No matter how strong the evidence presented by the Justice Department -- and at first blush, it appears damning -- it is an ex parte presentation and will never be subject to the scrutiny and challenge of the other side.

Such evidence, even when seemingly overwhelming and conclusive, is the very sort of circumstantial argument that pegged Richard Jewell as the Atlanta bomber, that linked Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield to the Madrid bombings, that fingered Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee as a spy, and that cast biodefense expert Steven Hatfill as the original anthrax suspect. In each of those investigations, the news media were largely complicit, conveying incriminating details of the government's case as if they were the gospel.

  The words are those of Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of Nation of Secrets, and they appear today in a Washington Post op ed entitled The Anthrax Case: Solved(?) But Unresolved  I want to use the quoted words as an illustration of the broader issue of whether we can trust our government.

Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for "repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide" and urging future Foreign Service officers to be "guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed."

As I write it is late Tuesday afternoon.  The quote, from which my title is taken, comes from a column by Roger Cohen about which I wrote July 24, in I am so tempted to violate copyright  

Our traditional media has failed miserably in informing the American public about policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience and so such policies have endured.  Today I propose to remind myself, and those who choose to read this diary, of policies fundamentally at odds with our national conscience.  That is, they should be, because if they are not, if they are acceptable, then we are lost already and there is no point in our being here.

My title comes from this exchange:

First, wanderindiana asked

Who will undo it?

    And how can we be sure that damage will be undone when our current elected officials have contributed to that damage?

I responded

good question
         
     but not only who, also how

and finally wanderindiana responded back
         
Someone else, another day...

That exchange took place in the thread on my diary yesterday, entitled If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful . . .

Perhaps the answer should be All of us, starting right now

"To my mind, there's no moral or practical distinction," he said. "If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights.  The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state of laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty.  It applies to all human beings not just in American - even those designated as 'unlawful enemy combatants.' If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles.  It's a transformative issue."

Those of the words of Alberto Mora, quoted on p. 219 of Jane Mayer's The Dark Side.  And the issue is so important, and to my mind has been overlooked in our discussions of whether or not the government has sanctioned torture.  By its own admission, it has sanctioned cruelty, even if it asserts that it has not sanctioned torture.  I want to explore this further.

I will not quote a single word.  But I want to warn you.  I am going to insist that if you do nothing else today you need to follow the link I am about to give you.  It is the lead story in today's Boston Globe.  It is about a boy only a bit younger than the student whose death on Friday inspired me to write my diary yesterday.  

And why do I warn you?  Because the story will and should trouble you.  You are going to be affected, if you still have a heart.

Only after you have read it should you consider going below the fold to read anything additional I might have to offer.  And doing so, or recommending this, or commenting, are totally unnecessary, although I will welcome you if you proceed.

But now, please, I insist.  Follow this link, being sure to read the entire article.

The email was entitled "Sorry to have to tell you this" and was from one of my students who came to Austin to be on the panel with me.  When I opened it up I found out that one of his classmates, a young man who had been in the same AP Government class with him, had passed away that morning.  And the effect on me was immediate and profound.  I knew he had not been the picture of perfect health, often missing school, and that his family had sought out appropriate medical treatment.  It was a family I knew well, having dealt with his Dad in his professional capacity, and having taught his older sister and written her college recommendations.

Certainly my sorrow pales next to that of his family, and it is not why I am writing this.  Perhaps it is because at age 62, with both of my parents long dead, with learning each year of the deaths of more high school and college acquaintances, I ponder death a bit more often.  When I wrote on June 1 about the oncoming death of our College's long-time athletic director, someone who is my age contemporary wrote "Ah. We've reached the age, you and I, when so many of those we knew are on their deathbeds."   So forgive me, but I want to ponder death this morning.  

William Worthy isn't worthy to enter our door
Went down to Cuba, he's not American anymore
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay

The words above are from the chorus of a song entitled Ballad of William Worthy by the late, great protest singer Phil Ochs, about a journalist who lost his passport because he visited Cuba after that became illegal.

