Liberals were angry at Palin because they thought she should look and act like Kay Bailey Hutchinson: Upper crust, prissy and stiff.Did I read that right?
This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future where too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national healthcare? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.You know, we have a long history with France. French help was crucial to our gaining independence. We bought about half the country from France in 1803. We came to the rescue of France in 1917, and liberated it in 1944. We still to an extent treasure the French-Canadian heritage of Louisiana (and the food there is pretty darn good, I would advise Mr. Saporito). French philosophers like Montesquieu contributed to the Enlightenment traditions on which the Founding Fathers based the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. A French sculptor gave us the Statue of Liberty; a French architect helped lay out Washington D.C.
In March 2007, Australian native David Hicks, who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, became the first person to be sentenced by a military commission convened under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Last February, Col. Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor in Hicks’ trial, told the Australian that the Pentagon “leaned on” him to rush Hicks’ trial, even though at the time he “had no regulations for trial by military commissions.”Unbelievable. Yet investigation and impeachment of Cheney remains "off the table."
[...]
Bush administration political appointees appear to have meddled in Hicks’ case in order to help their key conservative ally, Australian Prime Minister John Howard. In early 2007, Howard was facing a serious electoral challenge from Labor leader Kevin Rudd, who eventually went on to defeat him. Hicks’ incarceration at Guantanamo Bay was a contentious issue in Australian politics at the time.In February 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney visited Howard in Australia, where the PM lobbied for the trial to “be brought on as soon as humanly possible and with no further delay.” A month later, Hicks was sentenced and released back to Australia with critics airing suspicions that Cheney had interceded.
In October 2007, an anonymous military officer told Harper’s Scott Horton that “Cheney interfered directly to get Hicks’s plea bargain deal” as “part of a deal cut” with Howard.
Yesterday evening John McCain gave a speech near New Orleans...
And since it's not waterboarding, it's not torture. Therefore, the President was not lying when he told us over and over and over that "we do not torture." Brilliant!Murat Kurnaz, “freed from Guantanamo in 2006 after a personal plea from German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” detailed the gross abuses he underwent in U.S. custody yesterday. Kurnaz said he was subjected to “water treatment” which involved a “strong punch” that forced him to inhale water. Asked if this was waterboarding, Kurnaz said “water treatment” is different:
ROHRABACHER: You suggest that you were waterboarded in your captivity. Is that correct?
KURNAZ: No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called “water treatment.” There was a bucket of water.
ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?
KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.
Rohrabacher responded: “The CIA is claiming that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”
One of my favorite movies about military culture is "A Few Good Men" (I'm also partial to "The Caine Mutiny"). Its plot clearly illustrates what I consider to be the main issue we're discussing here: line personnel with the most honorable of motives are ordered to commit a violation of the official code of conduct, because their commander thinks it necessary to enforce discipline. The thing goes south and they wind up accidentally killing the soldier the commander was trying to "train," and then rather than owning his ordering the action up front the commander tries to cover it up (or at least his involvement). When the commander is called to testify at the court-martial of the line Marines, he makes a long-winded speech about honor and duty and warriors manning the walls while effete sheeplike citizens sleep soundly in their beds secure in the safety he provides through his leadership; what moral right can the sheep then claim to criticize the manner in which he provides that safety? But the fact remained that he ordered the commission of an act that went against the code of conduct governing the military, and ordered that a crime be committed; and regardless of how lofty and high-minded his intent might have been, he did order that violation. So he was punished for it. We are a nation of laws, not of men, even in the military.
I have absolutely no criticisms at all for most of the people who carry out the orders and do the fighting and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and everywhere else they are called on to do it. They are all heroes. Like those Marines in A Few Good Men, they do need to exercise some basic moral judgment in carrying out orders; you don't give up your knowledge of right and wrong when you take the oath, and that's what some of the displeasure here is about. But I realize that there often isn't time to think about whether what you're doing is the right thing to do, and there is a lot of conditioning to push our troops to default toward following orders without questioning them; so a heavier responsibility HAS to fall on the commanders who are giving those orders. Those are the people who most deserve scorn, those people like Col. whatshisname Miller who came up with the interrogation regime used at Guantanamo and then exported it to Abu Ghraib. Where's his court-martial? Beyond that, where is the investigation into the people who ordered Col. Miller to come up with those techniques? Where is their indictment and trial?
That's what I'm talking about, whoever wants to think I "hate the military." I don't hate the military. I hate what's being done with it (and to it).
