This County Will Self-Destruct In...

States are passing laws allowing people to carry guns in airports. We're becoming a nation of gun-totin' brown-arrestin' citizenship-revokin' paranoid lunatics. Is this really where we're headed? Wild West justice, hang 'em first and shoot questions later? Vigilantes? Are we finally so destroyed by those guys in caves that we have thrown up our hands and said, "You win?" So frightened, so lacking in confidence that we're just turning on ourselves? Seriously.

Adding injury to insult was a show on PBS, part of which was devoted to the "open carry" movement. Featuring lots of guys walking around with handguns on their hips, it gave fair voice to that side of the argument. Mostly, it's that if you have a gun on your person, you might have an opportunity to prevent a crime. I get that; can't really argue with it, per se. In fact, if I had a gun handy were I to come across someone committing rape, for example, I might just pull it and saying something impolite.

Yet I had a surprisingly visceral reaction to seeing those guys packing so smugly, one of whom had the hammer of his weapon in cocked mode. Maybe it's that it took me back to my days in Vietnam, when, on flying missions, I carried a .38 pistol, per regulation, in my survival vest. Some of the fighter jocks added bandoliers with a couple hundred extra rounds. Me, I figured if I was on the ground in a situation where that much shooting was required, with a bitsy sidearm like that, alone, all I'd need was one bullet.

But I don't think it was that. It was the simpering macho certitude, combined with the showing of pro-gun rallies featuring speakers saying President Obama is the most anti-gun president ever, with signs saying something like, "Yeah, Barry, you can take my gun. Muzzle first." Because, as anyone should know, the only action Obama has taken regarding guns is to loosen regulation of them in national parks. As with many of the policies of this so-called socialist liberal, he's getting hot criticism from his left over his lack of action on gun regulation. So it's not simply that there's a large segment of the population packing heat openly and proudly. It's that they're Fox-fed, RWS™-brained nutjobs. It's that they're proof paranoid of how far back we're falling, based on falsehood.

I know we'll never be crime-free nor gun-free. But I really doubt the guys carrying are thinking much about being crime-fighters. They're getting off on that thing in their pants; they're reveling in the attention they get and the discomfort it causes. It's about intimidation; and people who need to intimidate indiscriminately are not nice people, or healthy.

Because we already have laws allowing concealed carry. You need a permit, though, which open carry, mostly, does not. (Why, after all, would we want to regulate people who need to walk around all gun-hipped?) So it's not about fighting crime. It's about show. It's about in-your-face. And, parenthetically, it's about taking us to a place where the Second Amendment has never gone.

It's like walking around with your dick hanging out, only not as subtle.

My question is this: was it really al Queda that brought us down so easily, so thoroughly, or was it the specter of a Black Guy in the White House? Whichever it is, or whatever combination of the aforementioned, it sure as hell didn't take much to get us to toss it all overboard.

Limited Government

Scott Brown, darling of those limited-government teabaggers, wants to let Hillary Clinton take away your citizenship. I'm not kidding.

He's a co-sponsor of Holy Joe Lieberman's bill which would give the State Department the right to revoke citizenship of people it thinks belong to groups which it thinks are terrorist groups. Predictably, the RWS™ and Fox "news" are signing on, presumably without thinking it through. Or so one might hope. In a rational world. Were we in one.

[Study question for teabaggers: should the law include these guys?]

Y'know, I'd be fine with removing the mantle of citizenship from Americans convicted of terrorism. (Practically, it would mean mandatory death sentence or life in prison without parole, because if there's a country that'd take them, would we want to send them there?) Maybe it's just me, but I'd like also to know that such a law would include a pretty clear definition of what terrorism is, and to what extent "associations" with terrorist groups makes one a terrorist. Not to mention what, exactly, is a terrorist group? Greenpeace? Those guys up there a paragraph? Anyway, conviction should sort of be a prelude, don't you think?

