Rush: Republicans are Like Blacks in Jim Crow Era

I rarely pay much attention to the pile of bile that is Right Wing radio host, Rush Limbaugh. For me, it s kinda like a boycott - his product is outrage therefore if I buy into his deliberately outrageous provocations I become his customer. I have no desire to buy anything from El Rushbo.

But sometimes, even the picketers outside the store have to tip their hat when a retailer stocks an especially remarkable bit of merchandise. And so, I feel force to break my self imposed discipline to report to you that apparently Republicans in America are being lynched by angry mobs of Democrats. Or something:

If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and Constitutional rights, it's for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today's oppressed minority. It knows how to behave as one. It shuts up. It doesn't cross bridges, it doesn't run into the Bull Connors of the Democrat Party. It is afraid of the firehouses and the dogs, it's compliant. The Republican Party today has become totally complacent. They are an oppressed minority, they know their position, they know their place. They go to the back of the bus, they don't use the right restroom and the right drinking fountain, and they shut up.

Ah. Right, then. If EVER a civil rights movement were needed, claims Signor Rush, it is needed for the mildly mentally repressed Republican party. Certainly it was not needed for the group of people who were actually being forced to the back of the bus, treated as legally unequal, deprived of voting rights and violently murdered in appallingly high numbers by men in hoods.

Indeed no. For THAT, you see, was merely an example of the glories of our federalism in which we recognise the inalienable rights of the state.

Rather, we should have held fire at the time and saved our organising for the inevitable moment when, 40 or so years on the Republican party would peacefully lose an election because they have so badly screwed up the country that almost no one still agrees with them about anything. That, apparently, is what it means to be an oppressed minority.

Ya know, Rush, just because you're a minority doesn't mean you're being oppressed.

But furthermore - why is language like this allowed to persist? Slavery and the later civil rights abuses perpetrated against African Americans in this country were an American atrocity - an original sin of the nation that we have fortunately begun to overcome. I'm not saying that we should hang our heads every day for shame, or that those of us who were born after the worst moments of oppression had ended necessarily bear personal responsibility for it.

But surely, we owe more to those who were its victims than this kind of glib comparison, yes? People were rounded up by angry mobs by moonlight and beaten then cut, then hung and then set on fire. Thousands of them were. In living memory. Even generations after we had to fight a war to ensure their ancestors could no longer be enslaved.

When people make these kinds of facile comparisons between whatever is the current Outrage Du Jour and the Holocaust perpetrated against Jews, the Anti-Defamation League has made it a habit to object in the strongest possible language, on the grounds that this cheapens the memory of the real victims. I can't see any reason why it should be acceptable to treat the real victims of the Jim Crow South with any less consideration. Even if you are a professional merchant of slime.

Oppression? I'll show you oppression. Oppression right on your behind. Crazy!

Torture - Why Moving On Isn't an Option

"There are none so blind as those who will not see." Jonathan Swift

The United States of America in recent years had a decided policy to torture detainees at prisons in Iraq and in secret CIA detention facilities around the world. There is, sadly, no longer any serious doubt that this is the simple truth.

We also now know that a series of legal memos were written, after this program was already in place, that the Bush Administration claims provided a legal justification for the torture program. Since there is ample US law forbidding torture, and the US is also a signatory to both the Geneva convention and to the anti-torture treaty of the United Nations (signed, by the way, by Republican hero Ronald Reagan), and since many of the techniques in question, including waterboarding, have been prosecuted by the United States in the past as torture, it is hard to see how any independant reading of the law could come to an honest conclusion that these techniques are anything but illegal.

I'm choosing my words carefully now. The memos... are at the most generous reading a very poor piece of work. For a start, the failure to mention the several occassions on which the US has prosecuted waterboarding is notable. A failure to review the extensive scientific literature on psychiatric breakdown relating to some of the torture methods discussed.

Those facts, plus the fact that these memos were written after the torture program was already in place - and even long after the abuses at Abu Ghraib (which line up exactly with the practices described in the memo except for being a LESS harsh) strongly suggest that these memos are not genuine legal advice, but an effort to cover up or obscure activities that are clearly against the law.

That lawbreaking - IF PROVEN in a court of law - looks likely to go to the very top of the civilian leadership. Namely to Bush and Cheney themselves.

Now here's the thing. David Broder, of the New York Times seems to believe not only that these crimes should not be persecuted, but also that those who advocate for such prosecutions are motivated by vengeance. Peggy Noonan says no good could come from even releasing the legal memos themselves, and that it's probably best to just "just keep walking".

And President Obama himself has indicated that his personal preference would be to get on with the nation's business and not look backwards.

Actually, that would be my preference too. But it isn't possible.

Personally, I'm sick to death of being angry and disappointed in my country. I worked to elect Barack Obama in party because I did not want to spend my time wondering whether my country was doing these things. I would love to move on.

