So, Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat went to a fairly unknown Republican named Scott Brown. That’s what everyone is jabbering about, so I figure I might as well chime in. Now, to be fair, there were lots of reasons that Brown won that seat. The first is that he is an excellent campaigner. No doubt about it. He assimilated a lot of what worked for the Democrats in the past few election cycles, learned from it, even improved on it to a point, and then applied that same strategy to what most people thought was an impossible race. Keep in mind, however, that most people thought that some of the Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 were impossible as well.

Scott Brown also won because Martha Coakley was a mediocre candidate who ran a shit-tastic campaign. She assumed that Massachusetts would never put a Republican in Teddy’s old chair, so she didn’t have to try that hard. And what she did try, she hosed up pretty thoroughly. She had a sloppy work ethic, an utter lack of charisma or even feigned enthusiasm for the race, and honestly? Her organization seems like it was being run by a pack of narcoleptics on an opium bender. I’ve clipped my toenails with more vigor and verve than this woman ran for the United States Senate.

So while I don’t much agree with Brown’s positions, I’m not surprised that he won. Would I rather a Democrat take that seat? Sure. Am I glad Coakley, specifically, got her ass handed to her? You bet I am. She deserved it, and it will hopefully serve as a wake-up call for complacent Democrats who think that their base will infinitely elect them simply because there’s a (D) at the end of their name. On the up side, Brown has to run for re-election in just two short years, so there will be a chance to get a competent challenger into the race then.

Now, as for this whole “No More Super Majority” sky-is-falling bullshit that I keep seeing from every pundit and reporter in the free world? I’d really like to know just what in the hell they’re talking about. The Democrats never had a supermajority in the Senate. Ever. Even if you, for some reason, count the “Blue Dogs” like Nelson and Bayh? That still only gets the Democrats to 58. Bernie Sanders makes 59, though he’s pretty left of center. So I’ll give them that one. But magical mister sixty? Why, that would be Joe Lieberman.

When the critical vote in your supermajority Senate is a guy that got primaried out of your own party, gave a speech at the opposition party’s National Convention, and spent almost the full eight years sniffing George Bush’s shit and telling him it didn’t stink? That’s not a fucking supermajority. That’s 59 Senators and one adversary. I don’t care what party he claims to officially caucus with – Joe Lieberman was the sixtieth Democrat in the same way that Yoko Ono was the fifth Beatle. The absurd difficulty that the Senate had passing health care reform alone should be proof that whatever the Democrats have, it sure as hell wasn’t and isn’t a supermajority.

But you know who else didn’t have a supermajority? The Republicans under Bush. Nope. Never had it. They couldn’t force a cloture vote on anything without help from at least a few Democratic Senators. And yet that didn’t stop them from hammering out eight long years of the shittiest governance in American history. And the reason it didn’t stop them is that the Democratic minority lacked the sack to ever dare to filibuster the Republicans – on anything. And I’m not just talking about the September 12th Senate or the Recently Bitchslapped At The Polls 2003 Senate. Even in 2006, when the Democrats were obviously riding a wave of George Bush fueled populist outrage, they refused to stand the hell up.

I’ve always given the Republicans credit for sheer brass ball-ism and their uncanny ability to get things done. And this Republican Congress is no exception. Though I guess right now it’s their uncanny ability to not get things done that deserves damning praise. Because their basic position is that they will filibuster everything the Democrats throw at them unless they receive their concessions and are allowed to pollute, water down and otherwise piss on the legislation. And, of course, once they monkey wrench up the bill, they vote against it anyway. That’s some chutzpa, friend. But the Democrats let them get away with it, and that’s where the blame should fall.

So maybe, in the end, losing the false mantle of supermajority won’t really matter all that much. The Democrats still won’t get anything significant done. They’ll still piss away their basic majority (even with the Blue Dogs in play, the Democrats can manage the basic fifty votes for just about anything on their agenda). And the public might be able to go an entire week without having to hear from Joe Fucking Lieberman and his magical sixtieth vote.

Ultimately, the Brown victory should be a wake-up call for more than just fickle campaigners and smug partisans. It should be a clear message to all Senate Democrats that it’s time for them to take off the kiddie gloves and realize that the GOP will oppose anything and everything they want to accomplish (and often after screwing it up in committee). It’s high past time to replace Reid with a competent, steely-toothed majority leader who’s willing to let the Republicans filibuster if they so threaten. Parade them in front of the American voters. Shame them if need be. But start actually using the power that those voters gave to you, or they damn sure will take it away again.

The year was 2005, and George W. Bush had just won his first majority in a Presidential election ever. And with his 2% win over John Kerry, Bush strutted out in front of the media explaining that he now had political capital, and that he was damn sure going to spend it. Everyone with a capital R within ten city blocks of their name went on television to describe his 2% win as a mandate, Jeff Gannon jokes be damned.

