Crossposted from MY LEFT WING
Since I refuse to lose all hope in the souls of those legislators who just voted away our right to habeas corpus I must, instead, come to the conclusion I've already reached several times since this Congress first convened: They are stupid motherfuckers.
I come to this conclusion as I have many times before because only a stupid motherfucker would vote for the dissolution of the Bill of Rights when doing so also means -- you know, in addition to adopting a Brand New Fascism -- rendering his own job description null and void.
And make no mistake: whether or not these stupid motherfuckers actually KNOW what they have done, that IS what they have done. To vote away one of the RIGHTS in the BILL of RIGHTS is to take an IRREVOCABLE step toward dissolving the ENTIRE Bill of Rights-- whether explicitly or implicitly. It doesn't really matter whether the Reichstag actually burns in this scenario...
Whether literal or figurative, the dissolution of the essential contract between the citizenry and the government of this putative Republic is an inevitable result of the dissolution of one of its CHIEF TENETS. And if our "representatives" in that government are too stupid to understand what they've just done, I have to wonder...
What the fuck are we going to DO with these stupid motherfuckers?
As for the Bush Regime and its many co-conspirators in the murder of the Constitution: wrong is wrong, ladies and gentlemen. No matter how many judges and lawyers and legislators you find to "define" something as "not wrong," torture is torture is torture, and any sane human being knows torture when she sees it -- or, at least, when she feels it.
(I issued a challenge to John Gibson last week on his radio show, to undergo 35 seconds of waterboarding with me on live television and THEN tell me it isn't torture. He refused repeatedly. I submit that those people who undergo these "techniques" would be the first to tell you which are "torture" and which are not...)
You can call it "waterboarding, you see, if that's what you want to do. You can call slavery "human resources," too. And eventually you can and will call them "detention centres..."
But don't, for a minute, think you've got all of the people fooled all of the time on this one, douchebags. You have the slavish, the intellectually incapacitated and the morally compromised -- but there are millions of us out here in the real world who know exactly what you're doing.
War crimes and treason is what it is, ladies and gentlemen. Not only the breaking of the Geneva Conventions but in that process actively seeking to undermine and ultimately dismantle the underpinnings of the Republic -- THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is treason. Treason and war crimes, indeed -- you're all guilty, you know you're guilty, which is why we've just seen you try to make it legal retroactively.
It's torture. We all know it's torture. And endowing the figurehead of the moment in your new-fangled fascist regime with the power to define it as NOT Torture does not make it any the less Torture, no more than endowing him with the power to define water as fire will make that former element burn a building...
These people are traitors and war criminals. AT THIS VERY MOMENT, the purported "leaders of the free world" are no better than Hitler and Mussolini or Stalin himself, before they'd yet committed their most heinous crimes. Fascism in its infancy is still fascism; we're just so accustomed to wearing the white hats that we can't stand to look in the mirror and see that these evil, stupid motherfuckers have exchanged them for black.
Take a look around, people; you're looking at a bunch of good Germans, Everywhere you go: if you don't make it your business to fight this, either by alerting your ignorant neighbours to the facts or by deliberately undermining this fascist, criminal regime -- you are, as am I, as good a German as anyone could ever hope to be.
What will it take? Burning buildings? Pane glass in the streets? Neighbours dragged away in the middle of the night? If they come for you tomorrow -- are you SURE you will hear that familiar Miranda recitation? Perhaps you might... through laughter.