Hellfire and damnation -- in writing

A couple of short quotes said it all.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, after labeling Amnesty International’s just-released, scathing report on U.S. human rights violations as “ridiculous,” said "we hold people accountable when there's abuse.”

Retired military judge Kevin Barry said in response to this standard White House swill: “We have so much evidence of abuse in so many locations that to say it's a couple of bad people here or there has lost credibility with the public."

Since 2001 we’ve lived in two radically different worlds -- that of George W. Bush’s official fantasies, and that of reality. The first, having long since surpassed Wizard of Ooze dimensions, has indeed “lost credibility with the public” and is fading rapidly.

The best evidence of this is the recent turnaround in thinking by Walter Jones, the North Carolina Republican congressman who famously slapped the antiwar French by renaming their culinary gift to America, “freedom fries.” He’s not laughing at the antiwar crowd any longer. In fact, he’s joined them. "If we were given misinformation intentionally by people in this administration, to commit the authority to send boys, and in some instances girls, to go into Iraq, that is wrong. Congress must be told the truth," he told the Guardian.

That’s serious stuff, especially coming from a member of the Republican apparat.

Its significance lies in more than one congressman’s pro-war flip and quasi-suggestion of a special committee for impeachment. Its further significance is deeply sociopolitical; Rep. Walter Jones must be getting showered by letters, emails and calls from very, very unhappy, increasingly antiwar constituents – and from a Southern state, no less. That’s big.

When Karl Rove heard of Walter’s comments, my guess is that his thoughts flashed to another Walter, another president and another war. For when Walter Cronkite came out against our Vietnam involvement, Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America.”

Had he ever. And by most accounts so has George, who sucked America -- middle and all -- into a Mideast quagmire every bit as gooey as Vietnam, deploying as many lies and as much criminal culpability as any tinhorn dictator.

This culpability examined by Amnesty naturally worked the White House into a froth of denial and spin, which, given its credibility, pretty much confirmed Amnesty’s accusations by itself. But at least the human rights watchdog has plenty of credibility and its written findings contain just as much substance.

Amnesty’s report wasn’t just negative, it wasn’t just strongly worded, and it wasn’t just critical. It was, instead, absolute hellfire and damnation on paper, opening with, “The blatant disregard for international human rights and humanitarian law in the ‘war on terror’ continued to make a mockery of President George Bush’s claims that the USA was the global champion of human rights.” It went on to decry U.S. “war crimes in Iraq,” specifying “detainees in U.S. custody tortured in Abu Ghraib prison” and those held “in secret detention in undisclosed locations. In some cases, their situation amounted to ‘disappearance.’” Chile circa 1970s, anyone?

Iraq’s defense minister yesterday declared that his nation will not "achieve security at the expense of human dignity." Maybe. I doubt it. But maybe. Yet Amnesty left no doubt with respect to George W. Bush, who it says has “sent an unequivocal message to the world that human rights may be sacrificed ostensibly in the name of security.”

What lay outside Amnesty’s purview regarding “security” is that we’re less safe now than ever. And for what? At what price? Sixteen-hundred Americans who didn’t opt for Dick Cheney’s “other priorities”?

Amnesty’s U.S. director, William Schultz, got many of us dreaming about sublime justice with this observation: "The apparent high-level [American] architects of torture should think twice before planning their next vacation to places like Acapulco or the French Riviera, because they may find themselves under arrest."

An exhilarating prospect: George, Dick and Rummie relaxing together ocean-side someday, only to be picked up on a rights-abuse rap. Maybe they could do their time at Abu Ghraib with Augusto Pinochet.

Comments

[cadavre]

AI pretty much slammed Israel as a neolith of humanity [also]! They are right up there with us. Maybe there's a "gentlemans" play in one upmanship going on between the Evangelical Zionists and Non-goy Zionists [in control of the US government] and the non-goy Zionists in control of Israel's government. I wonder what the bet is?

What's the board on this one folks?

For our fellow world citizen Jews seeing this dance of goy evangelical and non-goy pretentenders in the name of Christ and Judea - beware. The goy zeolots have the bombs and they have the destiny of rapture - the vaporization of unrepentent Jews in Israel. If the choice is to be "chosen" or to be a "vaporizor", better not to choose!

We are the mob and we are in control!

I thought we snuffed these bad genetics a long time ago? Have they forgotten who runs this place, who feed them, who guard them while they sleep?

Have they forgotten the lessons so ruthlessly rendered by the mob in moments past? Has their arogance led to a misjudgement that they are really in control?

Let's be clear on this. Anti-Semitic (well - really anti-jewish) behavior is not fermented by by the christians or jews or muslims that live in our neighborhoods and go to parent teacher nights at our neghborhodd schools. Anti-Jewish sentiment is fermented by the policies of Israel as well as a host of American organizations (AIPAC, JINSA, ADL and many small outfits under the umbrella of the Holocaust Industry head quartered in Washington DC) that market those policies through our houses of state and predominately non-goy US media!

Let's be clear!

[Judy]

Unfortunately it doesn't matter to Bush & Co. if they lost middle America or upper or lower for that matter. Their project is to change government so there is no such thing as representative government. They are achieving an executive control so deep into the other branches of government that no conservative is allowed to dissent, if they do Karl will just find a like minded opponent for the next election cycle and replace them with a party loyalist. We are not in Kansas anymore Toto, we are most definitely in Oz. Remember his words "You're either with us or against us". Us being the neocons, nobody else matters.

When is everyone going to get it through their thick skulls that Bush could give a rats ass about any American unless their net worth is in in the hundreds of millions if not billions. When one of their cheerleaders wakes up and realizes they were a part of the nightmare they get sent to the political equivalent to Orwell's 1984 room 101.

Voinovich has a little over five more years, he's no spring chicken so he had nothing to lose. Christie Todd Whitman took herself out of the chop shop so she had nothing to lose. McCain is just getting revenge. What's horrible is that even fellow moderates or middle of the road Republicans haven't backed them up, they are too afraid and they also know their voices will be as absent from or distorted on Fox, CNN, MSNBC et al as any liberal's.

The others are willing to sell the country out for perceived tax breaks, for greed. I know, I'm related to a few of these types. My brother said "So what if we invaded Iraq for oil, we are going to need it." Nice. A hundred thousand dead Iraqis (most of them women & children), over 1600 dead soldiers so he can drive an f-in SUV. I don't speak to him anymore. He's the type of guy who'd say 'get a job' to a homeless man not knowing the poor soul was a Vietnam veteran robbed of sanity and health in the name of defending his sorry ass.

Even upper middle class Republicans who don't agree with homosexual bashing go along with the radical religious right wing zealots & war-mongers because Bush & Co. cater to their lifestyle, so they don't have to sacrifice, they can consume as much as they want with no guilt and so their children can go to college and not war.

Even when real conservatives speak up against the Bush regime, the only ones who listen to them are democrats and liberals.

[Kid Charlemagne]

Judy is correct that the neocon cult does not care if they have Middle America's support or not, but she left out why they don't care: As long as their friends build the hardware and write the software for those lovely HAL 9000 voting machines, they know they'll "win" the so-called elections.

I'm probably dating myself with the HAL 9000 reference. ;)

How about "HAL 1984" as a nickname for computerized voting machines?

Dancing around the monolith, Kid Charlemagne

[Art Durand AKA Whitebear]

Warmongerers in prison? There assets seized and turned over to the Department of Education or Energy for renewable resources? Works for me.