And while there is no firm policy quite like that today, even for Cuba, in as sense we are now all trapped, at least if we wish to maintain any privacy.  And for those of us who use technology it is especially frightening to consider the implications of how the 4th Amendment has been erased, especially by the Department of Homeland Security, an abomination whose creation needs to be erased, and whose accumulation of powers without oversight needs to be rolled back as much as do the assertions of the unlimited power of the unitary executive.  And on this subject, I think even Russ Feingold is too deferential.

In a world in which animal rights are gaining ground, barbecue season should make me feel guilty. My hunch is that in a century or two, our descendants will look back on our factory farms with uncomprehending revulsion. But in the meantime, I love a good burger.

So begins a column entitled A Farm Boy Reflects.   It is today's NY Times offering by Nicholas Kristof, written from Yamhill OR, where he grew up on a family farm.  And his next paragraph explains WHY he is writing it:

This comes up because the most important election this November that you’ve never heard of is a referendum on animal rights in California, the vanguard state for social movements. Proposition 2 would ban factory farms from raising chickens, calves or hogs in small pens or cages.

  Perhaps it takes someone who eats meat but grew up on a family farm himself raising animals to be slaughtered for meat,  to take on the question of animal rights.

Please read his column.  Then perhaps come back to this diary.

What on earth do they have to do with with one another, you ask?  Well, in her Washington Post op ed entitled Goodlings Amok, Ruth Marcus recognizes the incongruity of connecting them, but she does so in a way that showsw the Village, of which she as a writer at the Post is a key part, has now decided the Boy Emperor has no cloths.  Please note the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs, before below the fold I offer a few observations of my own:

You might think that the two of these have nothing in common save the happenstance that both are the subject of devastating new reports: Goodling about the stomach-turning politicization of the Justice Department; the deficit about the stomach-turning state of the federal treasury.

But the linkage goes beyond the adjective. The ousted Goodling and the lingering deficit are twin manifestations of the Bush administration's overarching contempt for government and blind adherence to ideology.

Iinvite you to keep reading.

A clear and urgent duty of the next president will be to investigate the Bush administration's torture policy and give Americans a full accounting of what was done in our name. It's astounding that we need some kind of truth commission in the United States of America, but we do. Only when we learn the full story of what happened will we be able to confidently promise, to ourselves and to a world that looks to this country for moral leadership: Never again.

That is the final paragraph of Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post, entitled A Torture Paper Trail, inspired by the documents obtained under a FOIA request and then released by the ACLU.  The column is, as is usually the case with Robinson, well worth reading.  I am simultaneously reading Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, thus there is little in the documents that can totally surprise, but the effect of Robinson's column on top of what I read in the book is overwhelming. It requires me to insist once again on some kind of accountability for the misdeeds done by our Government.  Only unlike Robinson, I want to examine more than just the misdeeds of the Bush administration.

Federal candidates are making a push for funds by the end of the month.   You will see many diaries asking for financial assistance.  I want to use my diary today to urge you to support three, all of whom have a connection with dailykos. Two still have primaries, and th third, running for the 2nd time, has a race that is winnable if only he can get sufficient funds.

Jon Powers faces a self-funding multimillionaire who lost the race last time.

Jerry Northington is our very own possum, longtime participant at dailykos

Barry Welsh is taking his second run at a now very vulnerable Mike Pence in Indiana.

Let me tell just a bit about each.

I closed out four years in office as a southern Governer throughout this period without one person being killed in demonstrations and marches.

  These are the words of man whose guiding principle as a public servant has been the Latin of my title:  the safety of the people is the supreme law.  On January 20, 1959, at age 37, he became governor of South Carolina, having already served in the South Carolina legislature beginning in 1948.  He failed in his first try for the U. S. Senate, was out of elected office from January 1963 until winning a special election to the United States Senate in November of 1966, and he served until January of 2005.  His 38 years is the 7th longest in Senate history.   And now he has written an important book, entitled Making Government Work.  His name is Ernest "Fritz" Hollings and I am delight to be able to write about him and about this book.

