What's more dangerous than a Right that has declared war on reality?

"I am a biology professor, not a lawyer, and I had never considered bringing a gun to work until now. But since many of my students are likely to be armed, I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field. . . .

"In terms of the campus murder rate -- zero at present -- I think that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do. Which is why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense. Bad guys go where there are no guns, so by adding guns to campus more bad guys will spend their year abroad in London. Britain has incredibly restrictive laws -- their cops don't even have guns! -- and gun deaths there are a tiny fraction of what they are in America. It's a perfect place for bad guys."

-- Boise State U. Prof. Greg Hampikian, in a NYT
op-ed piece, "When May I Shoot a Student?"

by Ken

The answer I'd like to propose to the question in the title of this post is: A Right that is taking steps to escalate its War on Reality from cold war to hot.

Very likely you've already seen the NYT op-ed piece from which I've quoted above, but if not, it's important that you do, and I'm not going to apologize for inflicting it on readers who have already read it.

As far as I know, history doesn't record the exact moment when America officially went off the Reality Standard, but there are clearly two turning-point markers. There was, first, Ronald Reagan's declaration of Morning in America, by which he offered an eager nation relief from the tyranny of reality, a time and place in which the only standard of "reality" that applied was what you wished reality to be. And second, there was that glory time during the (George W.) Bush regime when the regimistas took to chortling over the pathetic prattling of the loser leftish loons they so chucklingly dubbed "the reality-based community." And the Right has never looked back.

As between the often-nasty realities of, you know, reality and the pastel-colored gazebo of believe-what-you-wish, it proved no contest. And by the time of the 2008 election season, the Reality Standard was clearly out the window. That was the historic year in which every word out of the mouth of every Republican candidate in every race from the presidency on down was a fantasy, a delusion, or most commonly and out-and-out lie. And from the moment on Election Night when it became unmistakably clear that the presidential race, at least, was lost, the Right rose up with every weapon at its disposal up to and possibly including violence to stuff its fantasies, delusions, and lies down the throat of Reality.

In retrospect, it seems clear the correct answer to the quesion "Do you have to be insane to be a right-winger?" was a resounding and unequivocal "You betcha!"

You might think it couldn't get worse, but I'm thinking you would be wrong. Again in retrospect, the escalation of the insanity was probably inevitable. Now it's not just the danger of right-wing insanity which threatens us, but the active promotion of insane paranoia designed to delude captive minds into thinking that their enemies are within reach of having them at their mercy.

At the moment, the form of paranoia sweeping the country is the laughable premise that Christianity is under siege, when in fact Christianity in this country has never been more swaggeringly bullying. The only person the rampaging Crap Christians treat with more loathing and contempt than their delusionally anti-Christian "enemies" is Jesus himself, who is the object of every ounce of psychotic rage they can muster. That's the genius of Crap Christianity: It can, in the name of Jesus, wage holy war against everything that Jesus said and stood for.

Viewed from this perspective, it's easy to see that the groundwork for hot war against the imagined enemies was laid with the psychotic gun "rights" movement. The political masterminds of the movement have raised the stakes from garden-variety insanity to criminal insanity by persuading already mentally enfeebled and destabilitzed minds to arm themselves everywhere they go, even in school and in church. "We're crazier than coots," they have their people saying, "and we're gunnin' fer ya."

I think what I love so much about Professor Hampikian's op-ed piece that he takes the gun-nutters at face value. "Since many of my students are likely to be armed," he says in this letter to the chief counsel of the Idaho State Legislature, "I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field." He notes that "at present, the harshest penalty available here at Boise State is expulsion, used only for the most heinous crimes, like cheating on Scantron exams," and argues utterly reasonably, it seems to me: "Now that lethal force is an option, I need to know which infractions may be treated as de facto capital crimes."

When May I Shoot a Student?

By GREG HAMPIKIAN
FEB. 27, 2014

BOISE, Idaho -- To the chief counsel of the Idaho State Legislature:

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state's college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student?

I am a biology professor, not a lawyer, and I had never considered bringing a gun to work until now. But since many of my students are likely to be armed, I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field.

I have had encounters with disgruntled students over the years, some of whom seemed quite upset, but I always assumed that when they reached into their backpacks they were going for a pencil. Since I carry a pen to lecture, I did not feel outgunned; and because there are no working sharpeners in the lecture hall, the most they could get off is a single point. But now that we'll all be packing heat, I would like legal instruction in the rules of classroom engagement.

At present, the harshest penalty available here at Boise State is expulsion, used only for the most heinous crimes, like cheating on Scantron exams. But now that lethal force is an option, I need to know which infractions may be treated as de facto capital crimes.

I assume that if a student shoots first, I am allowed to empty my clip; but given the velocity of firearms, and my aging reflexes, I'd like to be proactive. For example, if I am working out a long equation on the board and several students try to correct me using their laser sights, am I allowed to fire a warning shot?

If two armed students are arguing over who should be served next at the coffee bar and I sense escalating hostility, should I aim for the legs and remind them of the campus Shared-Values Statement (which reads, in part, “Boise State strives to provide a culture of civility and success where all feel safe and free from discrimination, harassment, threats or intimidation”)?

While our city police chief has expressed grave concerns about allowing guns on campus, I would point out that he already has one. I'm glad that you were not intimidated by him, and did not allow him to speak at the public hearing on the bill (though I really enjoyed the 40 minutes you gave to the National Rifle Association spokesman).

Knee-jerk reactions from law enforcement officials and university presidents are best set aside. Ignore, for example, the lame argument that some drunken frat boys will fire their weapons in violation of best practices. This view is based on stereotypical depictions of drunken frat boys, a group whose dignity no one seems willing to defend.

The problem, of course, is not that drunken frat boys will be armed; it is that they are drunken frat boys. Arming them is clearly not the issue. They would cause damage with or without guns. I would point out that urinating against a building or firing a few rounds into a sorority house are both violations of the same honor code.

