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!

When the demo for Bionic Commando hit Xbox Live, I have to tell you, I was disappointed. I’ve long been a fan of the series (and by series I mean the one game) and I have been looking forward to Bionic Commando for some time. But the demo was a dark, crowded, single-level free for all gankfest dominated by twitchy sniper one-shots and the brazen overpowered spray of one or two select weapons. The truth is that without the Bionic Commando name (and the good will that Grin earned by gracefully remastering the original title as Rearmed), I can’t imagine that demo selling any units. In fact, when I first played it, I couldn’t figure out why Capcom chose such a mediocre experience to demo such a highly anticipated game. Usually that’s a bad sign.

Well, I understand why they did it now, having beaten the full game on the maximum difficulty setting, and it has nothing to do with a lack of quality. The game experience itself is unimpeachable. It is consistently challenging without ever being cheap, well designed, balanced, and taking full advantage of all of the unique situations that its primary feature – the bionic arm – has to offer. The reason they threw everyone into a multiplayer zone during the demo was so that your opponents would suck as much as you do. Because when you first start playing Bionic Commando, make no mistake, you suck at it.

And I mean you suck hard. Even once you get the basics of swinging and targetting with the grapple down, once you figure out how to do some basic weapons aiming and how to take advantage of cover (though there is no inherent cover system), you will still be very bad at Bionic Commando. To be honest, I think I was about a third of the way into the game before I really got good with the arm, and I know that by about two thirds of the way through the game I was performing maneuvers that wouldn’t have even occurred to me earlier on.

The progression and skill curve of using the arm not just as a weapon (because it is a powerful weapon) but as a tactical tool to place your character where you want to be is constant. Even having beaten the game, I’m sure that a second play-through would continue to build on my technique. In short, it just isn’t something you could have ever learned in the span of a demo. And it puts the early previews, which all said that the game seemed cool but the arm was very hard to use, in sharp contrast. Those reviews were dead on accurate. And that’s a good thing.

If you go into Bionic Commando expecting to be able to swing from rooftop to scaffold simply by spamming your grapple button (which has been the principle mechanic in most other swing-based action games), you’re going to be frustrated. If you go in unwilling to treat the basic “grunt” enemies with a certain measure of lethal respect, you’re going to die a lot. And if what you’re looking for is Grand Theft Auto with a retractable claw, man are you going to be pissed.

And it’s the last part that surprised me the most – the game is most definitely not a sandbox experience (ala Spiderman 2). The levels are strictly linear, with waypoints clearly defined. If you attempt to venture too far off course, you will start to take damage and eventually get killed by radiation (the game takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear-style attack).  This mechanic is a bit clunky at times, make no mistake, because there were a few occasions where I haplessly swung up into what I figured was clear skies only to die in the air with very little warning and almost no way to alter course. But this is nit-pickery at best, and exists only to highlight the single gameplay aspect that I wasn’t completely satisfied with.

The physics of the swinging are utterly flawless – once you understand how to properly control your character. And it keeps coming back to that element because the control is so very important. When you first start playing the game, you will spend a lot of your time hurling your character more or less at your objectives and floundering around mid-air because you let go of your swings too late. That’s quite normal. By the end of the game, I was using enemy hovercraft as swingpoints to grapple between buildings and riggings to dodge sniper fire without so much as a second thought. The curve really is that steep, but it’s also that rewarding.

As far as the combat goes, it’s surprisingly pure in its execution. I’d estimate, not counting bosses, that there are about ten enemy units in the entire game – and in some cases, that’s recounting the same unit if it’s armed with a different weapon. What sells the combat are the environmental situations they put you in when you are dealing with these enemy types. Sometimes you’ll have to take down mech-type opponents (who are impervious to normal small arms fire) without any sort of explosives. You’re limited to what you can use to damage them environmentally and how you can out-maneuver them with your arm.

Other times you will be put into a wide open space with limited cover and an array of deviously placed snipers – often without any long range weapons of your own. The challenge then becomes to travel from sniper nest to sniper nest at high velocity, because leaving yourself exposed and stationary will get you killed in literally three seconds. And eventually the game starts mixing up different combinations of enemy units and locations. And it’s the locations that are often important. Performing a wild dive down to a pack of grunts is a completely different combat experience from trying to assault them in a narrow tunnel full of debris.

