Witch hunt?

New Zealand teenager
tries to auction naked
pictures of his mother.

It has already started. Just the mention of the possibility that our Attorney General might appoint a special investigator to look into the torture question has prompted the first cries of “witch hunt.” The Republicans will obviously oppose any attempt at accountability and justice when it comes to Bush/Cheney and the rest of the criminal gang that spent the last eight years ruining our country. There is no “hunt” involved here, the “witches,” if one wishes to call them that, are well known and have even confessed already to some of their misdeeds. Thus it is not as if we think something might have happened and want to learn about it, we know it happened and seek accountability. We know that U.S. law, International law, and the constitution itself were violated. For Republicans to try to obfuscate and confuse this particular investigation is to verify once again that law and the constitution, as well as the well-being of our nation, do not concern them. They are interested only in clinging to and trying to re-establish the power they so shamefully abused for so long. In my opinion this is immorality writ large and should by all rights destroy any credibility they claim. This is not about some relatively insignificant political disagreement. We are dealing here with the deaths of thousands of our best young people, injuries (probably permanent) to many thousands more, the deaths of perhaps as many as a million innocent Iraqis, the displacement of up to four million, torture and other war crimes, and human misery untold. It is understandable why they would like to see it swept under the rug, so to speak, but if they want to pretend it didn’t happen, and the leaders of their party were not responsible, the rest of the world is not going to forget it. And if the U.S., having created the Nuremburg trials, refuses to investigate our own war criminals and hold them responsible, our hypocrisy and arrogance will be forever displayed, and our image in the world will be damaged forever. The question for Eric Holder cannot be whether to investigate, only who to appoint.

I must say, the Republican party is putting on a show that would make the Keystone Kops jealous. They opposed the stimulus, with no plan of their own. Now they are opposing health care with no plan of their own. Some of their most prominent figures have had trouble keeping their pants on and just dig themselves deeper in their scandals every day. Their supposedly hot shot Governor (of Alaska) resigned after one of the most absurd speeches ever heard, and is herself mired in scandal. Their Chairman rants against Obama’s health care proposal but obviously doesn’t understand it, and doesn’t even know for sure what health insurance he has himself. They opposed Sotomayor for the Supreme Court even before she was announced and have now exposed their blatant racism for the world to see. They have stupidly made it clear they have nothing to offer and are deliberately attempting to destroy Obama and say “no” to everything he wants to do, no matter what it is. Their party is split now between those absolute crazies who think Obama is not really a citizen of the U.S., and those who are so embarrassed by this they want to hide in their closets. One of their putative “leaders” at the moment is a fat, loud-mouthed, draft-dodging, drug addicted, bag of pig pucky, who is also a pathological liar. Some of their Senators have made utter fools of themselves, especially during the Sotomayor hearings, and come across as too stupid to breath. In my relatively long life I have never seen a performance as dismal as this. I cannot conceive of anything they could possibly do to refurbish themselves as a viable political party. It appears to me that when they lost the White House to Bill Clinton, an infectious immorality took over the party, shepherded by Karl Rove who abandoned ordinary politics in favor of “roviating” opponents. What inevitably happened when they renounced their country in favor of their party, renounced politics in favor of crime, and left an absolute disaster in their wake is what we are seeing and trying to deal with now. The best thing these remnants of what was once a genuine political party could do now is just shut up and get out of the way.

LKBIQ:
I came from a disadvantaged home. They were Republicans.
Paul Tsongas

TILT:
Scalping was not universal among American Indians, and there is no evidence those who practiced it learned it from Europeans.