In terms of the campus murder rate -- zero at present -- I think that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do. Which is why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense. Bad guys go where there are no guns, so by adding guns to campus more bad guys will spend their year abroad in London. Britain has incredibly restrictive laws -- their cops don't even have guns! -- and gun deaths there are a tiny fraction of what they are in America. It's a perfect place for bad guys.

Some of my colleagues are concerned that you are encouraging firearms within a densely packed concentration of young people who are away from home for the first time, and are coincidentally the age associated with alcohol and drug experimentation, and the commission of felonies.

Once again, this reflects outdated thinking about students. My current students have grown up learning responsible weapon use through virtual training available on the Xbox and PlayStation. Far from being enamored of violence, many studies have shown, they are numb to it. These creative young minds will certainly be stimulated by access to more technology at the university, items like autoloaders, silencers and hollow points. I am sure that it has not escaped your attention that the library would make an excellent shooting range, and the bookstore could do with fewer books and more ammo choices.

I want to applaud the Legislature's courage. On a final note: I hope its members will consider my amendment for bulletproof office windows and faculty body armor in Boise State blue and orange.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Greg Hampikian is a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University and a co-author of "Exit to Freedom."

Just remember "that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do." And that's "why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense." Let's hope the Idaho legislature comes through with the bucks for those bulletproof office windows and faculty body armor in Boise State blue and orange. After all, this is war.

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Gloriosky! Now the administration is supposed to tiptoe around the imagined "goodwill" of congressional Republicans who don't have any?

"What they saw through those yellow-gold lenses, they never forgot. And neither will you, my friends." After all these decades since I last saw this episode of Boris Karloff's Thriller, "The Cheaters," from 1960, I find that the whole darned thing is on YouTube! We learn from Boris K that the old-time Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters and then boldly looked into a mirror "hanged himself before dawn."


"The choice of a successor to Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state has turned into an unexpectedly nasty political fight that could cost the White House valuable goodwill with Republicans."

-- from "Fight over Susan Rice holds political risks for White House," by the Washington Post's Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson

by Ken

The quotation above from Anne Gearan and Steven Mufson's WaPo piece is in fact the story's lead, and it's about as far as I got -- running into that astonishing phrase "valuable goodwill" as applied to congressional Republicans.

"Valuable goodwill"? From these pestilential vermin? I'm tempted to say that there isn't a neuron's worth of goodwill, not to mention honesty or decency, residing anywhere inside the carcases of life forms like Young Johnny McCranky, Lindsey Graham, or Susan Collins, but that probably isn't so. It would probably be more correct that these life forms have mastered the skill of suppressing any impulse to goodwill, honesty, or decency that happens to pop into their consciousness.

The other day when Susasn Rice bearded the lions as it were, sashaying into the den of the right-wing foreign-policy sociopaths, I understood the logic, and even had a certain admiration for it. The vilification they were performing on her, after all, was almost wholly irrational and counterfactual, so why not step right up and try to set the record straight?

Ambassador Rice found out why not, and I'm afraid that came as no surprise whatsoever to me, because she wasn't dealing with people with either functioning ethics or reason. They're savage beasts driven solely by the dark screeching of their deep-seated loathsomeness. And so, instead of clearing the air, their session seems to have breathed even more toxic fumes into the miasma of their America-loathing psychosis and their compulsion to turn the country into a mirror of their fundmental evil.

Now I hold no brief for Rice, but as yet no one has shown any significant offense committed by anyone in the U.S. government in connection with the lethal assault on the consulate in Benghazi. Personally, the thread I would most like to see pursued, is the possible culpability of mentally defective congressional Republicans in denying the State Dept. adequate funds to protect its people around the world. But that won't happen, because Republicans consider that they have carte blanche to commit any form of criminal behavior as long as it's in the service of their murderous ideological psychosis.

So primitive monsters like the McCranky, Graham, and Collins demons should feel free to pursue their witch hunt just as soon as they deal, finally, with the years-long history of indisputable raging monstrous criminality of the foreign-policy of the Bush regime. They will truly have performed a public service when we get to see justice done to everyone involved in those many years' worth of that lethal combination of mass-murderous war crimes and the Great Wall of Lies the conspirators threw up to try to conceal their malefaction from public view. I'm thinking of an assembly line of the murdering hoodlums filing up to a dais, commencement-style, for the administering of their lethal injections. With Chimpy the Then-Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney either leading the way or bringing up the rear -- I'm open to discussion on the point.

At that point it will become appropriate for congresscreeps -- any of them still alive and kicking, that is -- to consider the appropriateness of a slap on the wrist for Ambassador Rice for passing on the intelligence talking points about the Benghazi raid as they were given to her.

A more worthwhile use of the congresscreeps' time, however, would be to pursue the quest of that old Dutch scientist who created the Cheaters. As Boris K explains in the intro to the episode, it's only through the final custodian of those mysterious glasses, which enable the viewer to see the truth, that we learn what they were actually created for. They were created to enable the beholder to look into a mirror and see the truth about himself -- with unanticipatedly fatal consequences.

No doubt there are many Democrats who would benefit from this same exercise. But I'm hard put to think of any Republicans who would survive it. Certainly none of the Senate Republican Psychos.

#

9/11 and the case for reality (Part 3): Are we a "peace-loving nation" or a nation committed to permanent war?

With the launch of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," former career military officer (now professor of international relations at Boston University) Andrew Bacevich has written: "Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous."


"I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that 'war is hell,' it was frequently necessary, we did it well, and -- whatever those misinformed peaceniks said -- we made the world a better place.

"But then I went to a war zone. . . ."

-- Jeremiah Goulka, in "Confessions of a Former Republican"

"All of my adult life I had been a company man, only dimly aware of the extent to which institutional loyalties induce myopia. Asserting independence required first recognizing the extent to which I had been socialized to accept certain things as unimpeachable. . . .

