This week in appalling…

Students protest the football coaches being suspended--before the end of the season.

After the bowl games, heck, cut 'em loose...

Hey, did you hear about Penn State? They’re leaving the NCAA conference to join NAMBLA (ba-dum-tishhhhhh!) 2000 students rioted because of the firings, suspensions and resignations over the child rape scandal. Hey, we didn’t know this was a Catholic school! (ba-dum!)

In other news, Michelle Bachman thinks that poor people ought to give up two Happy Meals so that rich people don’t have to pay 3% more taxes. Unfortunately, that will wreck the Republican jobs program. Social safety net? We should look to the example of Communist China! They don’t do anything so socialistic!

Happy Veteran’s Day! Mitt Romney thinks you haven’t done enough to serve your country. Let’s privatize the Veteran’s Administration so that you can have the glory of paying American health insurance companies and help them make … even bigger profits. It’s only patriotic.

Waterboarding? Seven out of nine Republican presidential hopefuls agree it isn’t torture. Let’s rehabilitate those Japanese who were hung for it after WWII–oops, they did that against Americans–damn, they should have been drawn and quartered as well!

Berlusconi steps down in Italy–he wants to spend his time helping to defend Herman Cain. I was right last week, more harassment accusations popped up out of Herman’s woodwork. “My wife will tell you–she never heard of any of these things.” Right, Herman.

Last we heard from Rick Perry, he was trying to remember his name. Pick Peary? Rick Rarey? Wait a minute, I almost have it.

Frank Miller thinks the Occupy movement is nothing but hookers and rapists and thieves. Oh, my! Methinks Frank has gotten the United States confused with Sin City… and forgotten about the corruption that pervaded his creation. Things aren’t always black-and-white with splashes of color and good guys aren’t only sweaty, semi-naked men with painted-on muscles, Frank. Oops, that was 300. Maybe Frank is ignoring all those people who have extra time on their hands to protest–because they have no jobs! Perhaps he thinks they can get jobs at McDonald’s? They won’t be hiring–the word is that sales of Happy Meals is expected to go south.

Let’s really get some attention: OCCUPY THE SUPER BOWL!

President Obama killed the tradition of wearing “Aloha” shirts at the APEC summit in Honolulu. “Hey, I’m from Hawaii and even I think those things are awful!”

And finally, Penn State lost its first post-scandal game. Students said, “We knew they should have waited until after the season.”

Next weekend I will be attending AnimeUSA at the Crystal City Hyatt Regency. I’ll be participating in two panels on Saturday, one I will be giving on traditional and digitial inking at some ungodly hour in the morning, and the other I’ll be supporting my friend Alicia at her traditional post-midnight Yuri drawing panel. I’ll be in costume some of the time (courtesy of Alicia), but the rest of the time, I’ll be in my traditional purple “I NEED INTRAVENOUS CAFFEINE” shirt. So say hi, if you see me.

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Bizarro World: Cheney Demands Document Release, Obama Keeps Photos Secret

Bizarro Obama, claiming the need for secrecy, prepares to wrestle Bizarro Cheney, armed with customary shotgun, who demands document release.

The two Super Bizarros of the Right and Left prepare to battle

Harry Shearer in the Huffington post has called the new reality the Mirror World edition. Did somebody yell, “Simon Says: Everybody switch sides”? Screw it, Harry, I think it’s worse than that, we’ve formally entered BIZARRO World. We’ve been phasing in and out of Bizarro World ever since 9/11, when people were evacuating shopping malls in the midwest, convinced that Saddam Hussein was about to bomb them, but now with Cheney demanding the release of documents to show how effective our use of torture was and with Barack Obama, Mr. Transparency in Government, deciding to fight the release of torture photos, I think we’ve taken up permanent residence and Kal-El ain’t gunna come to rescue us. William Rivers Pitt thinks everyone is damn scared that the real dirt will come out and if Seymour Hersh is right, there’s some really horrible stuff we’re going to find out about how we conducted our “enhanced interrogations.”
Now, President Obama has decided to revive the military tribunals for Gitmo prisoners–you know, the ones he promised to end during the election campaign? And Republicans are dancing all over Nancy Pelosi for allegedly being untruthful about she knew about prisoner interrogations, in order to distract the country from the lies that President Bush told us about “We don’t torture.” Right is left, up is down, in is out…
In other news, after all that brouhaha about Obama addressing the Notre Dame commencement, a little over 2 dozen protestors showed up and Obama entered to a standing ovation and gave his speech to thunderous applause. The official White House transcript includes a protestor’s boo that Katharine Zaleski said showed his commitment to greater transparency. While being open about dissent is admirable, being transparent about the little things while maintaining secrecy about the big ones is backasswards…Bizarro World.

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Is this really to protect the troops or to protect the people who gave the orders to them?

President Obama tries to convince the public that not releasing the torture photos will protect the troops.

Would you like maple syrup or strawberries and whipped cream? Oh, no, not ze whip!