My guess is, there are thousands - hundreds of thousands in fact - out there just like me.  Tired of accepting a backseat.  Tired of feeling powerless and voiceless.  Tired of the squalid state of our public affairs.  At at heart, more than ready, willing, and able to take on the system.

I hope I didn't spoil things, but those are the final words from the epilogue of the new book by our very own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Taking on the System:  Rules of Radical Change in a Digital Era.  I was fortunate enough to receive an uncorrected proof so that I would be able to write about it.  As you can tell from the front page, you have less than a month until it is "officially available."  

And since I have already told you the end of the book, let me do the same for this review.   Go forth, purchase, and read.  With less than three months between its publication date and our next national election, you will have a lot of useful information to absorb.

If you want to know why I say that, you will have to keep reading this diary.

I have in recent diaries at times explored the possibility of leaving teaching, in part because the context I need in order to teach effectively may be changing, becoming more restrictive.  Also, I teach government, and I am not completely sure what our government is.  And, as I told a few people in Austin, something had come up which had the possibility of my moving to the world of politics and government.  People have encouraged me to try to stay in teaching, and those with whom I spoke at NN08 asked me to keep them informed.

This diary is in response to those requests, and in the context which I have just laid out.  And by my standards it will be a relatively short diary.

that is how moved I am right now.  I have just finished reading a column that is affirming of life, insistent on moral clarity, and totally appropriate to the incident which occasions its writing, the arrest of Radovan Karadzic.  It is by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, and is entitled Karadzic and War’s Lessons.  

Perhaps it will not move you as it did me.  But you should read it.  It should not be excerpted, which is all I can do without violating copyright.  So I am going to ask a favor.   Please read the column.  If you do nothing else this morning, I think you will find my request reasonable.  After you've done that, if you want, we can talk further.  And anything I have to add will be below the fold.  But don't feel obligated to do anything - except read Cohen's column

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain appeared Tuesday to suggest rationing of veterans’ health care may be needed so combat veterans can receive the care they deserve.

  That is the lead paragraph in an Army Times story today entitled McCain: Make combat-disabled top VA priority.  

I am a veteran (Vietnam Era) who (a) did not serve in combat, and (b) has never had to make use of the VA health care system.   Still, I feel an obligation to fully fund the appropriate health-care needs of ALL who have served, and thus recent statements by the Senator from Arizona, including his proposals to partially privatize veterans' health care by offering vouchers for service at private medical facilities, concern me as indicating an abandonment of the solemn commitment we have previously made to those who have served on our behalf.

In this diary I want to explore the cited article and some related issues, and I invite you to join me below the fold.

Let me reiterate what I say in the title.  This is one person’s perception.  

Let me put that into context.  I have attended all three conventions, and organized and led at least one panel at each.  I also write this as a long-time member of this community and someone who lives in the National Capital region and is somewhat politically active here.  That sentence is offered solely to perhaps help readers understand some of what I will offer.  While this is my perception, my observations, my analysis, I hope that this diary can provide an occasion of conversation, where others can provide evidence supporting or gainsaying what I have offered.  After all, I was but one of 2,000 attendees, and only saw a small fraction of the sessions.

So please join me below the fold.

We were honored.  Yes, only about 50 people were there at any one minute, maybe 70 or so total with those who came and went during the 70+ minutes of the panel.  

There were several other good panels at the same time, 10:30 on Friday morning.  Also, that was the only time the organizers could schedule former Alabama Governor Don Siegleman.

I am talking about this: the panel on politically active youth

The first minute or so of sound is missing (I will explain that and more below the fold).

I am going to suggest that, even though it will take more than an hour to watch panel, you consider recommending this diary.   Let me explain that, and more, below.