Bush decided that it was time to take care of a pesky little problem that has rankled fiscal conservatives in America for over half a century. And so the President embarked on a cross-country speaking tour in order to convince people that the best way to fix Social Security was to break it up into hundreds of millions of private investment accounts. That way their money could be individually invested – because if there’s any money trading hands anywhere in the world, Wall Street believes it deserves a cut. It was the first salvo in the hard line right wing dream of finally dismantling that damned infernal socialist New Deal that Roosevelt had put in place during the late thirties and early forties.

It took them almost seventy years to gather up the cajones to go after Social Security outright (long since branded as the “third rail” of American politics). And when they finally tried, they did so with their mandate President and their complacent press and their noise machine so overbearingly influential that it actually convinced people that a Vietnam War veteran knew less about military action than a Champagne Squadron AWOLer. They had proven that they could fool enough of the people enough of the time. They had their mandate. They had the attention of a still panicky nation. They were the thin red line between order and terrorist anarchy!

And they got their asses kicked over it. The attempt to gut Social Security was the first major, public defeat for the Bush Administration. So here the GOP was, so far out from the inception of the program that no one who helped to craft it was still alive, and they couldn’t even put so much as a dent in it.

But if you want to understand why Republicans are flipping their shit over reforming health care (and the inclusion of a Public Option), you need look no further than Social Security. They know damn well that once a proper Public Option is in place, they will never be able to get rid of it. This is a major overhaul of a severely broken aspect of how our entire country operates – an overhaul favored by 72% of the country. And a Public Option for health care is utterly toxic for the health insurance industry as it currently exists.

Its mere existence would force the current lineup of HMOs to have to end practices like mandatory denial rates (where medical directors are expected to be able to deny a certain percentage of all claims without even knowing what those claims will entail). They’ll be more reluctant to sift back through a person’s medical history looking for tiny excuses to drop their coverage as soon as they fall genuinely ill (even though they had no qualms about collecting premiums when the person was healthy). It just won’t be feasible to abuse their customers in pursuit of profit when any one of those customers will have an alternative that will never deny them coverage and will always charge an affordable rate.

But what scares them the most is the realization that, like Social Security, any sort of health care Public Option would become untouchable. No politician would be able to go after a program that popular because you can only buy a politician up to the point where the money matters. You couldn’t get a politician to campaign on a platform of cannibalism no matter how much money you handed to him because all of the advertising in the world won’t win him an election. Likewise, once public health care is available, the insurance industry understands that it’ll be here to stay. And that’s why they’re shooting their entire wad on killing it before it becomes law.

I mean, the alternative theory is that all of the various HMOs out there are spending millions on Senators, Congressmen and advertising because they’re really concerned about the average citizen. And if you believe that steaming load, I know for a fact that you’ve never been to the doctor for anything worse than a head cold. So brace yourself for the big push, maybe bigger than anything from the political right in terms of propaganda since the invasion of Iraq. They will fight against a Public Option to the bitter, bugger-all end because they know that once it’s here, it’s here to stay. They know that they’ve slowly created a monster of public mistrust and loathing over the past thirty-five years. And they’re scared.

They should be.

I shall caution you but once, gentle reader, before I dive into the thick of this murky dread. What follows is a mental miasma of self implosion and psychological contortions. It is what keeps terror up at night with the shakes. To progress further is to stare directly into the beating heart of madness. It is the Sanity Check that you cannot outroll. You have been warned, and I absolve myself of the damage you welcome by continuing.

So, Sarah Palin (that’s not the damage). I said before that she was done, over, finished as an almost-was. That she would fade back into the mists of relative obscurity only to be trotted out as a punchline or a tutorial on How Not To Do Things. However, I never said she’d go quietly.

But she is going. Resigning, in fact, from the Governorship of Alaska with a full year and a half left in her term. Turning the reigns of power over to, well, actually, I have no idea who becomes the Governor now, but since the state was functioning for several years with Sarah Palin as their chief executive and Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens as their senior statesman, I’d have to imagine that Alaska can’t possibly end up with worse leadership than a stick up her ass hillbilly and a ranting, raving old badger.

The big question is why, though. Why is she resigning as Governor barely more than halfway through her term? There are theories arcing across the Tubeosphere about it right now, ranging from an FBI investigation to a personal Marc Sanford style scandal. It’s easy content to take wild guesses about the motivations of a crazy person, especially if that crazy person happens to be famous. Her official reason is that she’s a lame duck Governor, and Alaska needs someone who can continue to lead. You know, speaking of crazy.

