Cerebral Flatulence

Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn of the WaPo report that the Obama Administration has yet more work to do to clean up after Cousin Dubya and his gang. And all of a sudden, now that Our Problem is finally in our laps and back yards (where it was all the time, while many of us were getting high on jingoism and xenophobia), everyone’s yelling and screaming about how “We CAN’T put these terrorists and Spawn of Satan near MY [school][country club][gym][soccer field].”

Um, grow up. Do you still think that America is a small Texas town, run by the judge and the car dealer and the insurance agent, where everyone stays in their place and the ‘disruptive elements’ get shot on a country road or tossed into solitary on a state plantation?

We deliberately set out to create this problem with no interest in a solution. Perhaps the True Believers thought that Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” would make real planning for trials irrelevant.

There’s a goofy idea floating around to return Alcatraz Island to its former role as the nation’s top SuperMax prison. Frankly, I like it. From 1935 to 1962 Alcratraz was watertight, unless Clint Eastwood really did make it to shore the last year the prison was open. Every escape attempt ended badly, and there are more great whites in California waters than there used to be. With modern techniques, DHS could turn Alcatraz into a Lucite paperweight with Bad Guys embedded inside.
Add a Navy or Coast Guard gunboat, ready to shell the island into rubble if there’s trouble.

The best part? We couldn’t shut away our “worst of the worst” out of sight in some undisclosed location. No, the most dangerous people to the USA would be kept in a box in the middle of one of our largest cities and ports, in full view of the world and us citizens. Anyone could at any time see where the detainees are and how they’re doing. And, we’d most publicly own our s**t.

Let me also say that I lived in The City for six years and got my undergraduate degree at S. F. State, so I’m not out to foist a turd on Baghdad by the Bay.. (Herb Caen’s old tag would take an unfortunate turn, wouldn’t it?) If anything, San Franciscans would make the best guardians of danger and of American principles.

The New York Times’ Scott Shane analyzes AG nominee Eric Holder’s statements yesterday at his Senate confirmation hearing. Mr. Holder emphatically stated that waterboarding is torture, which is obvious, and opened a big ol’ can of worms for (soon-to-be) former Bush Administration officials, and possibly career civil servants.

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.

[…]

In recent weeks, Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other officials have strongly defended their counterterrorism methods and credited them with preventing attacks on the United States since 2001. Their implicit argument — that the Obama administration should not question policies that protected Americans — was made more explicit and personal by Michael V. Hayden, the departing C.I.A. director, in a session with reporters on Thursday.

“If I’m going to go to an officer and say, ‘I’ve got a truth commission, or I want to post all your e-mails, or, well, we’ve got this guy from the bureau who wants to talk to you,’ ” Mr. Hayden said, it would discourage such a C.I.A. officer from taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.

“We have no right to ask this guy to bet his kid’s college education on who’s going to win the off-year election,” Mr. Hayden said, alluding to legal fees that such a C.I.A. officer might face.

Excuse me?

We, The People, elected by popular vote, and the Electoral College confirmed, the incoming Commander-in-Chief, and we expect his principles to be followed by his subordinates.

We, The People, would like some real, public proof that the secret policemen have in fact protected us from the Bad Guys.

We, The People, would like to stop having our phones tapped, our persons searched, our travel interfered with, and our lives endangered by overaged cowboys.

We, The People, expect that when a person takes the CIA’s oath and pay that (s)he knows what they’re getting into, which especially includes “taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.”

We, The People, are paying for that CIA officer’s kid’s college education, often to the detriment of our own kids’ needs.

We, The People, are not holding a gun to this CIA officer’s head and forcing him to remain in our service. As so many stiffs have brayed over that last few years, personal choices entail personal accountability. If you choose to follow an order to commit criminal acts, you can choose to say No. The 20th Century taught us that much.

Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks, “When a shady pol squeezes, where do you turn?”

“It’s a big step, but I think we’d have less mischief if now and then one of those who gets a shady proposal from a pol called back and said, ‘You know, I’m going to take this down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and if they say this is cool, we’ll talk about it.’ “

Yes, politicians are fellow citizens doing their jobs, so hey, I should lighten up, huh?

No.

These fellow citizens use other peoples’ money to get jobs that give them power tell the rest of us how to run our lives. The folks who pay the piper call the tune, and despite much effort, the power brokers who fund our politicians will not permit the rest of us to meddle in their deliberations. We, the hoi polloi, must buy back our governments from the perennnial few. And politicians should remember that they are temp workers, hired for the moment to manage our collective affairs.

Maybe we should have citizen “minders” to act as revolving Jiminy Crickets for our hard-pressed legislators and executives. Joe and Jane Bleaux’s who’d keep an eye on things for a week at a time, like jury duty.

If politicians don’t like the new order, why, then, they can find other work. You know, just like the rest of us.

Cross-posted from DANGER ROOM (I do hold forth there somewhat , commenting on Somali piracy:

At the risk of being crude, what’s the squeamishness about addressing this matter? The big powers have no compunction about using force majeure and accepting civilian casualties, and who the heck backs Somalia? If century-old firms can be executed in the blink of an eye, and heavy collateral damage is a daily cost of policy, why stop at half measures?

