Today We Remember the Glory Days...

...of Republican competence and civility.  

The era they brag about and pine for.

From 16 years ago.

And where is professor Abu Yoo these days?  

Over at Fox Business, pimpin' for Donald Trump. 

Trump is trying to 'restore the energetic executive that our founders wanted': John Yoo

No Half Measures

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"I saw Satan laughing with delight,

the day, the music, died." Edition *

No, I did not watch Richard Bruce "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" Cheney on Luke Russert's Dad's Memorial Tree Fort today because there is no lead-infused nuclear blast goggles thick enough through which one can safely observe that rancid bag of flag-swaddled evil when his blood-drunk madness at full boil.

But the gist of it was, apparently, we want Dick Cheney on that wall.

We need Dick Cheney on that wall.

And Dick Cheney has neither the time nor the inclination to explain himself to you because:

Waterboarding is not torture.

And because:

[The Torture Report is] a cheap shot piece of political business that was not bipartisan nor was it involved any discussion of the people involved in the program.

And because:

I have little respect for the United Nations or for this individual who doesn't hear a clue and had absolutely no responsibility for safeguarding this nation and going after the bastards that killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11.

And because:

There's no pardon needed. No crime was committed.

And because:

Saddam Hussein had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al Qaeda. All of things came into play... When it was time to get into the business of deciding the importance to go after Iraq, we did the right thing. I believe the it was, in fact, the right action then and I believe it now.

 Of course what should have happened, did not happen:

Because this isn't Hollywood.

This is the real world.

And here in this very real world -- in this country, at this time -- we give our monsters the run of the place. We let them have their own teevee networks, their own publishing houses and newspapers, their own churches, their own political party and to them is ceded around 70% of the on-camera real estate during what I took to calling The Mouse Circus 10 years ago when I started writing down what I was seeing on our national Sunday Morning Gasbag cavalcade.

The deal which Conservative struck with the devil long ago was really very simple; in exchange for giving their leaders money and power and unswerving fealty, the rank-and-file were forever relieved of the burden on admitting error of any kind, ever.  They would never have to suffer pangs of conscience...because their conscience would be methodically cauterized.  By excising their basic humanity, they would never again be forced to apologize or atone for a fucking thing...and and never, ever have to own up to the fact that Liberals have been right about their filthy "movement" all along.   in exchange for the right to never, ever admit they were wrong about anything,

And so, with the perfect totalitarian logic, we arrive now at that place where, in order to protect the Big Lie by which they live, Conservatives must now actively celebrate sadism and torture,  They must cheerfully dance around the rack and the gibbet as they were maypoles, and they'd fucking well better mean it or the magic will not work,

Conservatives have made themselves into the perfect, mindless tools for the annihilation of everything they pretend to hold dear, and they did it voluntarily, with their eyes wide open.  They did it without one of them ever being waterboarded a hundred times or twisted and manacled to a dungeon ceiling for days on end.  

In the other hand, I would be willing to bet real money that if Dick Cheney were suspended naked and freezing from the ceiling in shackles, forced to shit himself, repeatedly waterboarded and occasionally beaten with, oh, say, a claw hammer, eventually he would sign a piece of paper making a very sincere and detailed confession reversing everything he just said on Meet the Press and, if told to do so by his torturers, take the blame for the assassination of John Lennon and a head of state to be named later.

Because forcing someone to say exactly what you want them to say is the only function of torture.

After Cheney slouched off in the general direction of Bethlehem the studio crew Febreezed the worst of the sulfur and brimstone out of the air, one of the Bush Administration's most accomplished sociopath -- Dan "Baghdad Bob" Senor -- was invited on camera to prove to viewers once more time that, in D.C., there really are no professional consequences whatsoever for Conservatives liars.

And just like David Brooks, Mr. Senor squared his shoulders and bulldozed right past the mountains of inconvenient facts -- right past the simple, self-evident horror of what the Bush Administration had done -- so that he could quickly plop every Conservative talking point onto the table, 1...2...3...

See, The Torture Program was actually awesome!