The problem is that her excuse is just noise. It’s nonsense. If a power saw tried to do an impression of television static, it would come out sounding like Sarah Palin giving a speech. I mean, she uses words, sure. But her words just don’t make any bloody sense. The Governorship of Alaska is a four year term. With a year and a half left on the clock, she’s already decided she’s a lame duck?  The mind reels at how brazenly full of shit she is. Am I to imagine, then, that if she were elected President (I know, I know, but humor the whack jobs for a minute), she’d only serve a six and a half year term? Wouldn’t want to lame duck it around the White House for eighteen months now would we?

Her other reason, you understand, is that she’s not a quitter. I actually like this line of thinking, because it helps to take the edge off of the lame duck excuse. I mean, that seems damn near logical next to the paralyzing thought that, in Sarah Palin’s mind, resigning her office for no reason is proof that she isn’t a quitter. I take a small amount of comfort in knowing that she neither understands nor believes the words coming out of her mouth. But still, like a small child starting a brush fire by playing with matches, the simple fact of her disingenuous nature does not at all detract from the fact that other human beings, many of them with at least some secondary education, are nodding their heads in approval of this bold and courageous move.

It was about eight months ago that I suggested Palin was the sort of self-aggrandizing con woman narcissist that would shit in her own hat and call it pumpkin pie if she thought someone would believe it. And if I didn’t say it then, really, I should have. When I suggested that she was proudly classless and grotesquely un-Presidential. When I proclaimed John McCain’s campaign officially over, wrung dry and left hollow by Sarah Palin’s alternating modes of political vampirism and pathetic attention whoring. I called her a stupid bitch and some people took offense. The woman just quit her job while telling people she isn’t a quitter. I’ll assume that there are apologies forthcoming.

The thing is, she’s sure she’s going to be the President one day. I can understand why – she’s likely surrounded entirely by suck ups and hangers on willing to fuel whatever aspirations and fantasies she conjures up in order to ride her name to success. And just the same way she made McCain’s already uphill battle into a soul crushing defeat, so will her thousand little vampires bring her down. The difference, really, is that McCain was smart enough to know better – but the old man let a little piece of ass he was never going to tap in the first place cloud his judgment. Sarah Palin? She believes her own shit doesn’t stink, and she judges other people based on whether or not they agree with her.

Though for a woman who won’t stop complaining about the media’s brutal and unjust treatment of her, she sure does seem eager to soak up as much media exposure as is humanly possible. For all of her pissing and moaning, she’d rush out in front of a speeding semi truck to get another interview with Charles Gibson or Katie Couric and she knows it. Because the one thing single most important thing that Sarah Palin can’t understand is that she isn’t already perfect.

You see, she didn’t embarrass herself taking questions about the Bush Doctrine or her weekly reading list or fungible energy sources or Vladamir Putin or whether abortion clinic bombers are terrorists or. . . well, you get the idea. She didn’t embarrass herself because of some shortcoming of her own. It was all those gotcha media journalist types. And now that she’s wise to their tricks, boy is she gonna show them a thing or two, you betcha.

It’s her defining characteristic, and it’s the thing that makes so many people so uneasy with her. Not coincidentally, it’s the thing that makes her so much like George Bush. Blame and fault are for other people, and if only we would judge her based on a theoretical set of circumstances that could have happened but didn’t, we’d see how great she is. She believes this down to her core, with every last fiber of her being. All of that humble, folksy charm bullshit is just that: bullshit.

So now Sarah believes that she’s too important to just be the measly Governor of Alaska. She’s a major player now, baby. She’s a superstar! And she has no intention of letting her fame and recognition dwindle up in those cold Alaskan peaks when she could be building up her Army of the Uninformed down in the lower 48s. You know, where all of those electoral votes come from. So Sarah Palin did what any homespun, real American would have done in her place. She quit her job and abdicated her responsibilities without any reason or warning whatsoever so she could come on down and strut her stuff. Maybe she’s forgotten how much bigger the pond is down here. I look forward to her re-re-education.

You know, when I said she’d be a relic by the next Presidential election, even I didn’t expect her to crash and burn in the first year. Even the right wing is turning on her, with a few notable exceptions like Bill Kristol. Bill thought her resignation was a brilliant move. Of course, he says the same thing about invading Iraq. And if if that kind of Cluster-Tasta-Fuckster-Phe is what passes in your mind for a job well done, then sure. Everything’s coming up roses for Sarah.

But back in the real world, Palin’s done. She’s too worn out to run for office, and she has neither the staying power nor the sufferability to transition into any sort of punditry / media celebrity. Crash and burn, sweetheart. Crash and fucking burn.