"George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended 'global war on terror' without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords."

-- Andrew Bacevich, in "The Unmaking of a Company Man"
(the introduction to his book Washington Rules:
America’s Path to Permanent War)

by Ken

Before the detour yesterday ("What makes Willard's thuggish imbecility on Libya different from his usual thuggish imbecility?") necessitated by the "Mutt" man's Mutt-ish outburst, I had intended to continue my "9/11 and the case for reality" series, in particular proceeding from Tuesday's Part 2, "The right-wing worldview has long coupled delusions with lies, not least in matters of 'national security.'"

In a sense, though, we were continuing the theme, because it wasn't just the "Mutt" man's terrifyingly outsize ignorance and cynicism on display ("I'll say any damn thing I have to to get what I friggin' want, which is to park my carcass in the Oval Office"). There was an actual strain of ideology embedded in the Muttster's thuggish reiteration of the view "America don't apologize, America kicks butt -- bring it on, suckuh!" Remember that many of the right-wing pols who were horrified by the "Mutt" man's orgy of self-indulgence objected not to the substance but to the manner of it -- to the politics rather than the "principle." (Sorry, I have to put quotes around "principle.")

This is the very mindset we were talking about Tuesday, drawing on testimony from two reformed right-wingers who have told their conversion stories in Tomgrams from Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch.com: Andrew Bacevich ("How Washington Rules," from 2010 -- in the form of the introduction to his book, as noted above) and Jeremiah Goulka ("Confessions of a Former Republican," from a couple of weeks ago). "What both men are talking about," I wrote Tuesday, the 11th of September, "are the lies and delusions that lay at the heart of foreign policy -- in the name of 'national security' -- in the Bush regime. And today is the anniversary of what should be its eternal shame."

The eternal shame shines on! Since Tuesday night we have learned that the "Mutt" man, despite his previous disinclination to twist his silver-plated tongue around matters of foreign policy, is proud to light the light and carry the torch for that eternal shame.

It's hardly a secret that right-wing pols as far back as memory goes have honed their skills at using phony-baloney mindless jingoism to monopolize the votes of voters bred to respond to this very bogosity. One of the fascinations of both Jeremiah Goulka's and Andrew Bacevich's stories is their frankness about their unquestioning acceptance of this worldview. It's a sterling reminder of how gullible even very smart people can be.

On Tuesday I quoted this telling paragraph from Jeremiah Goulka:

Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did. My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.

Tonight I think we need to read on a bit:

To me, military service represented the perfect combination of public service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness. As a child, I couldn’t get enough of the military: toys and models, movies and cartoons, fat books with technical pictures of manly fighter planes and ships and submarines. We went to air shows whenever we could, and with the advent of cable, I begged my parents to sign up so that the Discovery Channel could bring those shows right into our den. Just after we got it, the first Gulf War kicked off, and CNN provided my afterschool entertainment for weeks.

As I got older, I studied Civil War military history and memory. (I would eventually edit a book of letters by Union Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.) I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was right that "war is hell," it was frequently necessary, we did it well, and -- whatever those misinformed peaceniks said -- we made the world a better place.

But then I went to a war zone.

I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation researchers to help the detainee operations command figure out several thorny policy issues. My task was to figure out why we were sort-of-protecting and sort-of-detaining an Iranian dissident group on Washington’s terrorist list.

It got ugly fast. . . .

(One thing that seems ungracious to point out but I think still needs to be pointed out is that despite Jeremiah's from-the-cradle passion for military service -- "the perfect combination of public service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness" -- he made that fateful first visit to a war zone not in military service but as a RAND Corporation researcher.)

As I noted Tuesday, for Andrew Bacevich the awakening didn't begin till he was 41, when in he got firsthand views of the 1989-90 former East Germany, which in his hawk's-eye view was the forward edge of the terrifying Soviet juggernaut poised to engulf the West, which he discovered instead to be a dilapidated wreck.

[I might add here that one of the fascinations of the final volume of the diaries of the language and literature professor Victor Klemperer (published decades later as The Lesser Evil: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1945-59), who miraculously survived the Nazi period in his home city of Dresden only to be confronted with the Soviet occupation, is his observation of the stripping of East Germany by the Soviets extracted, who shipped back to the Soviet Union everything they found which was remotely transportable, and left behind a client state that was close to a slave state.]

Bacevich wrote that, following his transformative observations in Jena and East Berlin, "Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble." I quoted the paragraph that follows on Tuesday:

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

Again, tonight I think we need to read a little farther.

I was not so naïve as to believe that the American record had been without flaws. Yet I assured myself that any errors or misjudgments had been committed in good faith. Furthermore, circumstances permitted little real choice. In Southeast Asia as in Western Europe, in the Persian Gulf as in the Western Hemisphere, the United States had simply done what needed doing. Viable alternatives did not exist. To consent to any dilution of American power would be to forfeit global leadership, thereby putting at risk safety, prosperity, and freedom, not only our own but also that of our friends and allies.

To Bacevich "the choices seemed clear enough": between "the commitments, customs, and habits that defined American globalism, implemented by the national security apparatus within which I functioned as a small cog" and "appeasement, isolationism, and catastrophe." And circumstances provided him with the perfect backdrop for this view: "Seeing the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil answered many questions, consigned others to the periphery, and rendered still others irrelevant."

Before his belated awakening he says, he had "occasional suspicions," including a bunch from his personal Vietnam experience, "which I had done my best to suppress."

I was, after all, a serving soldier. Except in the narrowest of terms, the military profession, in those days at least, did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of career success required curbing maverick tendencies. To get ahead, you needed to be a team player. Later, when studying the history of U.S. foreign relations in graduate school, I was pelted with challenges to orthodoxy, which I vigorously deflected. When it came to education, graduate school proved a complete waste of time -- a period of intense study devoted to the further accumulation of facts, while I exerted myself to ensuring that they remained inert.