DAN SENOR: Well, look, I think the actual program, the integrity of the program, the report does not actually produce anything that undermines it.

However, even though The Torture Program was awesome, talking about it gravely imperils ourbravefightingmenandwomen! (about whom Mr. Senor never gave a single shit while the Bush Administration was getting them slaughtered in their hundreds during Operation Enduring Clusterfuck):

DAN SENOR: It's one thing to release the report. It's another thing to release those graphic details, those very vivid descriptions which I do think will have implications for American fighting men and women overseas in the battlefield to provide that fodder for our enemies that, you know.

And in flawless unison with every other Bush Regime dead-ender from David Brooks to Gretchen Carlson...What About The Droooooones?

DAN SENOR: No, you know what we have been doing? We've been using drones to blow up terror operatives--and their families at picnics and weddings...

The Citibank Reacharound Act of 2014 got virtually no coverage, and what there was amounted to nothing more than another absurd round of the Beltway's favorite decadent parlor game:  False Equivalence.   In this week's episode, the Citibank Reacharound Act of 2014 was used as a vehicle to demonstrate that Elizabeth Warren is really pretty much just the Left's version of Ted Cruz:

After which everyone jumped into Mrs. Alan Greenspan's vintage 1931 Isotta Fraschini and drove down to the track, where they all took turns drinking champagne from the hollow place where Dan Senor's should should be, while betting other people's money on presidential horses which do not exist yet, in a race which will not be run for two years.

Over at Crooks and Liars, they have irrefutable evidence that still more monsters roam unfettered, the Earth and are still able to get in front of an audience of millions whenever they feel like it.

And everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Because best lack all conviction, while the worst are still full of passionate intensity.

Because there is still a Club.

And you and I are most definitely not in it.

*If this sounds familiar, it's because I actually appropriated Mr. McLean's entire song back in 2005.  Which, when I looked it up, reminded me, jeez, I've been at this a long time.

Putsch*

If CIA and top White House goons and National Security officials really did conspire to create and execute torture policy while keeping the Commander-in-Chief in the dark for years, then what happened can only be described as the first coup d'etat in American history.

Of course the notion of "President Cheney" really running the country while Prezit Stupid kept the yokels distracted by talked about Freedumb and murdered the English language is by now a very old joke.  And it is a measure of what an abject failure Bush was as a leader and a man that the idea of him being operated like a finger puppet by a cabal of oligarchs and neocon ghouls is just sorta shrugged off as "Oh well..." these days.

But it is interesting that no one dares to put what happened in terms of a coup d'etat.

Because those terms are scary as Hell.

*Thanks for the catch

If You Are Very Old

Or if you read history, you might be familiar with a time long ago when Presidents would fire insubordinate assholes who deliberately undercut their administration's policies, no matter how popular that asshole may be, or how much outrage that firing may ignite.

As Brother Charles Pierce points out, John Brennan is one such insubordinate asshole who needs publicly sacked by Barack Obama and walked out of the building by security immediately.

No Vegas odds-makers has yet crunched the numbers on the probability of this actually happening, but I'm guessing it's somewhere around the same as The Ghost of Reagan Past from the grave on Christmas Eve to remind a joint session of congress that he not only...

...fought for the passage of the U.N. Convention on Torture and made the U.S. a signatory to it in 1984. And not only did he push for each country to prosecute anyone in their leadership that engages in torture, he specifically called for the use of universal jurisdiction to prosecute leaders in other countries who do so. Here’s what he said when he signed the treaty:

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today. 

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

Because If They Screeeeeech Bullshit Loud Enough

Eventually we'll all back down and everyone (but that same, exhausted platoon of dirty hippies) will return to our slow-motion lobotomy national default setting of Blaming Both Sides for Everything (from Raw Story):

...Watters suggested that Democrats had released the report to coincide with the testimony of economist Jonathan Gruber, who outrage conservatives when he said that health care reform was passed using the “stupidity” of the American people.

“They Senate Democrats, they’re just trying to get one last shot in at Bush before they go into the minority!” the correspondent opined. “And they didn’t even interview any of the CIA interrogators to do the report.”