Poor President Obama. He’d REALLY like to get past this little torture problem that the Bush administration dumped like a load of crap on the Oval Office rug. But it just keeps coming back. Now the claim is, that in spite of his campaign promises of transparency, he will oppose releasing the torture photographs and that this will somehow protect the troops. There’s a possibility that this is true, but this writer believes that the president is being disingenuous. What not releasing the photographs is going to do is protect the president from having to do something about the perpetrators of these crimes. And I don’t mean the grunts and CIA operatives who actually performed the “enhanced interrogations” but the chain of command that issued the orders, back to and including former President Fratboy–I mean, Bush.
There is a long-standing tradition of treating previous administrations and their officials with kid gloves. You publicly give them the respect of having done whatever they did for the best reasons and especially, if there was anything fishy about it, you treat it as a hands off situation. The time to have done something was while the administration was in office–and that means use of the constitutional impeachment procedures. The problem is that the Bush administration committed high crimes and misdemeanors. They broke our laws against torture and international treaties against it. Yet, back in 2006, Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment process off the table, effectively leaving only one course of action, investigation and possible charges only after the change of administration.
Now the Democrats have been acting as if they were complete innocents in the matter. But it seems that Speaker Pelosi had been informed about the use of torture, and tacitly supported it by not doing a goddam thing about it. Nancy is also being disingenuous and trying to say that congressional leaders had only been informed about the possibililty of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, in other words, she knew that torture MIGHT be used, but not that torture actually WAS being used. Come on, now, Nancy, if a CIA spook tells you he might have to do something, chances are he’s already doing it. But this goes to the heart of the matter. Maybe the Bush administration is directly culpable for this crap, as former VP Dick Cheney is proud to admit, but there are a lot of people who are complicit in that they didn’t DO ANYTHING to stop it even though they were in a position to object or, if their voices were overborne by the “soft on terrorism” rhetoric of the time, leaked it to the news media.
Which brings us to another complicit group. The news media were cheerleaders for the so-called War on Terror. At some point in time, if there had been rumors that we were practicing torture, and there had, the news either suppressed the stories or said, so what, these were the people who attacked America. It wasn’t until the Abu Ghraib photographs started showing up on the internet that they were forced to break the story. Now the line many editors are taking is that we are ALL complicit because 100% of the American people were behind Bush’s war and nobody cared if we stepped on a few innocent Iraqi toes if it meant making America safer. What these apologists are forgetting is that a substantial portion of the American people were not gung ho about invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 and which did not have any weapons of mass destruction to threaten us with. But these people, through the complicity of the news media were marginalized and vilified as traitors, commies, anarchists, cowards, surrender monkeys or Frenchmen.
So this is the problem that Obama faces. If he allows the release of the photographs, they are probably so awful that the clamor to do something will be tremendous. But this will open a can of worms that will not just affect the former administration, but also members of his own party, journalists and god knows how many others who had the power to do something but stood by and did nothing.
But some of us didn’t.
See: How Americans Came to Support Torture, in Five Steps
Analysis: Obama revives old arguments on photos
Lawyers scoff at W.H. photo claim
Babes in TortureLand: Media Torture

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More Torture Memo Fun: Shepard Smith Finds a Conscience

Not-So-Innocent Condoleezza After All

Do you realize that Dick Cheney has seen the surface world more times in the last three months than in his entire tenure as Vice President? As usual, his current surfacings have been to tell us how bad a President Barack Obama is, how he’s endangering us with his reckless transparency and, of course, how effective our torture program was to gain information. Of course, we can’t find out if this is true because the documents are classified but Darth Cheney, aka, the Penguin, told us he made a formal request that they be declassified. Well, guess what? He isn’t VP anymore, just an ordinary mortal like the rest of us. He COULD have declassified the information himself before he left office, but naturally he assumed that Obama would just shut up about his predecessors misdeeds since that is the way the game has traditionally worked. But it seems Cheney didn’t ask the CIA about this, he made a FOIA request to the National Archives who, as of 2006, were 4 millions pages behind in filling FOIA requests. I don’t think they’ve caught up.
But what intel did we get? Marcy Wheeler of the Empty Wheel Blog dug through the 9/11 commission reports and found only 10 pieces of information obtained through the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. The first three, to give examples of the quality of info we got, were: 1. “Abu Zubaydah describes his role running the Khaldan and Derunta training camps.” 2. “Abu Zubaydah describes Rahim al-Nashiri’s success as a recruiter.” 3. “AZ describes Bin Laden’s popularity.” (See Marcy Wheeler: 83 Waterboardings, 10 Pieces of Intel in the Huffington Post. Wow, that must have saved innumerable lives, Mr. Cheney.
Notice however, that Cheney never really addresses the moral issue of whether or not we should torture. His argument is strictly, “It’s effective, therefore we should do it.” And apart from being little Miss Innocent, it’s seems Condi (Condoleezza) Rice was actually one of the FIRST to OK waterboarding Rice OK’d CIA waterboard request as Bush adviser. All the top people, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Tenet were involved. Only Colin Powell appears to have been out of the loop, but remember, CIA is part of the State Department, which he headed.
In other news, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith has a new growth someplace on his body. It looks like…a conscience! I’m sure the Fox News health plan provides for the removal of these growths, but in the meantime, let’s take a look at HIS reaction to the memo problem. We have to agree with Shep’s response to Cheney. It doesn’t matter if it works. We’re America. We don’t torture.