This is, I think, a valuable insight: the way the system uses ambition to cultivate and reinforce obliviousness in its would-be players. With his 23 years in the Army behind him, and his ambition gone with them:

Wealth, power, and celebrity became not aspirations but subjects for critical analysis. History -- especially the familiar narrative of the Cold War -- no longer offered answers; instead, it posed perplexing riddles.

Bacevich underlines that he was coming to grips with this wildly different reality in the '90s, a period "bookended by two wars with Iraq when American vainglory reached impressive new heights." More important than his "realization that I had grossly misinterpreted the threat posed by America's adversaries"--

was the fact that I had misperceived "us." What I thought I knew best I actually understood least. Here, the need for education appeared especially acute.

George W. Bush's decision to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 pushed me fully into opposition. Claims that once seemed elementary -- above all, claims relating to the essentially benign purposes of American power -- now appeared preposterous. The contradictions that found an ostensibly peace-loving nation committing itself to a doctrine of preventive war became too great to ignore. The folly and hubris of the policy makers who heedlessly thrust the nation into an ill-defined and open-ended "global war on terror" without the foggiest notion of what victory would look like, how it would be won, and what it might cost approached standards hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords. During the era of containment, the United States had at least maintained the pretense of a principled strategy; now, the last vestiges of principle gave way to fantasy and opportunism. With that, the worldview to which I had adhered as a young adult and carried into middle age dissolved completely.

I don't think the "Mutt" man really believes any of that nonsense he's been spewing about Egypt and Libya. Like everything else he says in the campaign, it's just stuff he says. What makes him dangerous isn't the substance of the stuff he says, such as it is, but his willingness to say any damned thing that comes into his head if it may help put him into a position to do the stuff he really wants to do, about which we know just enough to make me, at least, pretty terrified. (We also know that he's probably prepared to do, as president, all sorts of stuff he doesn't really give a damn about if it means gaining support for the stuff he does.)

But there are a lot of people out there who do believe in this brand of kick-butt jingoism, and that's very dangerous, especially as long as there are cynical politicians prepared to pander to them. I wish there was some way to help them to understand the things that Andrew Bacevich and Jeremiah Goulka came to understand.

We still have some additional important lessons to learn from Jeremiah, which go beyond the national-security sphere, and also underlie it. I wish they gave me some hope, but I'm afraid that the fact that they don't doesn't allow us to ignore them. Watch this space.

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"Liars and their enablers now work hand in glove -- mendocracy is the regime that governs us now" (Rick Perlstein)

Postscript: Keith Olbermann's announcement
(see below)

Ronald Reagan laid the groundwork for the Right's official

severing of the country from the reality standard.

"In researching [the '80s], I've been surprised to discover the extent to which Ronald Reagan explicitly built his appeal around the notion that it was time to stop challenging the powerful. A new sort of lie took over: that the villains were not those deceiving the nation, but those exposing the deceit -- those, as Reagan put it in his 1980 acceptance speech, who 'say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith.' They were just so, so negative. According to the argument Reagan consistently made, Watergate revealed nothing essential about American politicians and institutions -- the conspirators 'were not criminals at heart.'"

-- Rick Perlstein, in "Inside the GOP's Fact-Free
Nation," in Mother Jones

by Ken

For the benefit of new readers, since the 2008 presidential election campaign, I've been reduced to periodic rants about Republicans and the Right generally having officially gone off the standard, no longer feeling any obligation or indeed connection to reality, so there should be no surprise at my responsiveness to our friend (and favorite working historian) Rick Perlstein's new Mother Jones piece, which tackles this very subject.

Rick, you may recall, after his landmark books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, has been immersed in the next turning point in the conservatizing of America, the Reagan era. And it's hard to look at that period without grappling with the loosening of the bonds of reality.

Reagan himself had a decidedly shaky relation to reality, quite independent of the descent into Alzheimer's. Indeed, while there's a political career's worth of evildoing that the sainted Ronnie has to answer for, I've always thought his most toxic legacy was preaching to an all-too-eager American public the happy-making doctrine that reality is whatever you think it is, whatever you want it to be, whatever makes you feel best. But it wasn't till that 2008 election that I perceived that an entire side of the American political spectrum had abandoned any feeling of responsibility to truth.

It's been hard to think how there could fail to be consequences.

Of course long before 2008 the Bush regime had been hard at work permanently sundering all links between its pronouncements and truth. This is what I found myself pondering as I read -- with Rick's piece already resounding in my head -- today's ThinkProgress Progress Report, "The Neverending Story," which looks into the documentation about the abuses in Guantanamo provided by the latest WikiLeaks cache of more than 700 documents (with a link is to The Guardian's coverage).

THE DETAILS: The Times editorializes today that the documents serve as "a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created" at Gitmo and "describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration's system for deciding detainees' guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released." "Innocent men were picked up on the basis of scant or nonexistent evidence and subjected to lengthy detention and often to abuse and torture," the Times editorial notes, adding that suicides there "were regarded only as a public relations p roblem.& quot; The documents show that there were 158 detainees "who did not receive a formal hearing under a system instituted in 2004. Many were assessed to be 'of little intelligence value' with no ties to or significant knowledge about Al Qaeda or the Taliban." The Guardian notes that 212 Afghans at Gitmo were either "entirely innocent," "mere Taliban conscripts" or "had been transferred to Guantanamo with no reason for doing so." Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim. The so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Qahtani, "was leashed like a dog, sexually humiliated and forced to urinate on himself." And U.S. forces held Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, for 6 years before finally letting him go. Hajj had insisted he was just a journalist and he went back to work for Al-Jazeera after his release.