Okay, so, I’ve pretty much avoided any serious discussion of Glenn Beck up until this point. There are a few reasons for that. First off, I don’t like giving the guy free press. I understand that he’s just a more effeminate version of Ann Coulter – actively trying to say any damn thing, no matter how offensive or crazy, because it guarantees him a job. And I know that there are no Beck viewers that actually read my website (my hate mail is all clearly written by the partially literate). So really all I’d be doing is exposing Beck-lessly happy people to his severe damage. It’d kind of be like having a blog post titled, “Hey, guys, want the clap?”

Well, load up on the antibiotics, kids, because today we’re going to crazytown. Many of you have probably seen the clip I’m writing about by now. Beck had 22 year CIA agent and bin Laden specialist Michael Scheuer on his show. Now, it should be noted up front that Scheuer isn’t any kind of GOP shill. In fact, he was highly critical of the Bush administration. He’s certainly no liberal either, though, and was pretty vocal in endorsing Ron Paul. He shits all over Richard Clarke, which automatically makes me skeptical of him. And he pushes the whole “Clinton could have killed Osama but didn’t take the shot” meme, which is really due for retirement. In terms of political affiliations, he is an island unto himself, and he takes himself incredibly seriously. So regardless of Beck’s agenda, I have no doubts that Scheuer meant every word he said. And yet he also seems to understand the dynamics of internal Middle Eastern politics better than most of the supposed experts I’ve ever heard from.

To that end, it’s really a shame that he and Beck started waxing poetic about our porous American borders and the dangers of illegal immigration. And it’s telling that he sees everything through a What Would Bin Laden Do filter. Because in discussing the perceived shortcomings of the Obama administration’s response to pretty much everything, Scheuer has apparently allowed his amygdala to work itself into a state of cerebral frenzy. He feels that we are so bloody off track that the only way we’re ever going to “wake up” is for Osama bin Laden to detonate a major weapon in the United States. In fact, he calls it our “only chance” for survival. Seriously, watch it for yourself. I shit you not.

Then he goes off on some sort of tear about the elitist, liberal media and how much our politicians try to suck up to the Europeans. . . whatever the hell that’s supposed to be about. Now, he calls it an absurd situation. So at least he’s aware of what he actually just said. I think it’s a little “blinders on” that he thinks Osama is the only person who could attack us in the way he’s deathwishing for – but then again, I’m not the Middle East expert, so I’m in no position of authority to argue with the man on that point. But I will tell you this – even in the rankest depths of the Bush administration’s alternating waves of crazy and stupid, I never heard anyone on the left praying for a 9/11 redux. Most of us were just hoping that nothing else major would go down while the damn fools were still in power.

But honestly? It’s not even Scheuer with his side-mouthed smile as he pines for an al Queda victory that pisses me off most in this clip. It’s Beck – and not for his complacency about the “only chance” comment. It’s for what he said afterward. Scheuer demands that the government employ “as much violence as necessary” to protect the American people (a statement I have trouble squaring with his unusually enlightened assessment of why we are so reviled in the Middle East in the first place). Upon hearing that comment, Beck goes on to say the following:

“Mmm hmm, which is why I was thinking this weekend, that would be the – if I were him [bin Laden], that would be the last thing I would do right now.”

That one sentence makes the nerves inside of my teeth twitch. It tells a person everything they need to know about Glenn Beck, and in a lot of ways it’s quite amazing for how thoroughly condensed all of that information is. It’s like pure, 100% natural, home grown douchebag.

First off, it’s a lie. I refuse to believe that days before hearing Scheuer’s comment, this line of reasoning even occurred to Beck. I mean, he’s four beans short of a sloppy joe, but even I don’t believe that he sits around on the weekend inventing elaborate terrorism fantasies so that he can get out of maybe having to stand quite so close to any more brown people (remember, the original discussion was illegal immigration before they casually broadened the topic to national security in general). Beck heard something that he realized was so batshit insane that he wished he’d thought to say it, and so he immediately latched himself on to the comment by claiming similar musings. It proves to me that Beck is both an attention whore and a liar, which is what I said at the start of this rant. But that’s not really the part that pisses me off.

The second thing that aggravates me about that comment is that apparently, Beck wants me to believe that Osama bin Laden plans his terrorism strikes around how best to hamper US immigration policy. Really? You think so, dumbass? Do you honestly believe that if bin Laden (or al Queda) had the capacity to strike us again, right now, that they would hold off because an attack would spike the knee-jerk reactionary panic response of the American people? Apparently, Glenn Beck thinks that terrorists try to avoid inciting terror. And that’s still not the aspect of his comment that pisses me off.

