Friday, April 24, 2009

Gitmo Pt II

Caught a little cable news last night, although lately I've been making it a point to not catch a little cable news. I'm serious. Cable "news" for me has just about run out of interesting. How fucking predictable this branch of the media has become. For awhile, I had fun clicking back and forth between Hannity and Olberman, allowing them 10 seconds apiece to tell me the SHOCKING news about ...whatever....Jeremiah Wright.

"He's just bad for America. This sort of thing has no place in our country, and I find Obama's friendship with this charlatan extremely...."

"....biased against the African American community. Have they forgotten Pat Robertson's remarks over at "Fixed News?" Another perfect example of the right wing's......"

"....'god damn America.' I think Wright should be put on trial for treason, and I want Obama to answer questions about why he chose to spend 20 years listening to this supposed reverend..."

"....illegally wiretapping our phones. Does the 1st Amendment mean nothing to people like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes? Have they ever heard of the Constitution?"


How long can they go on like this? Do these fucking people seriously believe there are, or ever were, only two kinds of Americans? Sure, I can understand programming a show to be geared towards appealing to a traditionally conservative or liberal audience. That makes at least some sense, although when you begin programming for a certain audience it would seem to negate the word "news" in the header. But this idea that the United States is comprised of people who'll either agree with Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow with no gray area in between is absolutely friggin' ludicrous.

The cable news shtick is getting old fast, and from all outward appearances their reaction has been to amp it up to an even higher level of polarity. Both "sides" in the cable news business seek to divide us in a mad quest for advertising dollars, a truly reprehensible agenda.

However, these torture memos released by the Obama White House are another matter entirely. This isn't Bill Ayers or Bristol Palin's love child we're talking about here. We're talking about motherfucking torture. The United States tortured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. I don't know how many other secret locations we used to practice our evil, and it doesn't fucking matter. One location is too many, and we have gone down the path of no return.

And the actions of our interrogators weigh on all of us. It's on all of our heads. It matters not that I've been bitching about Gitmo, and screaming about the Bush White House's trampling of the US Constitution since 2003. I'm an American, and my country, by way of carefully worded legalese crafted by my elected officials, tortured people. There's no turning back. It's a black mark we'll all live with forever.

As I watched that little fuck Sean Hannity discussing "enhanced interrogation techniques" with Charles Grodin, and in some way trying to justify the unjustifiable, I kept thinking back to the secrecy surrounding Gitmo "detainees" during the height of GW's nebulous Global War on Terror. If John Beohner can speak openly about these "torture memos" then by all means Sean Hannity should have the balls to come out and use the T-word.

And I'd really like to ask a couple of simple questions of Sean, and Bill, and Rush, and Peggy and any other shithead who can calmly discuss America's torturing of our prisoners of war like it's just a tougher line of questioning, and something that will be helpful in the long run because it garnered so much useful information.....

If you aren't ashamed of our country for what we did, and if you supported, and continue to voice support for the actions of the Bush administration because you trusted that they were doing the "right thing"....why do you figure the Bush axis of evil spent the last two years denying what we now know to be true? If they were so certain that their actions were legal, moral, ethical....why did they feel the urgent need for convoluted legal memos to "justify" our actions? Why the shroud of secrecy around Gitmo?

Why did they need to lie?

4 comments:

Cindy said...

To justify the unjustifiable.

There's just no other way.

Than to lie.

LentenStuffe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Michael said...

Yeah, it is kind of a rhetorical question I guess.

As I'm watching these fucking people try to defend that position now, I'm reminded of what they said when terrorist sympathizers like me called Gitmo our "National Torture Chamber."

I'm not sure if Boehner meant to refer to the documents as "the torture memos" or if that was a slip. The more I hear from the likes of Kit Bond, the more I think Boehner wished he could swallow those words as they were leaving his own mouth.

Now we're going to play fucking semantics with the word torture. That says plenty by itself. I always thought torture was kinda like porn....know it when you see it.

I caved in and watched the gabfests this morning. What a fucking circus the media have become.

Cindy said...

Word torture.... exactly.

I have a hard time following the ridiculous twists and turns... c'mon people.

Torture. How low have we sunk that we are going to parse words like this?