There are, of course, many discussion-worthy aspects to this story, but I bring it up tonight as for its demonstration of the purity of the Bush regime's commitment to untruthfulness. At every step in the process outlined above, it's clear that no consideration of any sort was given to telling the truth about the gathering, treatment, or ultimate disposition of the Guantanamo detainees, any more than such consideration was given to any aspect of our involvement in Afghanistan or Iraq -- with perhaps occasional semi-exceptions where a bit or two of reality may have been judged tactically superior to the best lie that could be concocted.

Of course Republicans didn't invent the concept of government lying. In his swell Mother Jones Rick Perlstein takes us for a stroll down the memory lane of government and media fibbing, going back to the young William Randolph Hearst's tactic of "Just Making Stuff Up" in his eagerness to help foment the Spanish-American War, then jumping to the same feat performed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. [Links and footnotes onsite.]

"Some of our boys are floating around in the water," Lyndon Johnson told congressmen to goad them into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing war in 1964, after a supposed attack on an American PT boat. "Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish," LBJ observed later, after the deed was done. That resolution inaugurated a decade of official American military activities in Southeast Asia (unofficially, we had been carrying out secret acts of war for years). A full-scale air war began the following February, after the enemy shelled the barracks of 23,000 American "advisers" in a South Vietnamese town called Pleiku. But that was just a pretext. "Pleikus are like streetcars," LBJ's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, said—if you miss one, you can always just hop on another. The bombing targets had been in the can for months, even as LBJ was telling voters on the campaign trail, "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

It would have been possible all along for some intrepid soul to drop the dime on the whole thing. There were many who knew or suspected the truth, but with a villain as universally feared as communism was during the Cold War years, denying the facts felt like the only patriotic thing to do.

In the course of tracing back the hit to the reality standard engineered by the Nixon administration in the speech Vice President Spiro Agnew was charged with delivering in November 1969, Rick delivers a droll and punishing blow to one of my favorite exemplars of media lying and corruption, George Will.

Agnew's remarks reinforced a mood that had been building since at least the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when many viewers complained about the media images of police beating protesters. By the 1980s the trend was fully apparent: News became fluffier, hosts became airier—less assured of their own moral authority. (Around this same time, TV news lost its exceptional status within the networks—once accepted as a "loss leader" intended to burnish their prestige, it was increasingly subject to bottom-line pressures.)

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling—even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change—one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration's "Watergate morality." Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the "liberal" contention that scientific facts are facts—and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It's happened to me more than once—on public radio, no less.

In the same vein, when the Obama administration accused Fox News of not being a legitimate news source, the DC journalism elite rushed to admonish the White House. Granted, they were partly defending Major Garrett, the network's since-departed White House correspondent and a solid journalist—but in the process, few acknowledged that under Roger Ailes, another Nixon veteran, management has enforced an ideological line top to bottom.

Rick concludes:

The protective bubble of the "civility" mandate also seems to extend to the propagandists whose absurdly doctored stories and videos continue to fool the mainstream media. From blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the "Ground Zero mosque" falsehood, to Andrew Breitbart's video attack on Shirley Sherrod -- who lost her job after her anti-discrimination speech was deceptively edited to make her sound like a racist -- to James O'Keefe's fraudulent stingagainst National Public Radio, right-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone -- a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera -- who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence -- that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs -- the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

I might just add, as I've argued before, that there's a third component to the Lying Triangle: a large segment of the American public that not only is willing to accept wholesale lying but demands it, often violently. Reality is in a heap o' trouble.


POSTSCRIPT: KEITH OLBERMANN INVOKES THE PRACTICE

OF "BALANCING A LIE FOR EVERY TRUTH" (HE'S AGAINST)


"I wanted to go somewhere where I could expand on and enlarge upon the work I'd already done, a place where journalistic integrity and analytical honesty would never be compromised by corporate synergy, a place where no one would ever proclaim the ultimate dishonesty: that balancing a lie for every truth was somehow fair. I found that place in Current TV."

-- Keith Olbermann, announcing the start date, Monday, June 20 (live at 8pm ET/5pm PT, with repeats at 11pm ET/8pm PT and 2am ET/11pm PT), of his new Current TV show, to be called (are you ready for this?) Countdown with Keith Olbermann

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Is the administration determined to make the Gulf oil-rig disaster "Obama's Katrina"?

Do they think we'll never find out? This May 11 satellite photo showing oil dispersing in the Gulf was finally released -- on the 17th.

by Ken

This Agonist post of Sean Paul Kelley's yesterday was titled, appropriately enough, "I Told You So!":

I told you so, I told you so, I told you so a thousand times:

BP director on MSNBC just now says what's really threatening Gulf states is not the oil leak but "alarmist" claims by scientists

Expect more of this. Expect the Feds and BP to do as much as they can to prevent real science from being performed on the underwater plumes and then flacks to pollute their airwaves denying that the massive dying off of fish stocks, crabs, oysters, porpoises and so much more are natural and had NOTHING, absolutely nothing to do with the Gulf Gusher.

Sean Paul has been all over the oil-gusher disaster, and the insufficiency of the response. The post to which this one immediately refers began by quoting this gem from Digby:

I keep seeing scientists on TV with that "hair on fire" look about them, nearly frantic, trying to get people to understand how serious the spill is. They are followed by oil company flacks saying it's no big deal and politicians turning it into he-said/she-said. It's the strangest disaster coverage I've ever witnessed.

Sean Paul points out, though, that "Much of the oil may never 'wash' ashore," thanks to all those chemical dispersants being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. (And that's not going to cause any problems, nosiree!)

I think the oil companies had a pretty good idea of what would happen by using them, in essence that they would prevent or substantially delay millions of gallons of oil washing up on shore. And with that being the case the damage would be below the sea, in which they could then hire faux-scientists to spew arguments in the media about how fish stocks and oyster stocks (among others) were in terminal decline before the oil spill and their disappearance has nothing to do with the oil spill.