Listen – some people think Beck is a nutter or a raving psychopath. I know he isn’t. I know he has an agenda, he has a viewer base, and he is especially particular about the kinds of inflammatory arguments he makes to attract them. The crying on air, the Rasputin-Cam close up, the revolutionary-without-the-balls rhetoric? It’s all staged. It’s a scruples-free deliberate media campaign designed to make money for one Mr. Glenn Beck by drawing the constant attention of the media, which will draw new viewers to his show. Ann Coulter has been running this “find the crazy” shell game for years. Beck knows what he’s doing by now.

And what he did, in that one sentence, was to make a barren and pathetic excuse for his entire phony line of reasoning. He rationalizes away the fact that despite Obama being the OMG Worst Liberal Ever, being an arugula eating secret Muslim pansy surrender monkey, and having a weak-spined Democratic Congress to back him up, we still haven’t heard shit from al Queda. He has to justify how Obama can keep us safe while Ol’ Rootin’ Tootin’ Bush dropped the ball so very, very badly at the start of his Presidency. So you see, it’s not that Obama is capable. It can never be that. It’s that bin Laden is toying with him. If you spend years screaming to your listeners and viewers that only relentless military action can protect America, and then we continue to be safe in its absence, you need to balance that. Even to a completely brainwashed audience.

Beck knows exactly what he’s saying and what he’s doing. And he just off-the-cuffed a huge turd into all of our laps.

Over at Talking Points Memo, M. J. Rosenberg expressed a very important distinction about the events currently taking place in Iran. That regardless of the outcome, the neoconservative mouth-foaming to just bomb the place back to Jesus is pretty much dead forever in America. Iran has been demonized in our shared culture as a country full of fanatics and religious extremists who go to bed every night in actively-on-fire American Flag bedsheets and stone to death anyone to the political left of Osama bin laden. And those days are over now.

The American people have seen the Iranian people taking to the streets, fighting back riot cops with stones and bare knuckles, demanding at least some semblance of accountability from their already dubiously structured quasi-Republic. The comments section for that article was immediately flooded by the kinds of liberals that make me hate being a liberal – a self congratulatory smugfest to let Rosenberg know that they’d never been so uninformed or reactionary, and that it must be his inside-politics, self-imposed deafness that led him to view Iran thusly.

Well good for fucking you. But out in the real world, where most people don’t masturbate to the idol of their own enlightenment, Rosenberg made a very valid and meaningful point – and he wasn’t alone in doing so. Now, to TPM’s credit, plenty of other readers showed up to defend Rosenberg’s point. And yes, most people who are educated about the Middle Eastern political climate were aware that the Iranian people live in what would elsewhere be called a Banana Republic.

But that’s not how the media has portrayed them or how the right wing has used them as a political lever. Those aren’t the rational, oppressed people that John McCain was joking about when he sang “Bomb, Bomb Iran”. For some of the center and almost all of the right Iran was indistinguishable from Ahmadinejad himself, a fact that doubly expressed their lack of information since Khamenei has always been the man calling the shots.

And speaking of “Bomb, Bomb Iran”, when John McCain wants to stop making 1950′s jokes about dropping heavy explosives on civilians, he can then criticize Obama’s handling of the Iranian riots. But that day ain’t coming soon. The same goes for Lindsey “Five Rugs for Five Bucks” Graham. On one hand, I understand where their emotions are. The world was almost rid of Ahmadinejad as a global agitator, and now it’s damn obvious that he’s stolen the election. I think both liberals and conservatives can agree that having a more moderate, sane President in Iran would be better for just about everyone.

But even on a point where both sides are in agreement, there apparently can’t be any common ground. It was a pretty big deal when Obama admitted in Cairo, almost in passing, that the CIA meddled in Iranian politics fifty years ago. I mean, everyone in Iran damn well knows it, but officially we never bring it up when we’re out in public. It’s the dirty little affair that never comes up at Thanksgiving but everyone is thinking while they stuff their faces full of pie. But by mentioning American involvement, it was Obama’s own form of dog whistle politics that said, “I’m not going to jerk you guys around.” And by all accounts it worked.

But the most important thing that America can do – if what we want really is to help Iran move out of the political dark ages – is to not dip our grimy fingers into their bowl. Haven’t we learned by now that when we try to manipulate Middle Eastern politics to serve our own desires it ends up blowing up in our faces? Exactly how many times does that have to happen before guys like McCain and Graham figure it out? By interjecting ourselves into the Iranian riots, we’d be playing right into the role that we’ve suffered as a stereotype in the Middle East. The arrogant, meddling, self-interested, imperial Americans.

Of course, if we had some sort of actual diplomatic relationship with Iran, there might be some covert, back-scratching  pressure we could exert on them. But we’re not allowed to talk to them because they’re terrorists. Sort of. Or something. So right now it may feel like sitting on the sidelines and saying, “Geez, this is freaky!” is about the best thing that we can do as a country. But that’s not entirely true.