But here's the (really obvious) thing: Joe and Scotty want to remove your citizenship before you're convicted of anything. The State Department (ie big government) says so, and there go all your rights. To a trial in a court of law, among other things. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing conservatives, teabaggers, and, y'know, AMERICANS ought to reject out of hand?

What the hell have we become? How empty is our I'm-Proud-of-American allegiance to the rule of law that we're willing to throw it all away so easily? Does the Constitution mean nothing to such people as Joe, Scott, the RWS™? Will there be any pushback from a teabagger?

For its entertainment value, in a multi-car-pileup-with-lots-of-deaths-on-the-freeway sort of way, it'll be interesting to hear the speeches in Congress about this. The predictable demagoguery, the charges of softness on terrorism, the spinelessness in the face of the misguided.

And, of course, the absence of real reporting on the matter by the mainstream media.

"Such Other Matters As The President Considers Appropriate"

Wow. Holy Joe Lieberman and John McPOW have introduced legislation regarding terrorists, enemy combatants, and, to quote their bill, "unprivileged enemy belligerents." It's pretty amazing and, one would think, the sort of thing from which true conservatives would recoil like a .50 cal:

The provision that removes all discretionary limits to this secret determination of status is in the Criteria for Designation of Individuals as High-Value Detainees. That section creates an initial impression that such "determinations" are subject to the rule of law by laying out specific criteria, beginning with "(A) The potential threat the individual poses for an attack on civilians..." (B) the potential threat the individual poses to United States military personnel..." etc. But the final criterion (E) zooms to infinity: it is simply "Such other matters as the President considers appropriate. "

Thus any individual, whether a foreign national or a U.S. citizen, can be designated an "unprivileged enemy belligerent," forever denied access to civilian courts and subjected to indefinite detention "without criminal charge and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners" -- that is, forever -- on the basis of such other matters as the President considers appropriate.

Now, up to a point I'm okay with the idea that true terrorists might well deserve to be in a separate legal category, and that they should be subjected to smart, effective, and RELIABLE interrogations (which, as virtually all evidence shows, does NOT include torture in any form.) But it seems just a tiny bit strange, doesn't it, that two guys who have all but questioned the current president's loyalty are fine with giving him powers to arrest and detain indefinitely ANYONE he chooses, for ANY REASON AT ALL? With no legal recourse!!??

It gets worse, and even less coherent:

Paradoxically, while the President can set any criteria he chooses to determine the detainee's status, he can only overrule the final status determination if the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense disagree. Also paradoxically, once a captive"is captured" or "comes into custody" and "is suspected" of being or "may be" an "unprivileged enemy belligerent" -- note the passive voice and other grammatical constructions obscuring agency -- the President does not have the option of having the suspect tried in civilian court. If the AG and the SecDef are in agreement they are apparently accountable to no one.

Far be it from me to overstate something or to repeat myself. But there is, at minimum, a certain irony that all these right-wingers who claim to be the sole repositories of patriotism, the only true lovers of American (or, as Sarah has said, the only "real Americans") hold our legal system in such low esteem. Likewise, whereas terrorism is a real threat and vigilance and cooperation (of the sort that Obama has, in fact, engendered to an extent not seen in the previous administration) are needed, it strikes me as odd and not a little depressing that eighteen guys with box cutters have managed to accomplish such destruction of our formerly resilient country. To have suckered us into unnecessary war, have torn us apart internally, and have rendered us so frightened that we are willing to give up the essence of our democracy.

I'd hope the bill, as described, hasn't a chance of passing. Still, it's basically a codification of the yoobushleague view that the president can do any damn thing he wants. So, in the well rehearsed habit of abandoning the most basic of conservative principles, I'm also sure there will be signers-on aplenty. And claims of terrorist sympathy against all who object.

