Madness of King George

“My husband doesn’t wish he was Jack Bauer.
He wishes I was Jack Bauer.”

Washington Post:

“…the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

Something I’ve been wondering: has this administration started issuing its smaller fry, the apparatchiks, spies and torturers, with cyanide pills yet? It might be wise to do so.

US torture protege Augusto Pinochet, now in his dotage, had his immunity from prosecution removed this week. Old as he is, he’ll face the music in some way for what he did in Chile. I’ve no doubt Bush & Cheney didn’t miss that report.

CIA interrogators are having their indemnity insurance paid by the government because they’ll need their own private lawyers when they’re put on trial; the US Justice department (prop. A. Gonzales) won’t be able to defend them. Why? Because its senior lawyers’ll be in the dock too.

It’s plain that Bushco and everyone associated with them know damned well that a reckoning is coming, so they’re making preparations. This frantic strong-arming of torture legislation through Congress is one of them. the WH desperately trying to stave off the evil day when nemesis calls by changing the law so that what they’ve done and what they continue to do is legal.

They know they won’t get away with that sort of thing for much longer, but desperation is the spur for everything they do now and so the steps they have to take get more and more outrageous and unconstitutional. It has to come to a crisis.

They must be feeling this desperation inside the beltway. I expect, too, that Ken Lay’s recent sudden death gave many in DC Republican circles pause to reconsider their position should the whole Republican edifice, as it must eventually from its own corrupt momentum, come tumbling down.

I wonder which eventuality has the members of this administration lying awake fretting at night – the prospect of a very public trial, or dying painlessly and thus helping Bush escape justice?

Bush, Cheney, Addington, Yoo and Gonzales – who as we know are pure sociopaths – never worry at all, but there are many others in the administration, government and armed forces, Good Germans all, who went along with them through sheer expedience and self-interest. Now they’re scared.

It’s their fear and desperation that’s pushing Bush & Cheney to these extremes.

Well, that and Bush and Cheney’s sick fixation with homoerotic sexual violence and their untrammelled lust for power.

I remember way back when, before the Iraq war was a twinkle in Rummy’s sclerotic eye, being flamed horribly on usenet for suggesting that Americans were being bamboozled by their news and media outlets. They were most insulted: you’d’ve thought I’d suggested that all Americans committed incest as a matter of course considering the hysterical reaction.

So I never thought to see this tirade from Keith Olbermann, condemning Bush & Rummy and all their works, on US mainstream media – and on MSNBC no less.

He’s a bit tendentious (not to mention pompous) in parts, but you’ve got to applaud the sentiment. You can tell he’s been saving this up for a looong time.

Thanks to TRex at FDL for the link.

“650,000? Eat That, Dad!”

Eww. Creepy

Whatever Happened To Jimmy-Jeff?

Torture A-OK – Official