Turn that country into a free-fire zone and weapons test range. Kill every living thing that moves. Load B-52’s with napalm and incinerate Mogadishu from Diego Garcia. The country can’t feed itself, sprays s**t and has no natural resources. A salutary dose of Schrecklichkeit (so much more satisfying a term than ’shock and awe’). Effing get it over with.

OR…decide that’s not who we want to become and get serious about real international development. Either kill the poor or lift them up, but don’t drift.

If my tone is not sufficiently obvious, I am no more advocating genocide in Somalia than Jonathan Swift advocated Irish cannibalism. I am simply sick and tired of public bombast and private calculation. Such is the way of the world, but that’s one reason why I write this blog — so I can say how much I don’t have to like it. As always, if you find my words nettlesome or offensive, please exercise your power of free will and jump to another website…

Bwah-hah-ah-hah!!!!

Our lamentable society in miniature. It’s not academic — the stakes are too high — but this obnoxious brawl we’ve had in the national living room over the Thanksgiving turkey for the last 30 years will either stop, or our long slide into the Old Empires Retirement Home will become permanent.

Yeah, I know, I seem to be fulla spleen this week. F*** it. If public figures choose to act like the hind ends of animals, that’s their choice. But I don’t have to like it.

Here’s a story about the sort of shitheels who’ve bullied the country for the last couple of decades. When I was in high school, the dad of a partying buddy of mine was a big Republican fundraiser in our part of the county. He was rough on his kid, loud-mouthed about welfare mothers and high taxes, and raised a pile of cash for Reagan’s campaigns. My buddy wound up stealing checks out of my parents’ office and getting sent to military school; his dad wound up doing hard time for tax evasion and other sins. A real family-values kinda guy with just the moral standing to rail against my good gay friends in LA and San Francisco. (Whose kids, by the way, are successful, honest people.)

If I were John McCain, a man whom I admire in several ways, I would have a come-to-Jesus meeting right quick with Republican honchos about corralling the contempt conservatives might harbor in their bosoms for the rest of us. Kicking campaign co-chair Phil Gramm to the curb after his candid assessment of his fellow citizens was expectable but a little late. Gramm’s comments join some other outbursts of charm from very wealthy, very cold, very powerful Americans:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in the wake of the U.S. invasion

Vice-President Dick Cheney’s retort to Senator Patrick Leahy (D, Vermont)

President Bush’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina

What is it with the neocons? Conservative philosophy has much to recommend it; two of my greatest heroes, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, are conservative demigods. I’m pretty sure I’d strongly disagree with them on many matters were they alive today; and of course, since they’re dead, I have their whole lives, warts and all, available for my critique. On the other hand, both men were combat veterans, accomplished intellectuals and worldly humanists. Roosevelt’s stewardship and trust-busting, and Churchill’s restraint as a democratic leader fighting fascism, would be welcome changes from chickenhawk bullies and corporate looting of the commons.

Oh, yeah. Michael Savage. His venomous invective is enlightening, too. I suppose he may have issues in the closet about child rearing, and I guess they stay in the closet the way Rush Limbaugh’s monkey gets to live out of sight and without censure. I sure hope that when I make the money these guys make that I won’t lose my soul.

This is the most terrifying thing I’ve learned in a long time:

Before the Bosnian War, before he became the civil leader of the Bosnian Serb regime, Radovan Karadzic made his living as…

…a psychiatrist.

He was practicing his trade when he was arrested yesterday. So the architect of Sarajevo and Srebrenitza routinely handled other peoples’ psyches, and presumably strove to heal them, while at the same time crafting careful plans for genocide.

He apparently was able to think and order these things in private while solidly and confidently denying them on the international stage for years.

Like the Atlanta Olympics terrorist Eric Rudolph, Karadzic evaded capture for years with the help of a sympathetic public, who shared his thoughts and backed his actions. Who might support such acts in the future.

He joins the American psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, architects of the SERE program and allegedly the designers of the special techniques used at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Bagrham, and the black sites.

Two counselors I know and love have long said of their colleagues, “some therapists split the word and become ‘the rapists’.”

Danger Room notes a Washington Post story about the Air Force spending millions on “executive travel pods” for their generals. My commentary (cross-posted on that worthy blog):

The point is not that WaPo found a minor story or that the AF is being unfairly dissed.

The point is that senior leadership thought this was a good idea, pursued its implementation and used counter-terrorism funds for a non-essential, trivial and wasteful purpose , SOLELY for the aggrandizement of executives.

The nouveau-patrician attitude afoot that believes executives (military, governmental, business, etc.) are entitled to lordly perks and deference is a queer phenomenon in our democracy. But then, most Americans don’t want a democratic society. They want to be above the hoi polloi, behind a guarded gate, on the homeowner’s committee, in the executive council, as part of the A-team, and sitting at the right hand of the master and reaping the rewards due to The Best People. You know, that kiss-up-kick-down world.

Let the generals ride in airliners. Heck, talk Boeing into throwing in a few 777’s into their tanker deal. You know, the one where it doesn’t matter whether you can do the job, it’s whether you can whine and twist arms enough to get your way.

So the finance industry meth lab in the basement of the nation caught fire and is threatening the rest of the structure…we just went through this, didn’t we?