Likewise, fighting a hovercraft (which can nearly one-shot you) on a series of scaffolds where you have to swing to avoid its exposives, but you also have to stay under cover to hide from a sniper, and you can’t advance too far forward or else you will draw attacks from the soldiers. . . it very much becomes a tactical experience. You begin to play a secondary metagame that’s all about limiting and controlling the parameters of the fight. And that’s when your progression with the swing mechanics comes into play. You simply can’t do all of that if your attention is 100% focused on the click-and-release controls of your arm. In fact, I doubt it’s even possible to beat this game unless you can learn to swing as comfortably as you would run or aim in most other games.

And that’s what makes it brilliant.

You can’t cheat the game. You can’t just hold back and pop every enemy from the other side of the board. You can’t always go in with the heavy explosives and splash-damage your way to victory. You don’t have that one cheap move that you can just use over and over again on everything that stands in your way – in fact, your most potent arm attacks also leave you vulnerable to other opponents. The game lacks one single I Win button, opting instead for a series of I Am Awesome buttons. But in order to push those buttons, you actually have to be awesome.

For those of you that never played the original (or Rearmed), there’s not really enough plot from those games to worry about. For those of you that care, the Chain of Command comic on the Bionic Commando website neatly bridges the old story into the new one, and sets up the major themes of the game nicely. Just about the only person I wouldn’t recommend this game to is the extremely casual gamer, because no matter how low you set the difficulty, no matter how easily bosses go down or how much damage you can soak before you die, the swing mechanics will always be there, waiting to be engaged and learned. They’re vicious and tricky – even deceptively difficult. You will reach what you think are zeniths in terms of your ability, and they will turn out to be minor plateaus at best. But the better you get at using the bionics, the more rewarding the game becomes.

In short, it is worth every last one of your sixty dollars. Go buy it.

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.

So, Arlen Specter is now a member of the Democratic party. Allow me to just say, officially and unequivocally, “Big fucking deal”. Joe Lieberman was a member of the Democratic party. So was Zell Miller. Hell, Bob Nelson still is a member. And it doesn’t mean dick-ola. It’d be one thing if Specter had an attack of conscience and realized that he was running under a flag that thinks Sarah Palin is qualified to be in a position to launch nuclear weapons. But it had nothing to do with belief or structure, and everything to do with his own political future. Specter admitted as much when he listed his reluctance to have his long career in the Senate decided by the fringe of his current party as one of his primary reasons for swapping.

On one hand, the Republican party is shrinking, and in at least two important ways. The first is their base, which just keeps getting smaller and more isolated. In Pennsylvania, where Specter was staring down the barrel of a primary fight for his Senate seat against resident batshit-crazy former House Rep Pat Toomey. And while the guy is cracklier than an AM radio in a fallout shelter, his particular brand of nonsense and noise is what passes for policy amongst that Republican shrinking base. And since Specter has always been one of the party’s more moderate members, he knew damn well he’d lose that primary.

But it’s more than just Toomey that spooked Specter. The man, I am quite sure, can count. And he saw that in Pensy, his own party’s self-identified membership was shrinking rapidly. More and more keystoners were referring to themselves as either Democrats or Independents. And as low as approval ratings for Democrats in congress generally are, they look sky high compared to those same approval ratings for congressional Republicans. His party is becoming marginalized, impotent and cranky. And Specter doesn’t like it.

To which I say fine. Run as an Independent. If you’re going to do a Lieberman impression, go whole hog, mate. Because make no mistake, he is doing a Lieberman impression. Because from what I can tell, he might have changed the little letter after his name, but he certainly hasn’t gotten on board with the party’s platform or with very much of Obama’s agenda. Now, you could say that’s just Specter staying true to his beliefs. And I’ll say fine. But that means that he isn’t a Democrat, since those core beliefs fly in the face of what the party has been building over the past few years. Hell, he can’t even find a decent word to say about Al Franken. Find me one other Democratic Senator or Congressman that is actively rooting for Norm Coleman. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

So what it boils down to is that Specter wanted that very in-vogue (D) after his name – which I’m pretty sure Fox News has already “accidentally” given him a few times – but he doesn’t actually want to take part in anything associated with his party. Personally, I agree with Markos Moulitsas on this one. I hope Specter keeps on pissing in his newfound pot. Because one of the reasons that the Democratic party has been able to drag itself out from under the crushing obscurity of its predicted “minor party status” is that lousy Democrats get primary challenges of their own. And if Specter thinks he’d have a hard time squaring off as a Republican against a rusty hinge like Toomey, he’s in for a shock going up against Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary.