We're only seeing this just begin. But if less oil than any one expects washes ashore and "only" kills coral and wildlife under the sea in the Keys and other places, I guarantee you these arguments will be made and believed. After all, you going to believe your eyes or what the pointy headed libruls tell you?

What's really shocking Sean Paul, and not just him, is that the administration has managed -- surprise! -- to locate itself, not just on the side of the oil companies, but in apparent cahoots with them on what has clearly become a massive effort at cover-up. WTF?

Think back to the immediate aftermath of the rig blow-up, when Lyin' Rush led the Right-Wing Scumbag Chorale suggesting that it was all a liberal plot, and then that it was -- what else? -- all Obama's fault. It was grotesque. Yet another demonstration of the far right's total divorce from any semblance of reality, not to mention honesty or decency. "Obama's Katrina," they were calling it.

And at the time it did seem grotesque, beginning with the still-astonishing right-wing whitewash of the Bush regime, which began by playing with their tiny penises while the hurricane took dead aim at the undefended city of New Orleans, its inherent indefensibility having been greatly augmented by the thieving incompetence and ideological putridity of the regime, and then even after the catastrophe befell, those vile effing doodybrains just kept right on playing with their puds.

And the Bush pukepile's own incompetence and malicious indifference to and traitorous disregard for anyone who isn't part of the predatory corporate-criminal subculture of society that invented that swinish nonentity as a national figure had been so thoroughly imprinted on the federal government, which they were so determined to prove can't do nuttin' for nobody (except of course enable their slash-and-burn crusade of predatory thieving), that the entire government sat on its collective fat, lazy, stupid ass and burped and farted the days away as the city and far too many of its inhabitants died.

No, the hurricane itself wasn't the fault of those miserable sons of bitches. Everything else was, though.

Of course that Obama administration hasn't been that inept and disengaged in responding to the Gulf disaster. The mere fact that it has responded puts it in an entire other category. And yet, and yet. As in so many areas, the agenda of the Obama administration is far harder than one would wish to distinguish from that of the Bush regime.

Can anyone explain how it serves the interests of anyone except the people who allowed this to happen to make the first consideration a PR blitz in which the only concern is making believe that it's not such a big deal, everything's under control, when every shred of evidence indicates that, literally, nothing could be further from the truth? Why is it considered even permissible, let alone desirable, for the government to lie to the American people?

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here.

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Having an entire political movement "liberated" from reality is, really and truly, bad for America

(Don't forget to click on the cartoon to enlarge it.)

by Ken

The other night I was talking to Howie trying to explain what I mean, and to me what it's a crucial distinction, maybe the most crucial one to be made in today's cultural environment, when I say that the Modern Right-Wing Republican-slash-Conservative Movement now conisders that it has blanket permission to lie.

This is something I've been saying since the thick of the presidential campaign, when I was transfixed by astonishment that with maybe an exception here and there every single word out of every single Republican-slash-Conservative was a flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lie. And since there were no referees to say, "Sorry, you've got to take a timeout for flat-out, bare-faced, unmitigated lying," the result was that it's now officially okay. We are now officially off the reality standard.

I've been saying this at intervals ever since, and nobody bats an eyelash, which I take to mean that either it's obvious to everyone else or people just aren't grasping what I'm saying. Maybe it will help if I try to make clear what I'm not saying.

* I'm not saying that nobody ever lied before in politics. Gimme a break! As it happens, after a long hiatus, I've only just resumed my reading of Rick Perlstein's monumental historical reconstruction, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, having left off -- for personal reasons (too painful to relive) with the elder Mayor Richard Daley's 1968 Chicago convention-jamboree-riot -- and going through the ensuing campaign and coronation, er, inauguration -- I was forcefully and nauseatingly reminded just how sick and crazy Nixon was. The difference, though, is that Nixon not only knew but was perhaps the greatest master in history of the difference between reality and appearances. While Rick acknowledges the RMN did actually sometimes believe his own bullshit, for the most part he knew perfectly well when he was lying, and why he was lying, and above all how to make it look as if he wasn't lying, because he understood that there was a steep price to be paid if you were caught telling whoppers in the public arena.

NIXON SIDEBAR: PARANOIA IN OVERDRIVE

Singularly brilliant is Rick's re-creation of Nixon's state of mind on Election Night, when he made clear to the people around him that the calm confidence of victory he had been projecting was just make-believe, that in fact he was quite sure that he might lose. Rick really mines the guy's paranoia, suggesting that Nixon deep down was convinced that once again something that was rightfully his was going to be stolen from him. His deepest paranoia related to the hopelessly stalled Paris peace talks, and the possibility that somehow the Hated Others would bring peace, damn their souls -- even though he knew this was impossible, because as we now knew Nixon himself had rigged the peace talks. He was responsible for the hopeless stalling of the peace talks, having deployed the loathsome opportunist Anna Chenault, the Dragon Lady, to whisper in the South Vietnamese negotiators' ears that they would get a better deal by holding out.

On the other hand, maybe this wasn't so much paranoia on Nixon's part as his sheer crookedness. After all, if he could rig the peace talks to ensure more war, who's to say that somebody equally nefarious couldn't rerig, or counterrig, or outrig his rigging?)

* Nor am I saying that the suspension of all conditions for belief on the Right is brand-new, something just invented for the convention. The obvious fact is that the Bush regime spent eight years test-driving the new model of reality, where reality is some combination of (a) what you think it is, (b) what you wish it was, and (c) what the loudest- and vilest-mouthed right-wing sociopath says it is. You remember, I'm sure, how those of us who persisted in insisting that there was a standard for truth were derided by the acolytes of the regime as "the reality-based community." Clearly, in order to make such a distinction, those people had to be aware that they couldn't actually change reality. They simply followed the opening left for them by the patron saint of Right-Wing Unreality, Ronald Reagan, who preached that reality doesn't matter, all that matters is how you feel about stuff.

