Who Loves Ya?

What's it like? It's like a man whose wife has divorced him, moved across the country, remarried, had children by her new husband, and obtained a number of restraining orders against her ex. Still, the man keeps contacting her saying "Come on, baby, I know we can make this marriage work!"

That's what Bush's attitude toward Iraq is like. He's just incapable of recognizing that it is over, kaput. The Iraqis don't love us, won't ever be persuaded to love us, in fact hate our guts and just want us to bugger off forever. But Bush won't see it.

"Come on, baby! Just give me another chance! That Abu Ghraib thing was just an aberration! And Fallujah? I was drunk, I swear. Come on, love me!"

By the company one keeps . . .

What is the test of an honest man?

An honest man, if he should happen to wake and find himself in a house of ill repute -- having accidently wandered in the night before (for even honest men take a drop now and then) -- an honest man will leave that house immediately, lest his family or co-workers spy him there.

Can there be any doubt now that the Republican Party is no place for an honest man? How much more evidence of its corrupt nature does one need to conclude that the GOP is a rotten den of iniquity? Do not fool yourself, friend, into thinking that you can somehow redeem that house by your very presence. No, flee it immediately. Get out, and for God's sake stay out.

Flee whither? To the arms of the Democrats? Not necessarily. An honest man may not be altogether comfortable in the company of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, I will admit; yet he certainly cannot stay in the company of George Bush, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, "Scooter" Libby, "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Taft, Ken Blackwell -- yea, an endless gallery of rogues! -- and remain honest.

It's like the song the bartender sings at closing time: "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Ya better watch out! Ya better not cry!

From The Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 -- A suicide attacker steered a car packed with explosives toward U.S. soldiers giving away toys to children outside a hospital in central Iraq on Thursday, killing at least 31 people. Almost all of the victims were women and children, police said.

He knows when you are sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows when you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness' sake!

The grotesque nature of this war would cause the most proficient craftsman of black comedy to throw his hands into the air and concede that he's no match for Bush and his gang. This indeed is the present Uncle Sam has brought the children of Iraq.

The parents of those children would be wise, I think, to advise their kids to give American soldiers bearing gifts a very wide berth, lest they be turned to bloody mush. In addition the Iraqi government should require that all Americans in country wear a tinkling little bell -- as a housecat might be forced to wear -- this to give the kids fair warning of their approach.

Vide the true history of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Also see Derek Mainhart's excellent The Iraqi Tinies, his short graphic novel on the fate of the children of Iraq.

Precious Truths

The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has decided to charge Jose Padilla with lesser crimes than those of which he has been publicly accused (that is, planning to set off a "dirty bomb," to blow up apartment buildings with gas lines) because it was "unwilling to allow testimony from two senior members of Al Qaeda who had been subjected to harsh questioning."

For "harsh questioning" we should read, of course,"torture." And there is good reason why the courts do not accept as evidence testimony elicited by torture: it is notoriously unreliable. When one is being tortured, one will say almost anything to make the torture stop -- often whatever one thinks one's interrogators want to hear.

One of the "senior members of Al Qaeda" is reportedly Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, "believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." Mohammed is being held at a "black site" somewhere -- another kind of undisclosed location. Why undisclosed? "The better to give you the third degree, my dear!"

The Times report continues: "One review, completed in spring 2004 by the C.I.A. inspector general, found that Mr. Mohammed had been subjected to excessive use of a technique involving near drowning in the first months after his capture . . . . Another review, completed in April 2003 by American intelligence agencies shortly after Mr. Mohammed's capture, assessed the quality of his information from initial questioning as 'Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies.'"

What a poetic way of putting it! Yes indeed, torture does bring out the Shakespeare in some people. The all-too-prosaic question the courts must ask, however, is the following: How does one know for sure, of the utterances gasped out during the waterboarding session, which are truths and which falsehoods? How to tell the VIP from his bodyguards?

Yet Mr. Cheney persists in defending torture as a necessary tactic in the War on Terror. We must not "tie the hands" of our Commander in Chief by prohibiting him from tying the hands of others -- this preparatory, of course, to kicking the living bejeezus out of them. If you oppose torture (as, for example, torture victim John McCain does), Mr. Cheney has a question for you: "Why do you hate Freedom?"

Let's call this what it is. It is not intelligence gathering. It is terrorism, pure and simple. We counter terror with terror. Why? Because such hardboiled tactics are what Bush's handlers think will play best in the heartland, will please a majority of voters. No better example of politics trumping moral principle than this.