“It’s kind of like how Rolling Stone does their reporting, they only get one side,” he added, referring to a controversial report about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. “You know, the Democrats didn’t care about transparency when they were destroying hard drives at the IRS.”

Out Numbered host Andrea Tantaros agreed that she didn’t need transparency at the CIA either.

“The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she said. “But we’ve had this discussion. We’ve closed the book on it, and we’ve stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.”

“They apologized for this country, they don’t like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again,” Tantaros added. “Because they believe if we can just shame ourselves and convince the world how horrible we are, and put us on a moral equivalency with all these other countries then maybe they will stop beheading Americans and putting our heads on sticks. They’re fools.”

...

If the head of someone in the skybox tier of the Bush Regime power pyramid does not end up on a fucking pike for this, then Andrea Tantaros wins, and the only lesson to be learned from our years of state-sanctions, flag-draped depravity is that Senator Rourk was right:

How To Start An American Civil War

The Right nearly stormed the White House over fake Benghaaaazi and fake IRS scandals.

The Right has shut the federal government down because Freedumb!

The Right has nodded sagely as unarmed black men have been killed by cops.

The Right made a hero out of a mooching bigot because he and his lunatic pals responded to the cops coming to collect a tax bill by brandishing weapons and yawping about Liberty.

The Right been opposed any attempt at sane gun control in this country.

The Right impeached Bill Clinton over trivia.

The Right fingers it's arsenal and mutters ominously about "The Blood of Tyrants" and "Second Amendment Remedies" every time it stubs its toe.

So does anyone doubt that the minute the Kenyan Usurper Race Baiter Muslim Brotherhood Uppity-Negro-In-Chief announces that Conservative Superhero Dick Cheney is going to be tried for war crimes, there would be an armed uprising in this country the likes of which we haven't seen since 1861?

Burn, Baby, Burn

Jury convicts state-sponsored terrorist thug on all counts.

From the Sun Times:

Jurors convict Burge of perjury, obstruction

June 28, 2010

BY RUMMANA HUSSAIN Staff Reporter

Former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge — the face of police torture allegations in Chicago for decades — was found guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice by a federal jury this afternoon.

When the guilty-on-all-counts verdict was announced, Burge did not visibly react. The courtroom had been warned against outbursts.

But people standing outside the courtroom cheered — including attorney Flint Taylor, who has been pursuing justice against Burge for years.

“We’re totally elated at the verdict,” he said. “It’s 30 years too late. We still have plenty to do to get people out of jail. He should have been convicted of torture not perjury — but this is a good day.”
...

For those of you who have not been following this story at the indispensable "Beachwood Reporter", well, first, shame on you.

Second, what you need to know is that Jon Burge was a powerful Chicago detective and commander who, over the course of his career, tortured confessions out of over 200 suspects. In addition to other factors, the volume and credibility of reports of Burge's sadism and corruption led then-Governor George Ryan to institute a moratorium in the death penalty.

At the time, a certain State's Attorney with a Famous Name  is alleged to have turned a blind eye to information he possessed regarding the illegal behavior of Burge and his flunkies.

From Wikipedia:

The investigation revealed that in three of the cases prosecutors could have proved beyond a reasonable doubt in court that torture by the police involving five former officers including Burge had occurred.  Half of the claims were deemed credible, but because of the statute of limitations no indictments were handed out. Mayor Daley and all law enforcement officials who had been deposed were excluded from the report.

Yes, the State's Attorney who showed such remarkably poor civic and legal judgment grew up to be the Honorable Richard M. Daley, Mayor-for-life of the City of Chicago.  Who says there are no second...or third...or fourth acts in American life?    Provided, of course,

you are in The Club.

As for, Burge, he is a thug and a monster: a throwback to a previous era when cops in Chicago could beat, maim and murder almost at-will. An age which some of our more atavistic fellow citizens still look back on fondly as the good old days.

Burge will never serve a day in stir for torture, but like Al Capone -- who was never even charged with any of the hundreds of murders he ordered and dozens he personally committed -- he will now rot behind bars for lesser crimes.

It is something.