Now, some people don’t think Specter should be primaried as a Democrat, because there’s a lot of talk that the fairly popular Tom Ridge might run against Toomey on the Republican ticket. Ridge polls well against everyone, and his vast name recognition (not to mention his association with the recovery after 9/11) gives him an edge. Personally, I think that’s some pretty terrible logic.

First of all, you don’t allow a self interested schmuck like Specter represent your party simply because you think he has a better chance of winning. But more importantly, Ridge will be much easier to take down than most people think. To be honest, I find it a bit inconceivable that a state that went for Obama by 10 points and rejected Rick Santorum two years before by 18 points is going to elect a former Bush Administration official to be their Senator. All Sestak has to do is bust out the footage of Ridge standing there like a square peg, waxing incoherent about color-coded threat warnings. It’s a route that Specter really can’t go because of his Senatorial record. But a guy like Sestak could (and in my opinion would) hammer the hell out of Ridge for being a good little Bush lackie.

So Specter can think that he swapped himself into another Senatorial term if he wants to. And the Democrats can delude themselves into thinking that they now hold 59 (and soon to be 60, Arlen) seats in the Senate. But they’re both dead wrong, and the sooner acceptance sinks in, the better.

So how is it that when he was President Vice-President we heard from Dick Cheney about once every seven months, but now that he’s no longer in office the man’s got something new to say about how the government should be run every week or so? On one hand, I don’t really mind all that much. If the only guy in the Republican Party with a lower approval rating than George W. Bush wants to wedge his way back into politics, that’s good news for Obama and even better news for the Democrats in 2010. But on the other hand, it’s obnoxious. And the secret service costs of shuttling him back and forth between the Fox News studios and the partially constructed Death Star really aren’t helping out the budget crisis.

This week he surfaced to complain that the Obama administration released a variety of memos and reports about America’s faux legal justifications for torturing suspected and captured terrorists. And yes, I said torturing. Extended stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, repeatedly slamming people into tables and floors, and of course the catch-all of the past decade, waterboarding, are all torture. And anyone who hasn’t been waterboarded needs to shut their armchair warrior cake holes until they get a taste of it first hand. We’ve executed people for waterboarding American soldiers, and that’s pretty much the end of the fucking argument.

Anyway, Cheney is all in a huff because there were other documents that Obama could have released that would show all of the incredibly important things we learned from waterboarding our prisoners. All of the foiled plots that we common folk never knew about and all of the super duper secret information we learned, without which America would have descended into terrorism and anarchy. And he requests – nay, demands – that Obama release these memos to the public so we can all see what a good job the previous administration did torturing people for freedom.

I call bullshit. I call one huge, honking pile of third rate bullshit. First of all, the Bush administration practically held a ticker tape parade any time they caught some fifth string terrorist intern. I started to wonder if radical Islam had some rule about only being able to count to 2 because every schmuck we caught was apparently “al-Queda’s second in command”. They were desperate to prove the validity of their efforts and policies to the American public. So if they really had foiled some crazy Tom Clancy shit, we’d have heard about it in the time it takes Sam Fisher to call for extraction.

Likewise, if there were any such memos, and they really were a cohesive argument for torturing prisoners, they’d have been either “leaked” or declassified years ago. At the very least, they’d have been made public before Cheney left office. So on one hand, we can believe that a man who would out a CIA agent in order to exact political revenge wouldn’t declassify documents justifying his entire administration’s world view. Or we can believe that Dick Cheney is full of shit.

What’s embarrassing is this isn’t even a new routine. You demand that your opponent release information that doesn’t exist. Then, when they tell you there’s no such information, you call that proof that the information does exist and the other guy is lying. And if that sort of logic sounds absolutely insane to you, I’d like to congratulate you on finally making it all the way to March of 2003.

