to the War on Terror – isn’t the supposed Islamic Fundamentalist terror threat supposed to be global?  There are no end of Islamic ‘failed states’ out that, or near-failed states, that could harbor another head of the terrorist hydra – admittedly not as well financed as the Pashtun poppy-growers, but not without access to other funding sources.

Bottom line is that Obama needs to start a serious dialog on the broke-ass reactionary fear-mongering premises, attacking the ‘War on Terror’ head on, not just relabeling it and continuing the policy.  And Evil Dick is giving Obama a perfect opportunity to have the dialog.  Obama could take the high ground and just debate him directly, tear him to shreds.  Or we could actually have that truth commission, but open it up to include all the lying and bullshit perpetuated by Cheney to sell the war as well as investigations into renditions, torture and the Valerie Plame scandal.

Otherwise, expect us to continue down this losing path at the cost of tens of thousands of more Afghani and Iraqi civilian lives, hundreds more of our soldiers and budget-busting costs -  and ultimately making this war *the* election question of 2012.

If you thought that by electing Obama we’d get out of the Shrubyian quagmires any sooner, you’d be sadly mistaken.  It looks like Obama is following Shrubya’s brokeass ‘strategy,’ i.e. engagements without an exit strategy, no clear goals and a continuing drain of soldiers and cash.

In a move right out of the Shrubya playbook, Obama is replacing one general with another in Afghanistan, saying that it’s time for some ‘fresh thinking.’  Seriously, Mr. President, the only ‘fresh thinking’ we need is from you!!  It doesn’t matter whom you put in the hot seat, he/she will continue to muddle along until such time as it becomes clear what they need to achieve in order to get out of the quicksand.

And in the case of Afghanistan, as long as the Taliban live free and untouchable just across the border this war will drag on for as long as we wish to expend the lives.  Our ally Pakistan will neutralize the Taliban?  Don’t make me laugh, Mr. President, they are already busy getting their asses kicked by the Taliban’s tribal hosts.

And in case you’ve forgotten, Shrubya already tried launching a ‘death from above’ strategy in both quagmires and learned the hard way that for every ‘terrorist’ you kill, you create dozens of pissed-off new terrorists.

If you want to eliminate the Taliban threat to Karzai and ‘new’ Afghanistan, you need to take the war to them…on the ground…where they are.  If you can’t or won’t do that, then get us the hell out of there.  Fresh thinking, Mr. President, fresh thinking!

From the Washington Post this morning:

U.S. to Wind Down Help for Some Banks

Stress Tests Find Most Can Absorb Losses

The government signaled yesterday that its financial rescue efforts may have reached their high-water mark, announcing that the much-anticipated “stress tests” of 19 large banks showed that only one, GMAC, was likely to need additional taxpayer aid and that it would begin to unwind assistance for the healthiest firms.

Despite a deepening recession and projections that banks will continue to lose money, the government will require the firms to increase their combined capital by as little as $9.5 billion. [. . .]

From the Onion earlier this week:

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about. [. . .]

I’m just sayin’…

Remember this?

The new guy’s stepping up to the challenge, though he needs help from his sidekick: