The worst is yet to come. By that I mean that the Obama DOJ's embrace of Bush's use of the state secrets privilege to shield these crimes from public view will (probably already has) trigger a tidal wave of finger-wagging from the right that this, of course, means civil libertarians have been deeply Unserious about national security all this time.

That is, once Obama "got a chance to sit in the President's chair in the Oval Office" and hear about all the top-secret scary threats to America, he realized that the Bush administration was right to commit all these crimes and egregious uses of secrecy. This will, in turn, serve to "prove" quite usefully that the entire panoply of complaints about rampant Bush lawlessness in the sphere of anything arguably related to national security can be dismissed as fringe and - I dare to say - dangerous.

Bravo.

You simply fail to realize: Internet Debate Final Victory over WinSmith et al. is just around the corner!

Just a few more hours (or days) ought to do it...

and I love you for it.

"And until they surrender, the conflict continues."

I neglected to mention that the nationalist mentality (which, demonstrably, can be extended to "good" nations other than one's own) is also fixated on notions of "victory" for their side, and "surrender" or utter destruction of the other, even when such terms are wholly inapplicable to a given conflict.

A perfect exhibit of the Manichean and self-centered mentality that undergirds the nationalist philosophy (in this case, American nationist) can be found in the nationalist's most automatic and sincere response to even rational dissent from his country's foreign policy posture.

"Uber Liberal Alles:"

I would love it if Mexico and Canada bombed America

I want America to be incinerated. America is evil. This is Greenwald 101 dogma.

Precisely because the nationalist jingoist sees questions of war and foreign policy in binary, Manichean terms of good and evil, with his country indelibly being the good and its enemies evil, his mind cannot help but interpret the critic's motivations through this same lens, inverted.

To acknowledge the logic, points, or evidence proffered by the critic is to intrinsically and intolerably threaten the unquestioning good/evil paradigm, which is as rigid as it is brittle, and if lost, threatens to upend the nationalist's entire worldview.

Such high stakes only serve to intensify the emotionalism and absolutism of the nationalist's responses. It can only escalate. It knows only one mode, varying only the degree to which that mode is expressed, but occasionally - when accompanied by some intellectual talent - comes accompanied by spurious justifications faintly approximating truth and reason.

In part II of the interview I linked to above, Chomsky discusses the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and occupation. When they mention "Barak," they mean Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, not Barack Obama (in case anyone is initially confused).

Part II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bieFwutoqvA&feature=related

Glenn:

There's a really great interview with some pompous neocon interrogator from -- I think -- Canada that [Noam Chomsky] just tore to shreds.

This has to be it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10rTPSSmOFw&feature=related

I'm watching the young lad get worked over now.

It's always amazing to observe the huge gap between how [Noam Chomsky is] depicted and how he really is.

There's almost no purer example than him of a person being widely dismissed as shrill or ideologically insane purely by dint of a misconceived caricature of his or her views.

As for his debate with William F. Buckley, having seen another video example of Buckley threatening to punch his interlocutor in the face - in that case with Gore Vidal - I take his having done that to Chomsky as an indication of a perverse form of high praise.

Chomsky and Zin remind me of those supposed dissidents of East Germany who all along were in the pay of the Stasis. We have a few of them in my country. Leftists suspiciously guarding the gate for our rightist masters.

I must express my deep and sincere appreciation for displaying to me the first use of some form of the term "911 gatekeeper" that I have ever organically witnessed in an Internet forum.

Until today, I had only heard of such a thing, through the secondhand descriptions of other "truth gatekeepers" such as the insidiously cloaked, faux leftist/humorist Matt Taibbi.

I feel more intellectually complete now, like the young student who finally glimpses his first silverback in the wild.

Here's the one I was watching. It's the whole thing, in three parts (check the list on the right for the other parts).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDmqRc80jJQ&feature=related

It's riveting.

Your earlier reference to Noam Chomsky set me on a long odyssey of Chomsky YouTube clips, not the least of which was his old debate with the late William F. Buckley. Much appreciated.

Well, if the little panel discussion between Wolf Blitzer and his usual crew is any indication, the hugely significant fact that Panetta likely represents a separation from torture policy is going to go completely over the establishment media's heads.

In typical "Village" fashion, it's all about insider vs. outsider to them.

Knew I should have previewed that comment.

If their behavior vis a vis-à-vis the Bush administration is any guide, Feinstein and Rockefeller are merely upset that they weren't "consulted" on the fact that they would be utterly disregarded before being utterly disregarded.

It's the decorum, you see. Being treated as irrelevant simply must come with the requisite antecedent formalities.

liberals want a living constitution which means they want to change it daily to their liking like eliminating the bill of rights and replacing it with obama's marxist agenda.

I know. Like stretching Article II of the Constitution to such absurd lengths as to argue that it allows a president "in wartime" to flatly defy explicit criminal prohibitions enacted by Congress. Only liberals would do such a thing.