We can remember. And we can force our countrymen to remember – especially those that are looking for a convenient and foreign enemy. Ahmadinejad may be our enemy. Khamenei may be our enemy. Hell, the entire Guardian Council may be our enemy (though there are rumblings that the majority of the Council has also just about had it with Khamenei’s bullshit as well). But the Iranian people? The ones who are out in force, risking their lives to save their country from itself? The ones who are standing up to a government that disappears dissenters and shoots civilians in the streets? And the ones who would be most devastated by some half-cocked American military excursion? They are not our enemy.

They are us.

So, I’ve been listening to this health care debate forever now. It’s been a topic of personal involvement for me more or less since I joined the workforce because of how it has affected my life. I’m fortunate to have avoided any serious injury or illness since I was a young boy – and it’s probably a good thing because I generally haven’t been able to afford more than the more basic hospitalization coverage that my various employers have (or have not) offered me.

And I say “have not” because my first steady job was working as a contracted technician, through an employment firm, for a large electronics company that may or may not rhyme with “Bony”. We worked nine hour shifts (which included our lunch), the job itself was both mind numbing and infuriating, and our seven person staff had a turnover rate of about one person a month for the year and a half I was there – a record, by the way.

And because we were technically contracted employees (who had name badges and domain accounts and parking access and everything else) we received no benefits from Bony at all. All of our benefits came through our contracting company (who, I found out towards the end of my employment with them, were taking roughly two thirds of every dollar they got from Bony for my services). The health care that was offered to us through the contracting company was so expensive and so lackluster that it was actually cheaper and more efficient for me to secure my own private – and extremely basic – policy.

I generally referred to that setup as “getting screwed”. The irony is that, compared to most of the people that I talk to who are just entering the workforce now, I had a pretty sweet deal in terms of health insurance. And that to me is a problem. To be honest, I was very fortunate that I never really needed my insurance beyond a few doctor’s visits for common infections and the like. I never had a medicine or a procedure denied to me as a cost saving technique. So if I feel that the insurance industry has serious problems, I can’t even imagine the opinions of people that really have been screwed by the system.

Now I’m not going to go into some tirade about single payer systems or public options or further privatization or anything like that. To be honest, I’m out of my depth. And as hot a topic as these things are in political discourse right now, you don’t need to hear a moldy re-hash of it all from me. Having listened to all of the arguments, I’m personally in favor of a public option. It addresses the greatest number of problems and causes the least amount of unpleasant disruption. Not everyone agrees of course. And there is a whole list of talking points being used to refute a public option for health care. There are two, specifically, that I take issue with. And let’s ignore any fallacies, half-truths and lies here. Let’s just assume for a moment that the following two statements are true.

1) A government-run health care option would be cumbersome and oppressive. It would deny people their own voice in determining their health care decisions, and would be akin to the boondoggle horror that is socialized medicine.

2) A government-run health care system would put private health care companies out of business because they wouldn’t be able to compete or retain their customers if public health care was available to everyone.

What I’ve just been told by the very people that want to keep the health insurance industry the way it is now this: A shitty, inefficient, last-rate service health care option would still manage to put privately run HMOs out of business. Well how piss-poor a job must the industry be doing right now if The Horrors Of Socialized Medicine could still send them reeling into the poorhouse? Their argument for making no significant change is that the status quo is so beyond the pale terrible that even a government funded option, which they tell us is the worst health care in the world, would still be better by comparison.

In a few months, these same people are going to sit around wondering how in the hell they lost this argument.

I’m not going to do a huge post here, because not a lot needs to be said. But I just want to make something clear. If you are currently arguing against Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court because she’s unqualified, too abrasive, a reverse racist or an affirmative action pick, you’re full of shit. Just stop. You don’t believe any of that crap – or you didn’t before someone whispered those talking points into your ear. And an actual reading of her record (including the context for the one or two lines that the right pretends to be so upset about) dispels those myths. You’re opposing her because Barack Obama nominated her, and you oppose Barack Obama’s party and ideology.

And listen – it’s partisan politics. I understand that. But what you have to understand is that a Democratic President with a Democratic Congress is nominating a Supreme Court Justice. Who the hell did you think he was going to pick? What you have to ask yourself as a conservative is whether Sotomayor is about as personally acceptable a candidate as Obama is going to nominate.

That’s how I looked at Bush’s nominations – and my response reflected that outlook. I gawked at Harrier Miers, because she was legitimately unqualified. I shuddered at Sam Alito, because he apparently spends his evenings masturbating to the soothing sound of Antonin Scalia’s voice. And I agreed that John Roberts should be confirmed without serious opposition because while I don’t agree with him all that often, he’s about as reasonable a nominee as I was likely to see from Bush. And as the opposing minority, that’s really the only calculation worth performing.

