As I write this, jackdavis.org is down. No response. Maybe that's because lots of people are trying to see it...but in any case, it's bad, bad, bad.

I looked up the site to see that "blistering" ad - I love that stuff. Actually, the first place I checked was YouTube, and it's not there. So I went to jackdavis.org...and hit a brick wall.

Apparently Jack Davis doesn't care to capitalize on a once-in-a-lifetime political opportunity. I wonder why?

I wonder if Carol knows about Mike the Headless Chicken?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_headless_chicken

It's the first thing I thought of when I read this. Very disturbing!

Every time I see Paglia in Salon, I always hope that it's the last time.

Please note that I said "see", not "read". Salon, if you feel you HAVE to publish an unreadable, self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectual, couldn't you at least find one who was marginally interesting? Come on! It can't be that hard. Slate has Hitchens, and at least his Mother Teresa attacks are amusing.

Watching Paglia desperately try to overcome an obvious lack of ability by reflexive contrarianism was never really entertaining, you know. And her fifteen minutes have been over for a long time.

Hey! I remember reading a while ago that Slate LOVES contrarian articles. Why not trade Paglia for Hitchens? You'd probably have to sweeten the pot with a few thousand dollars, but it would be worth it.

Then break Hitchens' keyboard, or at least put him on a full-time Mother Teresa beat, and everyone will be happy!

The thing that confuses me is this:

It is now forbidden for the torture victims to tell even their own lawyers how they were tortured. If even ONE of those detainees is ever released, exactly how is the government going to stop them from telling, well, anybody? Particularly since many of them are foreign nationals! Are we going to assign CIA agents to each one of them, ready to liquidate if they try to speak to the press in their counties?

Or does this just make it all the less likely that we'll ever release ANY detainee, whether they're guilty or not?

As for any Americans that might be held and tortured (now or in the future), I wonder what legal basis there is to stop a released citizen from speaking about such an experience? I know that habeas corpus is gone, but did Congress eliminate the First Amendment while we weren't looking, too?

So once again a group that has been discriminated against in the past is happy to indulge in the same behavior when given the chance.

It's one of the most painful lessons that anyone could learn. I learned it from the fists of boys at Armenian summer camp when they beat me for not looking "Armenian" enough - this from children whose grandparents were slaughtered wholesale for their ethnicity. It's a lesson I never forgot.

I saw it again when the Israeli government and many Israeli scholars cooperated with the Turkish government's denial of the Armenian genocide. "Never again" is fine except when it happens to someone else or is diplomatically inconvenient, I guess.

Time and again our species has shown that we will commit the same atrocities on others that we, ourselves have suffered and deplored in our most holy tones. Could hypocrisy be hard-wired into the human genetic code?

I hope not. But history offers few hopeful signs.

In the case of the Bush administration, it is the documents themselves that seem to want to confess, that are bursting with the desire to talk, to tell the story of these last years of illegality. Americans, and the Congress they have just elected, should take heed.

"Confess"? No. They're boasting about what they've done. These people honestly believe that the American people will love and reward them for committing torture, particularly if they're mostly torturing foreigners.

And given what I've heard from a lot of average American voters, I have a terrible fear that Bush et alia really understand the public mood correctly; that as a people we are not only willing to accept torture and the loss of all our civil and human rights, but that we'd be actually glad to lose them, if a smooth-talker convinced us that the primary victims would be people that look, sound, or believe differently from ourselves.

Can it be that the Republicans lost the recent elections not because they violated every human right and standard of decency imaginable, but simply because they mismanaged the economy and the Iraq war?

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