Perhaps it was auto-erotic asphyxiation?

It does sound a little strange, doesn’t it? Arturo Gatti, welterweight champion, has a knock-down drag-out fight with his wife, pushing her to the floor and bruising her on the elbows and chin and then the next morning he’s got a purse strap around his neck and has turned blue. Word has it they were always fighting–in this instance about Amanda Rodrigues, Gatti’s wife, wearing clothes that were too revealing–is she the model? I can’t seem to get this straight–and other times over allegations of infidelity–probably both ways–and were, surprise, surprise, in the process of separation. A marriage not exactly made in heaven.
The police are charging Amanda with the murder–now, I can’t see how a boxing champion could manage to get strangled by his wife UNLESS he was already unconscious–and he was supposed to be very drunk that night. And the police think it’s fishy that she could be in the same house as he was and not notice that he was dead–but if she’d had this battle royale with him early in the evening, I could see her locking herself in a bedroom and not emerging till the next morning. However, the idea that someone would wander in and strangle him–with a PURSE STRAP–does make things rather interesting and makes you ask, if it wasn’t her, didn’t she HEAR something?
On the other hand–we have here the spectacle of Vice Presidential assassination squads and illegal surveillance on American citizens, which no one in Congress seems to have heard about despite the CIA saying that of COURSE they had been informed. It can be taken for granted that Cheney lied–but to be fair, Dick Cheney has demonstrated over and over again that he has no concept of objective reality, so you really can’t say he’s LYING when he doesn’t tell the truth because he’s brain-damaged–but the CIA are experts in prevarication. It would be easy for the CIA chief to report something to Congress in such a way that nobody really knows what he’s talking about. “Oh, we’ve also instituted surveillance on a number of terror suspects in the United States,” buried in a laundry list of actions of such mind-numbing detail that no one thinks to ask–what KIND of terror suspects? On the other hand, Congress had been reduced to a rubber stamp organization from Sept. 12, 2001 until January 1, 2007. This wasn’t simply because of the party of the Administration holding majorities in both houses, it was because the Democrats were at first as gung-ho as the President about kicking Islamic butt, whether it was the right butt or not, and later on, were cowed by their own acquiesence and scared by the apparent popularity of the President and his Iraq war. Only after Bush demonstrated how totally out of his depth he was in the wake of Hurricane Katrina did the Democrats acquire enough backbone to stand up to him–once in a while. Hell, Obama still doesn’t think that the alleged illegalities and abuses of power by Bush, Cheney & Co. should be investigated because the rules of the game say that you don’t go after the previous administration. I mean, it’s poor sportsmanship to complain about someone cheating after the game, even if you have videotape that shows they were offsides on every other play, right?
But we’re not talking about a football game here, are we? Ler’s hope Attorney General Holder has the backbone to at least appoint the special prosecutor he’s thinking about…

Yes, Virginia, There IS A Sanity Clause

Ahh, Dickie Boy. I guess it hasn’t occurred to you yet that nobody frickin’ believes you anymore. On the other hand, I guess you can’t be held to blame because the National Press Club obviously still DOES. Who else but the coprophagic reporters and editors who swallowed your BS for eight years would still pay attention when you offloaded the logs that you delivered the other day? Weren’t you the one who said that there wasn’t any doubt that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda? And said it over and over not just during the rush to a war that, oh, gee, you just admitted wasn’t really all that necessary, but for the five remaining years of your, oops, I mean, George Bush’s administration? Just who was it then who got us into this war? Congress? The other group who got diddled with edited intelligence, all disclaimers being buried in the footnotes? There IS such a thing as videotape, you know, and people can actually re-watch all those interviews. But not “the base”, I guess.
I guess Mary must be pretty happy right now also, now that Dad has realized he’s not against gay marriage. It must make her feel proud to know that he can acknowledge her sexual orientation without attacking anyone else–like John Edwards did during the 2004 election–for revealing a deep dark stain on his character. Too bad so many states have followed his earlier lead and started passing “Defense of Marriage” bills that define marriage as being between one man and one woman, but they obviously misinterpreted your unspoken thoughts.
Now, most of the news articles I read treated these statements of yours as two separate incidents, not wishing to reveal that you said both of these whoppers at the same event. But most of them completely ignored your dumping the blame for 9/11 on Dick Clark, suggesting that he was asleep at the switch and was caught with his pants down like the rest of you. Jon Stewart’s writers at the Daily Show (who have GOT to be watching every freakin’ news channel and C-Span 25/8!–as well as Arianna Huffington) After all, you hadn’t “read his book.” I guess you hadn’t read his memos, requests for meetings, briefing statements, either.
So what I want to know is, why does anyone pay you any attention anymore Dick? We already found you stealing the presents from under the tree. Isn’t it time we all grew up and admitted that far from being the Santa Claus we believed gave us peace and security, you were the Grinch who was stealing it away? Unfortunately, you’re out of office. It’s too late to invoke the Sanity Clause.

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

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.

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

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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ABOUT MEH

Cartoons and text by Greg Uchrin (aka Gregorius alexandrinus), with the able assistance of Fred and Bert Squirrel, with special appearances by George Dymme. Published Mondays and Thursdays.

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