Side Note: Neither this post nor its comments will be turned into a pissing ground over Sotomayor’s qualifications, or the empty talking points associated with them. So don’t even start.

As politics went, the first decade of this new century were pretty gloomy times for the Democrats. They lost two Presidential elections (to one of, if not the worst President in American history), they were completely scolded and impotent in both the House and the Senate, and even after regaining majorities they were still too abused and politically marginalized to get anything useful done. And yet it was a sort of underground revival for liberals in this country. The Republicans managed to do what the Democratic base had been unable to. It knocked the Democratic Party’s machine flat on its back without completely snuffing the party out. And what emerged was a party largely rebuild by constituents rather than consultants.

Liberals and progressives began to take the party back. Not completely or universally by any stretch, but the actual voting base has much more power than it ever did before. And make no mistake, all of this is largely thanks to Ye Olde Interwebs. The fund raising, organizing, and phone banking have all been exceptional – certainly Obama showed the power of of a multitude of minor donations adding up fast.

But it’s more than that. It’s also about a sense of community and interconnectedness that was never really present in the Democratic party of my lifetime. Liberals were often so very fragmented over individual issues and frequently lacked any sort of core message to articulate their core beliefs. It’s the failure of the Democratic establishment that none of these things came from within the party machine, but it’s also the triumph of the party as it exists today that the left realized it didn’t need to be spoon-fed wet noodle talking points.

Well now it’s the Republicans that are lost in the wilderness, devoid of a cohesive message or strategy, relying on failed arguments and foot-shuffling pointlessness to pass for a platform. Granted, the GOP wound up there for completely different reasons than the Democrats did, and the country is in a very different place. But many Republicans looked to the past eight years to figure out how a party goes from being a “permanent minority” to owning both houses and the Presidency in less than a decade. And that is when many of them (for the first time, I suspect) figured out what the internet actually is. Sort of.

So as liberals dominate the blogs, the community sites, the forums and the message boards, conservatives looked for the next big technological barrier to break. They were going to get in on the ground floor of something, damn it, and show those no goodnik Daily Kos punks that two can play at this internet game. And almost universally, the GOP focused in on the one facet of electronic communication that didn’t seem to have much of an organized Democratic presence. Unfortunately for them, that was Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing inherently wrong with Twitter. In fact, I find it to be a very interesting medium. The best explanation I’ve ever heard of it is as a “Broadcast IM” service, and that really does seem to fit. It’s  just that Twitter is designed to relay short, off-the-cuff bits of information, rapidly and regularly, to anyone who might care to listen. It simply isn’t a good place to do serious organizing or hold genuine debate. Though maybe it is the perfect fit for the Republican party today. 160 characters and you’re done. Just enough for a sound bite or a slogan without anything other than obstruction for obstruction’s sake behind it.

I don’t think the GOP has caught on yet that being the undisputed political Kings Of Twitter is kind of like having the most popular Twilight / Furry Fan Fic web portal on the internet. I imagine it will take them some time, and that the vast majority of them will never really understand what it is they’re playing at. Nor am I under any delusion that most of the politicians who claim to tweet are simply having their talking points mushed in with their daily planner and typed out by an intern in their spare time. And yet they’re putting a lot of stock – and money – into promoting the conservative Twitter community. Even Sarah Palin tweets now, which is weird because I didn’t know pitbulls could text without thumbs.

So I say let them have Twitter. Go ahead, you silly buggers. Own the hell out of it. Because while one political party is dominating every digital medium that’s broad enough to foster a serious discussion, the other party will be reduced to listing their political platform in lolspeak. u can haz permanent minorty kthxbye!

So yeah, we’re talking about torture again. I’m sure some of my readers are bloody sick of the subject. Hell, on some level I’m even sick of the subject. But it’s too important to ignore, and I think I need to address a very important aspect of how our national conversation about torture has been framed. As an aside, it makes me a little disgusted that our nation is actually discussing it. . . but that’s another rant for another day.

I’ve been saying for a long time, both here on my website and to anyone that will listen, that torture doesn’t work as a tool for gathering information. And this is true, much in the same way that a hammer is a terrible tool for driving screws. That doesn’t mean that torture is ineffective – far from it. Torture is very effective at its intended purpose, which is and has always been the extraction of false confessions. If you hurt someone badly enough, over a long enough period of time, they will eventually say or do just about anything to make that pain stop. Some people might break in hours. Others might be able to hold out for months, even years.

