Mark my words...

McCain is against it, now Huckabee comes out against it. Watch as the 180 degree turn occurs, and Democrats are left behind in the dust. And I can't say Democrats don't deserve it.

When you leave your spine at the door, and keep all of your powder dry, and apologize everytime you speak the truth, you get run over like a runaway truck.

If you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything...should be the Democratic party motto.

They'll get to the bottom of this, I'm sure.

Just like they'll suddenly discover their spines.

Nothing is ever going to come of this, is it? They've been complicit right from the start. And, in a sense, slimier than the Republicans, who, crazy as they may be, at least have been honest about their desire to torture people.

The Democrats remind me of Chris Shays of Connecticut. When election time rolls around, Chris talks about how much he wants to end the war. In between election years, he's a cheerleader for the war. And the public keep buying it, and Chris keeps going back to DC. Same thing with the Democrats: all talk, no action, and no consequences for it. We're just as much to blame, I think.

Actually, yes, you did repeat yourself. And you ended up in the same place that you always do. You tell us what needs to be done without actually telling us what needs to be done.

Exactly. And it isn't just Che, who is actually more specific than most of that type (at least when pressed on what he actually means). Go read every single one of those "more-radical-than-thou" sermonizers -- the ones who endlessly preach that anyone trying to change things without advocating what they deem to be some sufficiently revolutionary "anti-System solution" is a starry-eyed, Democrat-loving, status quo tool.

Tell me if a single one of them every does anything beyond petulantly voicing that criticism, let alone ever advocates anything specific for what they think should or could be done (beyond platitutes such as "The people need to tear down these institutions"). The only thing I ever heard from that circle in terms of any specific act was to vote for Ralph Nader -- that was 7 years ago and, other than a street rally here and there, I don't know of a single specific thing.

I'm willing to bet we will find out someday that these Democrats, both in the House and Senate, were warned that explicit torture was occurring within Guantanamo or CIA or wherever (be it waterboarding, belly slapping etc or any other heinous torture). And that the Democrats knowingly looked the other way despite the information provided to them. There was probably no teeth gnashing even when they were told about it.

No wonder Ron Paul's policies look so attractive (even though I dont agree with all of them)

This is the problem with reform when complicity spreads to the class of people who are supposed to police these types of high crimes. A similar thing happened in WWII with Germany's business class.

The corporate class in the Reich was suspicious of National Socialism from the very beginning, as the core belief in the Nazi creed was government ownership of all major industrial facilities. Nevertheless, they went along with it, in no small part because during the process of de-Judification, the Nazis handed over the repossessed Jewish businesses to these same corporate leaders.

Having been made complicit of similar crimes as the Nazi High Command, the corporate heads also realized that if the regime fell,they would go also-- hence the militarily irrelevant and highly destructive Allied bombing campaign at the end of the War. The German leadership would rather see their country destroyed than be held to account for their crimes.

The parallels are stunning, if not the severity of the crimes.

For those interested in more detail, read "The Splendid Blond Beast" by Christopher Simpson. Stunning analysis.

The points you make in this post, Glenn, are strong arguments that a Democratic president elected from the ranks of the Beltway elite will only continue to dance this minuet of human rights abuses and continuing destruction of the constitutional order. As one writer said in the comments section yesterday, this is a constitutional crisis. As I have repeatedly said in the past, this is the greatest constitutional crisis in the English speaking world since the English civil war in the seventeenth century, about a hundred and fifty years before the founding of the American Republic.

America needs an outsider to win the presidency this time, someone without the taint of corruption caused by beltway nihilism clinging to his clothing, someone decent and honorable. That is why I think Mike Huckabee could well win the presidency next year, despite the widespread revulsion of the American public at this administration and the Republican party. As you well know, Congress and the Democrats are held in contempt because of the sort of complicity in this administrations misdeeds you so eloquently outline in today's post.

This is why I say: Help us Obi-wan Huckabee, you are our only hope.

Kitt, I love your optimism. That isn't sarcastic, I really do. You are sure that somewhere out there, there are Martin Luther King Jr.s and Paul Wellstones, and that we can fill the Congress with them and save the world. I've never been that optimistic, but as soon as you find any, sign me up. It's people like you that keep us on the rails. Really.

That being said, let's talk about PTSD. What happens when someone lives through something that is bad, and cannot be forgotten. The precise mechanism is that the brain has a facility that allows it to take a complete and detailed snapshot in an instant, if it feels that life was just threatened and it needs to remember everything about why the person survived. It isn't mollified by time, because mollification of pain and torment is done by integration and this once in a lifetime experience is so special that there is nothing to integrate it with. What happens from there is a variety of acting out, of paranoia, of risk and substance taking, of sometimes violence as the person tries to mollify what the brain cannot.

Two trends started in American politics as they have grown in all of American society since the dawn of the age of recording and it's growth into the information age. One trend was first documented in the book "The Selling of the President 1968". It talked about the use of marketing and spin -- of techniques originally developed in the torture/brainwashing arena (Pavlov's work was not used for benign purposes by its funders), to manipulate the public mind -- that social/psychological group think that all the communications and blogs and media and gossip and storytelling create.

The second trend started with the film stars, the world's first people who could be many ages and many stages of their own lives in the public mind simultaneously. That this is different from the norm requires a thought experiment. Think of someone you know well enough to have seen frequently all your life who isn't documented. Now recall (not picture) in your head what they looked like when they were 10. You can't unless you've seen a photograph or home movie, because it isn't supposed to happen.

Starting with the George H.W. Bush campaigns, all of a candidate's past, as far back as their teenage behavior became not only part of the public record, but fair game for "opposition research" and negative campaigning. Like the film stars before them, but in a much more malicious way, they became 4 dimensional, existing in all of their past simultaneously in the public mind. It became impossible to ever change your mind if you were a politician, or you'd become a flip-flopper at campaign time.

As more and more of society becomes 4D in the public mind, the public mind is developing all the signs of collective PTSD. It cannot forget anything it thinks might be important, cannot mollify it's collective pain, and has begun to act out to externally deaden the wounds it's suffered. One symptom of this is that there are no more Thomas Jeffersons or Martin Luther King Jr.s, because 4D people have faults and exposing those faults is incredibly important to us. And because we are too busy acting out to pay attention to such people anyway.

So unless society develops new methods that are as good at forgiving as the Age is at not forgetting, we can expect people like Jay Rockefeller to addict themselves to access and information as a matter of political survival. They will start out good hearted, and become (what did Amity call them) access whores, but really what they are are the information junkies that must exist when society is suffering from PTSD.

End of wild theory, sorry for the long.