You guys didn’t really think I was done with this whole teabagging thing, did you? Seriously? When the barely-literate right decides to stage a protest that, at best, sounds like they’re sitting around a table with petticoats and parasols and at worst sounds like something you have to pay an extra fifty bucks for, I simply lack the self control (and the desire) to leave things alone.

Now, the left would like to believe that absolutely no one showed up to teabag today, and that’s just not true. It was no million man march. . . hell, it wasn’t even a thousand man march, but most of the events turned up several hundred people. Those aren’t great numbers considering the fact that Fox News essentially turned into Teabag Central over the past week, but remember. This is the grass roots astroturf right we’re talking about. They’re pretty new to this whole “doing more than bitching about it at work” thing.

As I said yesterday, I remember 2002 and 2003. Everybody starts somewhere. Hell, I work with a few teabaggers. I didn’t even know it until lunch, in fact. They’re nice enough people, as long as you don’t ask them what country they think the President was born in. And I’ve long since made it a point not to talk politics with them because it just creates too much workplace tension when I grind their talking points into a fine, grey paste.

So like I said, this whole thing wasn’t a complete flop for the right. And the left is always going to paint it as a disaster no matter how it turns out. So I decided to try out something I’d ordinarily never punish myself with. My nerves steeled, I turned to Fox News to see how they were spinning all of this teabagging. And I have to tell you. . . anyone who is worried about these protests can rest assured that nothing significant was accomplished today. No groundwork was laid down. While the body count was significant, the brain count was effectively nil.

The right, it seems suffers from many of the same pains that the left used to (and sometimes still does) suffer from. The first is a lack of message discipline. Now, I’m not talking about the actual GOP. They’ve always run a tighter operation than the Democrats, and they have Reagan and later Gingrich to thank for that. But until public distaste for Bush was boiling up into over the 50% mark, most of the left-wing events that I attended felt like a pot luck of personal issues. The right has managed to take that to an entirely new level.

As far as I can tell, the teabaggers are upset that Barack Obama is a socialist, terrorist, fascist, muslim, abortion performing, immoral icon of the antichrist who is going to cause America to surrender by taxing the middle class  at a 150% rate, making everyone marry an illegal gay Mexican, and melting down all of our guns so he can use the metal to build concentration camps where our children will be sent to work in the ACORN mines. I might have missed some of the subtext there, but it’s kind of hard to read all of those signs when your eyes are watering up with laughter.

To be honest, I don’t think most of the teabaggers have any idea what they are protesting. It certainly isn’t taxation – I’ve yet to see a single person at any of those rallies that will be pulling in more than a quarter million a year. And it certainly isn’t socialism, since I don’t think most of them could define it without a trip to the publicly funded library to look it up. The truth is that all this teabagging is just one great big conservative hissy-fit about being out of power. I mean, really. Obama’s been the President for less than half a year. He hasn’t even had time to fuck anything up yet. Hell, it took his predecessor longer than that to really screw the country over, and that guy was a freakin’ expert.

Some of them claim they are protesting government spending, inflated deficits and unbalanced budgets. Others say they  are worried about the government having too much control over their lives or being too invasive of their privacy. And many of them are protesting under some catch-all banner about America being in crisis. Well, they’re all full of shit, cause I didn’t see any of them out there teabagging for the past eight years.

The only thing they have to be upset about is that their own party screwed the pooch so badly that they’re out of power now. And rather than turning to their former leaders and asking them what in the blue hell they were doing since the new millennium came around (which is what the left did with the Democrats when they were tired of getting their asses kicked), they are taking out their frustrations and their loathing on the man that stomped them so very, very hard last November. It’s Obama’s fault, you see, because he had the nerve to actually win an election.

And you know what? That’s fine. If they don’t like that they lost the election, they have the right to say so. They even have the right to protest the fact, technically. Although it’s a damn stupid thing to protest, since what they’re upset about is a matter of opinion. So let them go out there and march mill around aimlessly against their own disenfranchisement. Let them grumble and scream and caterwail like colicky infants on a twelve hour non-stop flight. The rest of the country will respond in turn.