I know some people understand what I mean. I think of the Daily Show correspondent several years back who categorically rejected an argument based on "facts," on the ground that "the facts are biased."

What I'm saying is that the Right has become so far unmoored from reality that (a) it no longer feels any obligation, or even the slightest tug, in the direction of any piece of data that interferes with its ideological fantasy, not to mention its daily talking points, and (b) society gives every indication of having accepted this state of affairs. So they're not necessarily more dishonest than Nixon (how would you go about being more dishonest than Nixon?); they're just freed from the shackles of having to pretend otherwise.

TO ILLUSTRATE:
TAKE DICK ARMEY (PLEASE!)

Paul Krugman offered this tidbit on his blog today:

Armey of ignorance

In the midst of a seriously disgusting interview with Dick Armey, the former House majority leader offers his analysis of the financial crisis:

But at what point do we allow the government to order people that you must sell your product to this person or that person, irrespective of any good judgment? We saw what happened in housing when they ordered banks to make loans to people who weren’t qualified. Are we now going to have the same destructive influences in health care because we’re going to order doctors to provide services and so forth?

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

Truly, sometimes I despair.

AND SPEAKING OF PROF. KRUGMAN DESPAIRING

Yesterday's column struck me as an important one. Now that the Republicans-slash-Conservatives have established their untrammeled right to define their own version of substitute reality, we should perhaps concern ourselves with the question of what their build their fake reality out of. After all, Shangri-La was a fantasy too, but that isn't at all the kind being peddled these days by the loons of the Right. Clearly one of the most heavily represented sources for their delusions is paranoia. And yesterday the good professor took as his subject Paranoia Strikes Deep, arguing "that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit," and relating the teabaggers to Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." He concluded:

[T]he party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

Thank you, professor, these are the words I've been groping for: This business of an entire political faction openly divorced from reality, it's very bad for America.

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Quote of the day: Paul Krugman says there's a word for how the Bush regimistas lied us into Iraq, then tortured to cover up the lies

A 2005 offering from the great Tom Tomorrow (click to enlarge)

"Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

"There’s a word for this: it’s evil."

-- Paul Krugman, in a NYT blogpost yesterday

Speaking of Krugman, this blog entry really doesn't require additional comment. -- Ken

Grand unified scandal

From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

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Oops, the Bushbailers seem to have fucked up that attempt at limiting executive pay! Oh well, it was probably an accident -- stuff happens

by Ken

It's a pretty state of affairs when you're left wondering whether your government's latest fuckup is the result of inattention (we can't expect that nice Secretary Paulson to dot absolutely every "i" and cross every single "t," now can we?), incompetence, or careful sabotage.

Let the Washington Post's Amit R. Paley tell the basic story:

Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless
Loophole in Bailout Provision Leaves Enforcement in Doubt

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

"The flimsy executive-compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on of the Senate Finance Committee.

Oops!

It gets rather complicated from here, having to do with what enforcement mechanisms the Treasury Dept. has, and perhaps more pertinent how much will the Treasury has to enforce any restrictions -- the Bush regime was pretty strenuously opposed to putting any in the bailout law. Of course it's also possible that none of this matters now.

I think it's only fair that, after causing those execs who got that $335B such anxiety over the possibility that they couldn't boost their pay, they should be encouraged to toss an extra $100K or so into their pay envelopes, just to compensate them for the stress.


AND SPEAKING OF WHO GOT THAT $335B . . .

Say, are we just supposed to accept that we're not allowed to know who they are, and how much they got, and get get over it? While the Bushbailers were planning the giant dish-out to their Wall Street cronies, were they so busy fucking up the executive-pay-compensation thing that they somehow forgot to make it mandatory that such a list be made public?

I mean, somebody knows, don't they? The Bushbailers didn't just, like, stand out on a corner handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars, did they? Didn't the recipients at least have to, you know, sign something? Surely somebody somewhere has a shoebox filled with the receipts? Someone on the gov't payroll could make a list of all those scraps of paper, wouldn't you think?

Unless of course we're not supposed to know?

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Up in the sky, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Young Johnny "Impulseman" McCranky about to swoop down and spread more lies and confusion

(Thanks to Patriotboy and his superhero, Jesus' General)

by Ken

Logic says that after the insanity and inanity of the last couple of weeks, coupled with the vengeful turn that reality has taken against God's own POW, the McCranky presidential campaign -- the sleaziest, stupidest, vilest, most dishonest and incompetent national political campaign I can recall -- should be D-E-A-D, dead, with no support from anyone except the 30 percent or so of the American electorate that has chosen to live its life as screeching lunatics, beyond the reach of even the tiniest shred of decency or sense.

But a voice inside me keeps saying, "The lying sack of dung is going to get away with it and come out the crusading hero of the common man -- and his wholly owned chattel, the common woman."

Just look at this week. This man who has spent his entire political career fellating the rich and powerful, helping them turn the U.S. into a country of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich, crusading against all governmental interference with their right to do whatever they damned please, has the gall to try to pass himself off -- the very moment some of the generation's worth of accumulating fecal matter starts attacking the fan -- as an "outsider" who's going to clean up these decades' worth of D.C. and Wall Street filth.

When even the lickspittle Infotainment News Media decide that this is more lying than they can put up with and poke tentatively at his more preposterous claims, he puts on yet another mask, dons a cape, and transforms himself into a cartoon superhero, supposedly suspending his campaign (a total crock -- it was just a stunt to deflect some of the harsh glare of reality from that shellshocked campaign) so that he can swoop down on Washington, where he hasn't participated in any substantive business in a good year and a half, with the stated goal of hammering out a "solution."

