Was there ever any doubt that L. Paul Bremner III yet remained a true-blue, die-on-the-sword believer, sold on the grand old neo-con cause? I think not, despite his strenuous defense of self and President in his New York Times Op-Ed piece What I Really Said About Iraq. Nor do I think anyone’s especially now excited…
As we begin our final election-year descent into the maelstrom of American cultural dysfunction, before we founder beneath the coming wave upon wave upon wave of proud, flag-flying, viciously oafish “Who’s Preventing Me From Being A Millionaire?” mass imbecility that is the American populace “making up its mind,” before we discover ourselves too much exhausted to speak in the face of all that is so unspeakable about the American people and the American media, we would do well to pause at this summit of the loftiest crag to consider the vertiginous achievement of our peculiar institutions.
On May 6, 2002, the Bush administration announced the withdrawal of the United States from the International Criminal Court Treaty and claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of the permanent war crimes tribunal that the International Criminal Court Treaty established on July 1, 2002. At the time, little was made of this decision outside human rights circles. But as we now know, the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002 was only the tip of an iceberg, the only then visible piece of an extensive internal, on-going effort to reinterpret in secret the Geneva Conventions, U.S. law, Presidential authority, and even the meaning of the word “torture” itself.
Today, at the conclusion of the G-8 summit conference at Sea Island, Georgia, the world witnessed the morally disheartening spectacle of a President of The United States of America, George W. Bush, himself a professed born-again Christian, unable or unwilling to bring himself to condemn the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
Three times he was asked, each time in a distinct and different way in case he misunderstood, each time with a different opportunity to frame an answer, simple or complex, for the American people.
There can be no doubt he understood. Three times he denied the moral weight of the issue.
Have not especially President Bush’s many born-again Christian supporters the moral obligation, the Christian duty before God, to seek genuine and full clarification of his views and feelings on this issue?
“There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq.”
“Free societies do not use weapsons of mass destruction.”
“Life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam’s regime.”
President George W. Bush’s faith that there is no truth so unfortunate that it cannot be dispelled with barefaced denial and indifferent neglect is simply staggering. More staggering is the percentage of Americans who apparently approve this method of governance.
It sucked me right in, an article by Scott Timberg for the LA Times. “Discouraging words are seldom heard against Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall. Here are a few.” I like modern architecture in general; specifically I like the sculptural work that emerged from the demise of the “post-modern” and “deconstructivist” trends of the seventies and…
As I sit down to write this, the Office of President of the United States of America seems to dangle from the fingertips of the unelected members of the Florida State Supreme Court. You, reading this presumably after their decision, know much more than I. But what, really, do you know from your future vantage…
We are now living through one of those interesting, though hardly unique or remarkable periods in the history of human delusion when fundamental alterations in existing social, cultural, political and economic arrangements have become as unthinkable as they are inevitable
The problem with the slogan, the problem with the notion that "democracy means everybody taking care of themselves," is obvious, though hardly ever stated publicly, even by Democrats. Disempowering Big Government accomplishes little more than clearing the field for Big Business. The notion that democracy means everybody, from poverty-level single working mothers to a Bill Gates or a Donald Trump or, more powerful still, an AT&T or a Disney, each separately talking care of themselves as best they can without regard for each other, is patently absurd. Yet it’s the standard stuff of our corporate media-orchestrated political discourse.