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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
As someone who travels quite a bit, internationally, no one I have met has ever been fooled by the rhetoric that befuddles the average American.
I am so ashamed.
Maybe Guantanamo should stay open for training purposes? It should be used as a place where the establishment figures can be sent to have torture administered on them. I am sure that it will always be full. After all, at first we will have to send the entire Congress. That makes 535 people. There will be a waiting list.
And McCain complaining about Obama? why, we should send Obama to Guantanamo for a couple of months to experience what McCain experienced in Vietnam. This will qualify him to be president.
Anyway, it should be kept open, just as concentration camps are open as museums, so that future generations can learn what our government has accomplished, and what excessive power can lead to.
We have been, since WW II, the most powerful country in the world. However, as China and the EU, and how perhaps Russia with its huge oil and natural resource riches become relatively more wealthy and our own stupidity makes us less so, the day of unchallenged economic supremacy and power will be coming to an end.
The standards we set during this time could have held us in good stead during less monolithic times. Instead, we have created a world where power -- military, political, personal, and even at the basic human level -- is the measure of all things. We won't like the world we are creating when we are no longer at the top of the heap.
Wow, Diehl's utter lack of self-awareness is staggering. However, I think we should borrow his phrase of "legal nihilism" because it fits so well with what has been happening, as noted by Glenn, with the full admiration of the WaPoo editorial pages.
I coincidentally happen to be reading the chapters on Russia in Shock Doctrine. It probably shouldn't be surprising that Diehl would have his knickers in a knot over the possible seizing of oil companies by Russia, given that he undoubtedly was cheering on the privatization of these same companies under reckless conditions in the early 1990's. As Klein notes, these and other state-owned firms were virtually given away through the rapid establishment of "private" banks which were given state money to get them established. These banks then presided over the "auction" of the state firms and made sure that theirs were the winning bids, effectively buying the firms with money they never earned. Of course, the roles of the IMF and World Bank, acting as proxies for the US, in prescribing these "cures" for the fledgling Russian economy should not be overlooked.
Offtrack (but only sort of): my post this morning at Achieving Our Country describes John McCain's role in enabling torture while being used as a pawn by the Bush Administration. Click on my name.
Oppose the "ruling class." Or as you sometimes put it, "the political class." A term that you (often fairly) apply to mainstream Washignton. The same mainstream Washington that gave us the bipartisan FannieMae/FreddieMac debacle. (Thank you Jamie Gorelick and Franklin Raines. Thank you, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. And thanks, Paul Krugman, for you defense of the status quo several years ago.) Dwarfing, by an order of several magnitudes, anything the left views as scandalous with Enron, or Bear Stearns or Countrywide.
Glenn, I accept your arguments as a cogent and well-argued position. I come to a different conclusion on the facts, and I think that you mostly try to criminalize policy differences.
But in this political season, there are candidates for you to choose from, who really do appear to oppose the entire "political class." Assuredly, Barack Obama is not one of those candidates. Why do you, and your readers who are like-minded, not support a candidate who truly believes in a wholesale alternative to the current "political class"?
Is that the first so called international tribunal ever held since the notion of such things was enacted after WW2 was in 1993. Certainly there were good enough reasons to hold one in the intervening 48 years. So obviously these things and the 'rule of law' behind them are more about politics than the notion of law, let alone justice. The idea that the 'law' itself can and should remediate these abuses sounds almost quaint, divorced from the political realities of who enforces them.
For example both the French and Chinese governments clearly articulate a posture that states that such international laws form the cornerstone of their own foreign policy. Law and NGOs and transnational bodies are diplomacy by other names, force even. So the basis that these laws are intended to benefit anyone other than the French or Chinese (to the French and Chinese) is mistaken. So what is this 'rule of law' then but politics by other means?
Spekaing of rule of law, CBS reports that now that Verizon has obtained immunity from prosecution for wiretapping, they're refusing to turn over records of what they did: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/27/national/main4297682.shtml
I know, everyone is just SHOCKED by this. I'm not sure if we're going to see praise for this move from the pinheads at the Post, or whether they'll feign shock.
I am curious whether anyone has approached Warren Buffet or Berkshire Hathaway about the nonsense being spewed from the Washington Post. Buffet often espouses liberal positions. Although I once ran into Charlie Munger at a Hoover Institution event.
Most of what the readers at the Post say about this is exactly what Glenn says. (The rest is from a Russian disagreeing with what it says about Russia)
Which is the norm at the Post. They only read their comments to see if there's something rude they can get the vapors about.
From the moment the Bush Administration rejected participation in the International Criminal Court, the die was cast that the US was headed down this sorry course. Many of us wondered at the time why they would choose such and aberrant, in-your-face, gesture, but now it's abundantly clear that long before 9/11, the administration intended to arrogantly thumb its nose at long-standing traditions of human rights and lawful conduct.
Fortunately for them, they have been aided, extravagantly, by a supine media that believes, as they do, that if WE do it, it's, well, different.
One must wonder whether any of these cretins, from Condi Rice to the beltway blatherers, even see the black humor in their pious condemnations of those whose behavior simply mirrors their own, and even notice that the world's dictators snicker while the Washington Post somehow keeps a straight face.
It would be comical if it weren't so sad.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