Of course he not only has no clue as to what the problem is, he doesn't deign to trouble his precious head even with the effort to read the three pages that constitute the "plan" -- a plan that really isn't a plan, just an appropriation of absolute power -- being forced on the country by the Bush regime by means of its favorite strategy, mongering terror.

As an unintentional happy result, the Masked McCranky appears to have at least delayed if not actually prevented the ramming through of some lightly embellished version of this Paulson "plan." (Lipstick on a pig, anyone?) Of course he did it at the price of empowering a coterie of House loons under the care of Pack Leader John "I'm Tanning As Fast As I Can" Boehner, people who are even nuttier and farther out of touch with reality than the Wall Street stooges of the Bush regime.

As we're so often reminded, Young Johnny McCranky has admitted, in fleeting moments of the candor for which he is undeservedly famous, that he doesn't understand economics or the workings of the economy or our financial institutions. Which doesn't seem to faze him as he tries to ram himself down the country's throat as our next president.

The closer we look at the McCranky career, without even factoring in what are looking like ravaging diminutions in his capacities owing to age and health, the clearer it is that he really has no political beliefs beyond some kind of knee-jerk cowboy anti-Communism. I know we've just about run out of Communists. Well, tough! That just means we have to press any available supervillains into service -- bad guys on whom the Crankyman is prepared to unleash whatever weapons people are foolish enough to put at his demented disposal.

Beyond that, he appears to have no interests beyond his own personal aggrandizement, which in his deep-rooted mental confusion -- and again, I'm talking about a mental deformation that precedes by decades any effects of aging -- he appears to identify with his own loony impulses. This is, as our friend Cliff Schecter put it so aptly,The Real McCain, and I consider it shockingly irresponsible for any news reporter or commentator to speak publicly about Young Johnny without having digested Cliff's book.

Wild impulses erupt in Impulseman's brain, and he appears powerless to control them. Instead, he flaunts them. And tragically, there is a segment of the American electorate who seem to identify certain types of sociopaths as "one of us." These would be the people who fell in love at first demented rant with Sarah Palin, who announced herself in no uncertain terms as a bullying, vitriolilc, thuggish nincompoop, and as soon as there was time to check even superficially was revealed to be an ideologically deranged religious extremist and a compulsive liar. Just as with her partner in slime McCranky, it's hard to find a word she has said or a deed she has done that isn't based on outright fabrication or delusion.

And still that nagging voice inside me says, "With voters who demand to be lied to and abused, never bet against an abusive, lying scumbag."

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In re. Ciara Durkin: Thanks to the Bush regime's record of mendacity, we see what happens when we no longer trust anything our government says

October 6, 2007, St. John the Baptist Church,

Quincy, Mass.: Ciara Durkin is laid to rest.

What happens when we no longer trust our government? Rather obviously, we no longer trust the results when it undertakes to "investigate."

Yesterday Greg Mitchell, a much-respected journalist as well as the editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, reported on the magazine's website on the result, after nine months of private grief and public agitation and military fumblng, waffling, and "investigation," of the military's investigation of the death-by-gunshot of a 30-year-old Massachusetts National Guardswoman in Afghanistan.

Mitchell lays out the background:

The military's handling of the case has been disturbing from the outset, with claims of murder voiced by friends and family due to the fact that the victim was known to be gay and had written home that she had seen some troubling things that might cause her not to survive.

Officials first reported that Ciara Durkin, 30, of Quincy, Mass., who served in the National Guard, had died "in action," then revealed that she was killed in a "noncombat" incident that was being investigated.

Her family was told that she had been killed by a single gunshot near a church. They soon charged -- and the media widely covered the allegations -- that the military had been dragging its feet in giving them more details. They rejected any chance of suicide and suspected friendly fire or murder.

They said she had told them to push for an investigation if anything ever happened to her. She was in a finance unit and may have found some improprieties, according to a story in the [Quincy] Patriot-Ledger, which also disclosed that her family had notified the military about her concerns about her safety.

An e-mail she had sent friends in June 2007, claimed a fellow soldier had pulled a 9mm gun on her.

The Boston Globe reported that the family wondered if, as a lesbian, she may have been targeted. Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Ted Kennedy pushed for answers.

And now, after nine months, comes an answer of sorts:

Investigators concluded Durkin used her Army issue M-16 rifle to shoot herself in the head near a church on the secure Bagram Airbase on Sept. 28, 2007. The question of "why" remained and Durkin's family appears not convinced, saying they are "saddened" by the Army's final report.

The obvious problem, it seems to me, is that -- especially in the wake of the massive disinformation campaign that comprised the "investigation" into the friendly-fire death in Afghanistan of football hero Pat Tillman -- nobody trusts U.S. military investigations. Is there anyone now who doesn't believe that the "investigators" into the death of Ciara Durkin spent those nine months:

(a) hoping the fuss would die down and people would forget about it (except for the family, of course, but they know they can never satisfy them; and let's face it, the present U.S. administration has discovered that it doesn't have to worry much about the families of the servicefolk returned dead or maimed), and --

(b) figuring out what would be the very least they could get away with saying, whether true or not.

Of course, even in the event that the once-utterly-ruled-out suicide possibility is correct, it raises more questions than it answers. Greg Mitchell's biographical note tells us that his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits -- and the President -- Failed on Iraq, "includes several chapters on soldier/vet suicides," and he concludes by referring to "an angry editorial" in Durkin's hometown Quincy Patriot-Ledger, which --

raises questions about the epidemic of suicides among vets, in the war zones and back home, before concluding: "We can treat the physical injuries received on the battlefields but the hidden wounds can be as potentially debilitating and fatal. Ciara Durkin died while in service to her country. It would be a dishonor and a disservice to her and the hundreds of others like her to treat their deaths as a personal failure rather than a victim of war."

When we tot up the costs of the Bush regime's catastrophic wars, what dollar value do we assign to the lives disrupted and destroyed? And how do we put a price on the total loss of credibility the regime has inflicted on our government?

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