From the Spanish Inquisition to the Third Reich to the Khmer Rouge and all points of totalitarian oppression in between, torture was, has been and always will be principally effective in eliciting false admissions – specifically, targeted admissions. In fact, when you get right down to it, torture is really only useful if you already know what you want to hear. It doesn’t provide useful information because unless you already know the answer to your question, you have no idea if the victim is telling the truth, or simply fabricating intelligence in order to end the torture.

The counter-argument I’ve heard consistently, in favor of the use of torture, is that we may (or may not) have received critical information from torturing prisoners that helped fight al Queda. The first problem I have with that assertion is that it’s being made by the same bunch of duplicitous pricks that told us that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was an imminent threat, and that Hussein had direct ties to al Queda. They were wrong on all counts, and continue (to this day, in some cases) to assert these fictions to anyone who will listen.

So why in the hell are we willing to believe them about torture’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism? If we assume they are telling the truth, it treads against literally thousands of years of human experience. If we assume they are lying, it precisely follows the pattern of covering-their-asses lies that we heard from every other orifice of the Bush Administration.

And that pattern is not unique to Iraq. No one could have predicted that terrorists would slam planes into buildings – except for the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and any counter-terrorism expert with more than a week’s worth of experience. No one realized the levees in New Orleans would breach – except for FEMA, Homeland Security, the Army Corps of Engineers, and hell, the freaking Weather Channel. We absolutely do not spy on American citizens – except that we do. And of course we get easily acquirable warrants from the very security-conscience FISA court first – except that we don’t.  I could go on for days. Hit the archives of this site, and you’ll see that I have. Occam’s Razor demands, at the very least, that you acknowledge the likelihood of a cover-up concerning the use and usefulness of torture.

Which brings me back to the original point. Why would we torture prisoners? It’s not that I think that everyone in the Bush Administration has some sort of sadism fetish, or that I think they’re “evil”. Excuse me for not seeing the world in stark, absolute black and white. What I’ve long asserted, and what is quickly coming to light, is that our government tortured prisoners for the exact same reason that every other regime or government has tortured people. To force confessions, accuracy be damned.

It’s a pretty open secret that the neoconservative movement has had a hard-on for toppling Saddam Hussein – as far back as the mid 90s. It’s clear as day on the Project for the New American Century‘s website – specifically their 1997 Statement of Principles (signed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Bennett, Scooter Libby and Jeb Bush, amongst others). At least four years before they took the White House, this group of people was advocating using overwhelming American military force to control the world’s energy supply.

In a 1999 letter to Bill Clinton they insisted that America’s top national security priority should be, “removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power”. That letter, incidentally, was signed by Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfelt, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, William Bennett and Richard Armitage. The same men who were telling us just three years later that Saddam was going to hand off WMDs to al Queda. And the same men that to this day defend the torture of prisoners in American custody.

I know that’s a lot of names, but I have a few more to throw at you. The first is Paul O’Neill. He was Secretary of the Treasury, appointed by George W. Bush. He resigned after less than two years, and later admitted that he was asked (read: told) to leave. In 2004 he wrote a book called The Price of Loyalty where he talked frequently about the new administration’s obsession with Saddam Hussein from the moment they took power – long before 9/11 and during a time when they effectively ignored global terrorism in general and al Queda specifically.

All of these assertions are corroborated by many sources, from the several books Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) wrote about the Bush White House to the statements of counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke. Clarke served under every President from Ronald Reagan on forward. In his book Against All Enemies, Clarke tells a very similar tale about the Day One efforts to remove Hussein and the complete devaluing of counter-terrorism efforts against bin Laden.

In order to sell the American people on a war in Iraq, though, the government needed a better rationale than the Reverse Domino Theory that PNAC so clearly outlines. What they needed was to link Hussein to al Queda, which of course they could not actually do because the two were enemies. On at least one occasion, bin Laden called for revolution in Iraq and the beheading of Saddam Hussein (on one of his Greatest Hits tapes, which we don’t really get many of anymore). So what the neoconservatives who found themselves in charge of the most powerful military on the planet really needed was some sort of evidence that could tie Hussein, even tangentally, to the men behind 9/11.

What they needed were false confessions from captured al Queda prisoners. And that’s exactly what they got. Because like I said before, any human being will break after the right amount of pressure is applied over the right span of time. And once that happens, they will say anything – anything – to make their own suffering stop. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz. . . that whole crew was well aware of that fact. It’s why they started torturing prisoners in early 2002, before the invasion of Iraq. And it’s why they stopped torturing prisoners in 2004, after we’d already sealed the deal. It was done specifically and meticulously to provide just another false justification for the invasion of Iraq.

And if that doesn’t piss you off, I honestly don’t know what will.

Update: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (the “mastermind” of 9/11) says that he lied to his interrogators in order to get the torture to stop. Like I said, torture is very effective. But not at gathering information.