Into the Darkness

America banks sharply into mid-winter’s night

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca
12/8/07

There was so much going on this week that it’s hard to know where to begin, really.

First, there was the National Intelligence Evaluation, which, for the benefit of anyone living in a cave and Mike Huckabee, was the bald declaration by American intelligence forces that Iran is not working on a nuclear weapon, and hasn’t been since 2003. For a president who was invoking World War III and/or avoidance thereof as a reason to attack Iran now, this totally destroyed his case, leaving him looking foolish and worse. When Israel denounced the findings, Putsch had to go out in front of the world with the shifty look of a ten year old boy trying to explain just why he was caught trying to stuff the family cat into the microwave oven, and declare that the lack of hostile intent by Iran didn’t change his mind about attacking them for America’s security. Quite a few commentators, even in America’s equivalent of a “free press,” used phrases like “nuts” and “bald-faced liar” to describe his performance. Joe Biden, not the most courageous Senator ever, flat out promised to impeach Putsch if he continued his push for war with Iran. Iran, in the meantime, went ahead and finally dropped the dollar as an instrument in oil trades altogether, labeling it an “unreliable” currency.

Lost in all the fooforaw about how big a bogeyman Iran President Ahmadinejad wasn’t were the little news stories that Russia, now a one-party dictatorship again, had resumed long range ocean patrols with nuclear-armed craft, and that the Russian Minister of Defence had declared that Russia would regain nuclear parity with America before the end of the decade.

What makes the clownish Ahmadinejad scarier than the cold and vicious Vladimir Putin totally escapes me, as does the concept that Iran with a potential nuclear capability is a bigger threat to world peace than a dictatorship in Russia with 15,000 nuclear weapons.

Then there was the case of the CIA destroying the “enhanced interrogation” videotapes. Having been subpoenaed by the Keane Commission, they were formally evidence, and thus destroying them was a felony.

The really stomach-churning part was the calm admission by the moral bankrupts in charge of the CIA that they destroyed the tapes in order to protect the human filth who were conducting the “enhanced interrogations.” Nothing like covering up for torturing, murdering pigs in the name of national security.

When those torturers come back to civilian life, will the people who are protecting them now let their children play with the children in the homes of those unreconstructed torturers?

The House actually passed an energy bill with some teeth, raising the fuel-efficiency standards to 35 miles an hour and dropping some of the tax breaks for oil companies. Republicans in the Senate promptly filibustered it, unable to conceive of a world where oil companies might have to measure their net profits in single-digit billions of dollars while undeserving Americans got schools and medical care and a social safety net.

On the upside, Honda announced the first production model of a fuel-cell car, ready to hit the streets next summer. All the dinosaurs who had been declaring that fuel-cell cars were as impossible as flying to the moon will have to scramble to catch up.

Mike Huckabee made the news quite a bit this week. First he took a big lead in the polls in that most unrepresentative of American customs, the Iowa caucuses. That, in itself, was not newsworthy, but it lent weight to the news that in 1999 he paroled a murderer and rapist who had raped a distant cousin of Bill Clinton’s and the guy had gone out and, within a year, committed one and possibly two more murders. Huckabee Hound at first denied that he had any personal involvement in the case, but three members of the parole board and the Clinton-related rape victim all called him a liar and the rape victim recounted a meeting she had with Huckabee Hound pleading with him not to release the prisoner. Just to top it off, the prison warden produced a letter from Governor Huckabee Hound declaring that it was his desire that the prisoner be paroled.

That he had his own Willie Horton (only for real; Dukakis played no role in the Horton mess) was bad enough, but the suspicion that he may have let this vicious, dangerous man out just to thumb his nose at the Clintons is a disturbing possibility that suggests a personality and pathology not unlike that of the incumbent president.

It also came to light that in 1992, Huckabee Hound wanted to quarantine anyone with AIDS. By 1992, pretty much everyone knew that you couldn’t get AIDS from casual contact. Maybe he was too busy dunking witches or something.

Mittens had his moment of glory. Romney, hoping to evoke JFK grappling with the issue of his Catholicism in the 1960 race, stood up and declared that he would not, in effect, be a slave to the Church Elders in Salt Lake City. All fine and good, and if the moron had had the good sense to shut his yap right then and there, it might have been a defining and even shining moment for him. But he didn’t have that good sense.

Instead, he lurched toward the religious right like an affectionate drunk declaring to a table of hostile bikers, “honest, guys, I’m one of you.” He went on to swear that all of us are in it together, in this noble, bold experiment in democracy and freedom called America in which any white Christian male is as good as any other white Christian male. Mittens apparently doesn’t know that 12-15% of Americans are atheist, another 20% are non-Christian, and about half of the Christians will be unamused at Mitten’s belief that America was designed as a playground for church-goers.

All of this should give Giuliani, with all of his baggage (none of which will fit in a 1,500 word piece) a boost in the GOP drive to lose 48 states in 2008.

Finally, some of the joys of privatization came to light – or rather DIDN’T come to light. Under the pressure of a court order in the wake of a Freedom of Information Act case, the State Department released their no-bid contract with Blackwater for private security in Iraq. Blackwater employees had shown mild signs of unprofessionalism such as engaging in mass murder, rape and possible looting, the sorts of things corporations don’t really like to discuss in polite company. Now Blackwater will have to spend millions in ads persuading the public that they are really patriotic.

The contract ran 323 pages, according to the Washington Post, but 169 of them had been blanked out entirely. Much of the rest was heavily redacted. According to the Post, this was not done by the State Department for national security, joke though that might have been, but mostly at the request of Blackwater to protect trade secrets. The contract was for at least $1.2 billion in tax dollars (that we know about, anyway), and we have no idea what we’re paying for beyond rapists, murders, and noisy yahoo psychocowboy security guards.

Can you think of a better reason to drop the government’s mad drive toward privatization?