Beyond Outrage, Beyond Hope

This might be too much for me. Most literally, it makes me physically ill. Trying to put into words the depth of my visceral reaction may be impossible. It's simply the most despicable, horrifying, destructive, and fundamentally threatening thing going on in the body politic of the US. It's beyond the lying of Fox "news;" it's beyond the formless and factless rage of the tea bag people. This even overshadows, as a threat to everything we are as a country, the abuse of Senate rules by the Republicans that has all but ground governance to halt. It is worse than (although it's abetted by) the dereliction of duty of most of our news media. This is, unarguably, evidence of the beginning of the end. Unless even those uselessly enraged and idea-disencumbered right wingers wake up and say, enough. Enough. We are a country of laws, that values laws, whose legal system protects us all. Us all. All of us. Laws.

ENOUGH.

I refer to the demon spawn of Dick Cheney. I refer to her horrible group of America haters. I refer to the fact that there are people out there -- marinating in putrefaction, as expected, on Fox "news" but also, evidently, in all walks of life (using the term loosely) -- who don't see the danger. The disease.

This person, this evil thing, this smirking embodiment of blind hatred and the unapologetic disseminator of desperate lies, has declared revenge on lawyers assigned to defend accused terrorists in American courts. This damned individual, who most surely hasn't the foggiest appreciation of the Constitution or the laws that have stemmed from it, who would destroy the foundations of a legal system that has been the model for most of the civilized world, who is regularly given air time when she should, in fact, be deprived of air (at least the kind that wafts outside of damp and moldy basements), would happily -- because it makes her famous, and garners laudatory grime from the scum that love her, and because she's desperately trying to keep her felonious father out of jail -- ruin the lives of people doing the bidding of that very Constitution which she ignores so thoroughly. (I can't find the will directly to link to her ad, but there's a link within the previous one.) What a horrible, fraudulent, venal excuse for a human being.

Well, I guess those were words; but really, I have no words. This is as low as it gets; were she and her bootlickers to get their way, we'd no longer be a country of laws. We'd no longer be a country at all.

It's so obvious. And yet, there she is, a darling of much of the media, mostly -- but not limited to -- Fox "news" and the radio screamers. And there are listeners who give credence to her, and who (you can read it in comments on various sources that have covered it, but I don't recommend it), in the most despicable of language, filled with the sort of glee that only springs from pure evil (and I don't even believe in such a thing), agree with her. It's not just disheartening; it's not just depressing; it's not just dismaying. It's so far beyond any of those that I can't express it. The words stick somewhere near my diaphragm; they close my throat. Because it means we are so far from reason in parts of this country that there remains no basis for hoping we can get beyond where we are. We shall not overcome. It's too potent, it's too attractive to those that prefer hatred to hope, in whom it's simply not part of their makeup to think beyond their own sad fears and selfishness, to whom the idea of democracy in all its ramifications is as foreign as breathing underwater.

Times are tough. Right wingers, evidently, aren't. They talked tough, oh yes. But they got their deferments. And now, in the heat of great need, they have melted. Called upon by the times to rise to new heights, to honor what has served us through wars and depressions, they have sunk to new lows, descended into the mongering of fear and hate and the wholesale peddling of lies. And they're the ones that claim the mantle of patriotism, even as they reject the fundament of what has -- until now -- made us great. As they destroy us from the inside, deliberately, thoroughly.

Patriots.

I'd laugh, if I could.

It's come to this. When tested, we have failed. Cowed by people in caves, and by the premeditated and self-serving terrorizing of our populus by politicians like the Cheneys and virtually all Congressional Republicans, and the RWS™, we are on the verge of complete capitulation to fear, of renunciation of the rule of law and democracy. At a time when we are most in need of reason, we get this. We fall upon ourselves. We grovel in a level of discourse so low that the founding fathers would fail to recognize what they have wrought. One of the most brilliant of whom, as we know, defended British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre.

How pathetic these distorters of reality have become, how craven in the face of danger, how they recoil from the challenge of real problems that need real solutions. How quickly they shrink from the hard work of democracy. How they cheerlead and stoke anger. How far down people such as Liz Cheney have dragged us, septic, into the cesspool in which they live, when we most need to lift ourselves up; how easily such thoughts as hers take hold and, like the slime that they are, spread over us all, suffocating, eating our bones. And, it seems, we barely notice.

