Dana Rohrabacher made a complete ass out of himself regarding his treatment of Maher Arar, the man who was wrongly kidnapped and rendered to Syria by the Bush administration. Karen of Democracy Cell Project asks if Congress is learning, seeing as the House is much like a rowdy frat club. The answer in Rohrabacher's case is that he is not. It is just as though it were 2005 all over again, and the Republican Congress, drunk with power, looks the other way at the war crimes of the Bush administration.
Specifically, when it came his turn to testify, Rohrabacher, obviously forgetting that there was such a thing as an election just last November, had this to say:
In the Fellini-esque movie that runs daily in the Halls of Congress, I am sitting in a hearing room in the Rayburn H.O.B., listening to Dana Rohrabacher compare the rendition program with medical errors that happen "all the time".
And YES! He just went to the chestnut d'annee: "There has not been an attack against the US since 9-11".
It is really interesting here to see how Rohrabacher engages in euphamisms in order to describe what is really a war crime and should be prosecuted as such. And this is hardly the only time that he has done this:
On April 17, 2007, while defending the Bush Administration's program of extraordinary rendition during a House hearing on transatlantic relations, Rohrabacher stated that the unfair treatment of one innocent suspect is an acceptable "unfortunate consequence" of holding others who would otherwise be free to commit terror acts. After receiving boos and groans from the gallery, Rohrabacher responded, "Well I hope it's your families, I hope it's your families that suffer the consequences." Rohrabacher was subsequently interrupted by protesters wearing orange jumpsuits who were removed from the gallery. For his comment that imprisoning and torturing one innocent person was a fair price to pay for locking up 50 terrorists who would "go out and plant a bomb and kill 20,000 people," Rohrabacher was named Countdown with Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" on April 25.
And this is quite a turnabout for a congressman who was once one of the Taliban's biggest supporters (same link):
In the November/December 1996 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Rohrabacher was reported as saying that the Taliban were not terrorists or revolutionaries, that they would develop a disciplined society that would leave no room for terrorists, and that the Taliban posed no threat to the United States.
However, in a September 11, 1998 editorial in the The Washington Post, Rohrabacher strongly rebuked the Taliban for providing refuge to Osama bin Laden, mass killings of Shi'ites and ethnic Uzbeks, Turks, and Tajiks, and restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and children:
It has been no secret that bin Laden has been sheltered by the Taliban. The Clinton administration was mute while one of the most violent anti-Western Muslim sects spilled into Afghanistan from their Pakistan-based "religious schools" and took control of the capital. We remained paralyzed while they moved to destroy moderate Muslim forces. While administration officials expressed concern of the Taliban's complete denial of rights for women, it was little more than lip service. Even modest support from the United States for moderate Muslim forces in Afghanistan and serious political pressure on Pakistan could have thwarted the takeover of this strategically important country by these militant extremists. The danger of the spread of fanaticism expressed by the newly independent republics of Central Asia was smugly ignored.
During the summer of 2001, Rohrabacher made a trip to Qatar that was paid for by the Islamic Institute and the Government of Qatar, according to Rohrabacher’s financial disclosure forms. While in Qatar, Rohrabacher, Grover Norquist, and Khaled Saffuri met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil. Wakil reportedly asked for help in increasing the amount of foreign aid sent by the United States to Afghanistan, apparently in exchange for U.S. oil company UNOCAL being allowed to construct of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. If Rohrabacher was conducting diplomacy, he was in violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits citizens from doing so if not in an official capacity. Rohrabacher told wire service reporters who were present in Doha, Qatar at the time that he had discussed a "peace plan" with the Taliban. But Norquist, a close associate of Rohrabacher, said that the meeting happened accidentally and that it included Rohrabacher yelling at them about blowing up the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.
This is typical of all dictators and psychopaths, to sanitize the language of the various war crimes that they support. The fact of the matter is that they do this so that they can totally block out the fact that their actions were responsible for massive human suffering. And not only that, it may very well be that Rohrabacher is engaging in the kind of inflammatory language that he is so that he can cover up his previous support and involvement with the Taliban. This is similar to the homophobic Republicans who are secretly gay themselves.
And as the hearings wore on and Jerrod Nadler revealed that there was nothing in any files that would indicate that Arar was some kind of terrorist, Rohrabacher's stupidity got ever worse:
At that point, the denouement commenced, and the tour de force of Mr. Rohrabacher escalated, as he spun around in dizzying circles, trying to leave a pattern of apology and defense of the Bush administration and revealing instead, alas, a mess of a thought process, ending with this:
ROHRABACHER: "An error in a program does not mean that program in and of itself is a wrong program."
The room tittered. Mr. Arar, on camera, blinked. One could not help but wonder if anything this man had been through, which included beatings, electric shocks, being forced to hear the cries of women being beaten, and a two-and-a half year review process by the Canadian government to clear his name could have prepared him for the sheer stupidity he was witnessing. He remained calm.
As of right now, we do not, to my knowledge, have a challenger to Rohrabacher. What we need to do is to recruit some kind of challenger to him, just so that someone can make the case against him and to tie down valuable resources that could be used elsewhere. What we need are people who are more concerned with the Constitution than they are for their own political well-being and for their standing among the Very Important People.
The fact of the matter is that Rohrabacher is like so many trolls who refuse to own up to their inflammatory remarks and instead, play the victim and claim that they are the ones being picked on. Just like trolls do not understand that this is Kos' site and that he makes the rules, Rohrabacher does not understand that this is America, and that the Constitution dictates the rules that we are to follow. Last time I checked, the provisions against cruel and unusual punishment, convictions without a trial, and the denial of an attorney were still in effect.
And the best way to prevent other such wingnuts from rising to power is prevention. We have to be able to identify those who aspire to power who do not have the best interests of the country at heart, but who are only in it for themselves. For instance, does Mitt Romney have the best interests of the country at heart? Or is he just in it for himself, and willing to say anything to get elected?
Once people like Rohrabacher get in power, it is a lot more difficult to get rid of them than it is to keep them from getting elected and being placed in a position of trust in the first place. He is in a safe district, in Orange County, CA, which voted overwhelmingly for Bush in the last election. It was also one of the places that helped Ronald Reagan rise to power. And even people like Nixon and Bush who were not personally popular got reelected.
And then, there are the wormtongues of the world, the Very Important People who think that if the Democrats would just reason with the Republicans, then things would be happy again. But while that sort of thing is a nice goal to accomplish, the fact of the matter is that the Broders of the world are operating under a faulty premise -- the premise that people like Rohrabacher can be reasoned with. But the problem is that the Republican Party is more like a machine than a bunch of individuals. Weakened by the 2006 elections, but still a machine bent on the looting and destruction of America.
People like Rohrabacher have totally sacrificed their humanity and completely sold their soul to this machine. They believe that only their needs and wants matter and that nobody else's should. If you give them an inch, they will take a mile.
And the Democrats cannot compromise with them or cut deals with them -- they must work together with the grassroots so that this machine is destroyed once and for all. The Elves had to destroy the Dark Lord once and for all by giving up any kind of aspirations of power or rulership of the world. They could not overthrow the Dark Lord by might; then, a new Dark Lord would have taken over. It would have started out well at first; however, things would have gotten more and more like the old boss as time wore on. And we could not accomodate them; that would have been like Saurman, who tried to reach some kind of understanding with the Dark Lord, only to find out that he was his slave instead.