But we're a country of laws, not of men. And although prosecutors always have certain amount of discretion in terms of which cases they bring to trial, I doubt whether this can be one of these cases - and I'm certain it shouldn't be - because:

1) It's too big. Not at all an instance of "a few bad apples on the night shift" but apparently and allegedly a massive conspiracy to use the full force of the US Government in a secret program to break domestic and international law. This makes it a bigger deal than Watergate, Iran Contra. Although junior participants (such as the CIA officers involved) may be allowed immunity in exchange for cooperation, I don't see how a criminal conspiracy of this scale could be covered up.

2) We still don't know enough. Investigations must carry on so that we can understand what happened, how it happened, and how it was allowed to happen. A recent report in the New York times suggests that one of the reasons for the torture was a determination by the administration to find evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection that didn't exist. That would make this a spectacular failure of national security and intelligence gathering - which we MUST understand in order to never repeat.

3) Failing to prosecute now would make it easy, perhaps inevitable, for such techniques to be used again, and would suggest that the legal argument being used (that if one's intentions are good one is authorised in using illegal torture) is valid.

4) And finally, let me just quote from the New York Times article (read the whole thing):

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The single most important fact to know about these techniques is that they were designed to extract FALSE confessions, not good intelligence. It's possible to believe (just about) that leading figures administration and even in the US intelligence community didn't know that, but it would be dangerous to the entire nation to allow anyone who reads the newspaper to go on believing that one day more. We need a trial to get the truth out.

And, yes, as Dick Cheney keeps insisting, by all means, let's include in this assessment any instances in which these techniques can be said to have "worked." They are totally irrelevant to the question of criminal liability, of course, ("Your Honor, I admit that I did steal the car but in my own defense this committing this crime did allow me to get to my appointment on time.") but let's include every single thing there is to know about all of this, in front of a jury of citizens, presided over by a neutral judge under the rule of law.

Let's, in other words, let justice take its course. It would be long past time.

Lily Ledbetter Act, Continued...

As usual, Barack has put it best:

But equal pay is by no means just a women’s issue – it’s a family issue. It’s about parents who find themselves with less money for tuition or child care; couples who wind up with less to retire on; households where, when one breadwinner is paid less than she deserves, that’s the difference between affording the mortgage – or not; between keeping the heat on, or paying the doctor’s bills – or not. And in this economy, when so many folks are already working harder for less and struggling to get by, the last thing they can afford is losing part of each month’s paycheck to simple discrimination.

So in signing this bill today, I intend to send a clear message: That making our economy work means making sure it works for everyone. That there are no second class citizens in our workplaces, and that it’s not just unfair and illegal – but bad for business – to pay someone less because of their gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion or disability. And that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory, or footnote in a casebook – it’s about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives: their ability to make a living and care for their families and achieve their goals.

Ultimately, though, equal pay isn’t just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families, it’s a question of who we are – and whether we’re truly living up to our fundamental ideals. Whether we’ll do our part, as generations before us, to ensure those words put to paper more than 200 years ago really mean something – to breathe new life into them with the more enlightened understandings of our time.

Lily Ledbetter Act to be Signed Today

This is a great day to be a woman in America. Hmm.

Actually, this will be the first day for a couple of years in which your employee cannot systematically pay you less than a male colleague for no good reason whatsoever, without fear of consequences. So maybe my threshold for "great" is a little low. Still, tomorrow will suck less than today for women and employees across the USA, and that's a pretty good day in the White House.

Obama Opposes Efforts to Revoke Gay Marriage

As you may know, the Supreme Court of the State of California recently voted to award full marriage rights to its gay citizens. This was a measure that was passed twice by the California state legislation, but was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger on the grounds that he felt it was a matter for the courts to decide. Now that they've done so, marriages have begun to take place across the state.

So the anti-gay movement has now been trying to pass a state constitutional amendment to make these marriages illegal again. Barack Obama has just issued a statement opposing this effort.

He says:

I am proud to join with and support the LGBT community in an effort to set our nation on a course that recognizes LGBT Americans with full equality under the law... that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states.

For too long, issues of LGBT rights have been exploited by those seeking to divide us. It's time to move beyond polarization and live up to our founding promise of equality by treating all our citizens with dignity and respect. This is no less than a core issue about who we are as Democrats and as Americans.

Right on! If civil liberties and respect for families are to mean anything at all, they surely need to be offered to ALL our citizens. The right to marry the person of your chosing is among the most precious and personal rights society affords its citizens, and I am proud that my candidate will not bow to nonsensical fearmongering. This is a pro-family position.

Those who want to overturn this ruling actually seek not only to prevent future gay unions but also to dissolve those that have already been formed. If two people chose to unite with each other, and stand up before the law to form a permanent union, the state should not take that away from them.