See? I have no words. None, at any rate, that convey convincingly and sanely the awfulness of these people. They will destroy us. And, even as we breathe our last, they'll find someone else on whom to blame it.

Is there anyone on the right willing to speak out? Anyone who calls him- or herself a true conservative willing to condemn Liz Cheney and the horseshit she rode in on?

Anyone?

And while you're at it, anyone on the right want to disagree with this soulless succubus that, even as he keeps arresting terrorists at a greater rate than her putrid progenitor, President Obama isn't serious about terrorism?

Anyone?

[Update, 3/5: Well, well, a couple of conservatives (none who troll these waters, of course) have spoken up. One even went so far as to use the word "unfortunate."]

Yoo Wish

Preserving what little sanity I have left, and able to generate diminishing amounts of calm, I tend to avoid reading right-wing blogs and their other sources of what passes for thought. But I do have enough of a sense of it to be amazed (after all this time, after eight years of rationalizing everything Bush did, yes, they can still amaze me) at the reaction to the release of White House memos on presidential power in wartime. ("Wartime," naturally, to be defined by the President.)

In short, these memos baldly argue for a dictatorship, unfettered in any way. Literally. Including, but not limited to, suspension of the First Amendment.

From the NYT:

The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

[...]

The opinion authorizing the military to operate domestically was dated Oct. 23, 2001, and written by John C. Yoo, at the time a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Robert J. Delahunty, a special counsel in the office. It was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked whether Mr. Bush could use the military to combat terrorist activities inside the United States.

The use of the military envisioned in the Yoo-Delahunty reply appears to transcend by far the stationing of troops to keep watch at streets and airports, a familiar sight in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The memorandum discussed the use of military forces to carry out “raids on terrorist cells” and even seize property.

[....]

The Oct. 23 memorandum also said that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

The reaction from the right: anger that they were released!!! Not that the memos were unAmerican or dangerous or downright scary to everyone, especially, one would think, conservatives who, in theory, are wary of the power of the federal government (except, of course, when they control it.) Nope. Anger that they were released.

The concept that a president can declare some sort of war and then claim the right to do anything he or she wants, at home and abroad -- searching, seizing, arresting, silencing -- with no regard for prior laws or Congress ought to frighten us all, regardless of political party. That a recent president was advised to do just that, by people he hired to give him legal opinions, and came close to carrying it out while Congressional leaders in his party looked the other way is something that ought to repel us all.

Can anyone doubt -- is there the merest molecule of doubt?? -- that if this had occurred during the years of Bill Clinton, Republicans would have been, and would be still, calling for his head? Investigating up one side and down the other? Demanding prosecution? Is silence from Rush and Sean and Bill and Ann and Laura and Mitch and John and John and Michael even imaginable?

Not.

The Sinclair Lewis quote has become a cliché; no one really gives it a second thought: "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." How close we've come. And yet, not only has there been no resistence from the right; it's been cheerled and justified.

There's a reason we have a constitution, and that it -- quite brilliantly -- established separation of powers and checks and balances: to keep exactly this from happening. But in a country wherein less than a third of people can name the three branches of government, it's hardly inexplicable why so few seem to care. And when, in states that elected the guys who nearly pulled it off, school boards are spending more time trying to remove science from schools than they are insisting on civics education, it all begins to make sense. Deliberately lousy education leading to inability to reason; faith-based faith that everything is okay; consolidated media with flame-throwing screamers perverting the idea of discourse and discussion; politics of division aimed at keeping people focused on the other side of the mirror. It's working.

They came damn close to pulling it off. Confident they've got nearly half the country in their thrall, they're still trying.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." For that is exactly the way to get the public neither to object, nor even to notice. In nearly half the population, it's working.

.