Policy Differences?!?!

I have now, officially and certifiably, heard it all.

Torture is nothing more than a policy difference.

Omigosh.

I thought the eight long years of Bush Hell had visited the most wretchedly ludicrous palaver possible on a vulnerable world. Guess not. Guess they had to crown their execrable efforts with the most contemptible canard of all:

Torturing human beings is not wrong, criminal, nor even morally heinous--it's just POLICY.

It defies imagination.

Or even coherent thought.

Gaza, Sudan, Northern Ireland, Somalia, Nigeria...

Cry out, Americans! When hatred kills children, there is no justification. Ever.

GENEVA – The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights called Friday for an independent war crimes investigation in Gaza after reports that Israeli forces shelled a house full of Palestinian civilians, killing 30 people.

Navi Pillay...[said] an incident in Gaza City this week "appears to have all the elements of war crimes."

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Israeli troops evacuated Palestinian civilians to a house in the Zeitoun neighborhood on Jan. 4, then shelled the building 24 hours later.

The U.N. agency said 110 people were in the house, according to testimony from four witnesses.

On Thursday, the international Red Cross said the Israeli army refused rescuers permission to reach wounded people in the neighborhood for four days. Israel said the delay was caused by fighting in the area.

Gaza, Addendum

I was talking with my kids yesterday about the fact that President-Elect Obama does not speak out about the Gaza massacre and they asked why Senator Clinton does not. I opened my mouth to answer as it dawned on me that she cannot now. She works for Obama.

What is that fine political axiom?...Hold your friends close; hold your enemies...

The True Horror That Is Gaza

699 and 11.

How do those numbers strike you?

They strike me as wildly disparate. Especially when each whole number represents a LIFE.

As our Congress and our president-elect are busy demurring 'weighing in' on these numbers, they're mounting--with the larger one on track to four digits probably before the president-elect can say again that there can only be 'one administration at a time'.

It's this complacency in the face of needless death--children, no less--that I find the most excruciatingly obscene in the dispositions of those who would conduct our country. I have, at last, faced the reality of our lame duck president's barren soul, and our representatives' spineless souls, but I was so hoping for some caring souls to take the helm.

In other words, anyone in a position to speak out against the wholesale slaughter of civilians and children who does not do so is a complete conundrum to me.

Well, I'm not in that position, but I'm going to speak out anyway.

The first part of the equation is that Hamas has been firing rockets into Israel for years. While in no way defensible, Hamas' actions have lacked lethality. No such lack can be found in the Israeli answer. As the most heavily-armed helicopters in the world rain death on Gaza, and equally ferocious armed vehicles snuff out any animate square meters of that strip of land, the purveyors of the firestorm claim victimhood and protest their right to protect their land.

Accordingly, 699 Palestinians have died in Gaza. 11 Israeli soldiers have died.

If I could employ an analogy, it might be this: a student gang comes to school each day and behaves badly, really badly. They kick the other students, slam lockers in other students' faces, trip other students, even wave guns in their faces---all with belligerent impunity. Well, the other students have had just about enough of the constant mistreatment. And rightly so.

So they BOMB every last house of this gang's families, plus every last house next to the gang's families' houses, plus every last place of business patronized by the gang's families' members, plus every last house belonging to the business owners. And everything else in between.

Sound about right?

699 and 11.

Just Imagine a World Where....

...children being killed by bombs dropped by Apache helicopters is more important than stopping a duly-appointed senator from sitting down in Congress...

...soldiers dying endlessly in an endless conflict of obscene origin is more important than fighting to appoint someone wholly ill-equipped but well-named to Congress...

...keeping families in their homes is more important than voting billions of dollars to the evictors...

...teaching civics in schools is more important than omitting its existence because we aren't supposed to know the laws and rules that are being stomped upon...

...the right to one's civil liberties is more important than a daily diet of fearing terrorists...

...respecting the earth is more important than filling the coffers...

...helping people is more important than helping corporations...


...[I invite you to add your own wish for the world we all deserve]...

Of Blogs, Blogging and Blogojevich...Oh, and I'M BACK!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a task left long undone becomes next to impossible to tackle! I've left my blog for so long I'm beyond rusty. And Dorothy with her oilcan is nowhere in sight. So I'll just have to crank back into gear on my own power here. If you hear a whack, whir, wheeze, whine, sputter, splat, squirt, scrape, clink, clank, clunk, clatter, crash, bang, beep, buzz, ring, rip, roar, retch, twang, toot, tinkle, thud, pop, plop, plunk, pow, snort, snuk, sniff, smack, screech, splash, squish, squeek, jingle, rattle, squeel, boing, honk, hoot, hack, belch...it's just me, stretching my blog limbs again.*

*With thanks to Jane Austin and Todd Rundgren, from whom I stole the opening and closing of the paragraph.

So how are you all in blogville nowadays? Nowadays filled with Gaza, Iraq and Mumbai; cool ash, foreclosures and inaugurations; Warrens, Blagojeviches and Kennedys? Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn't have taken up the blog reins again quite so fast...

Naw. I'll jump in. But just in the shallow end.

I understand the democrats are planning to unceremoniously oust the honorable Mr. Roland Burris from the Senate before he gets to put a crease in his trousers.

Right.

And so we're off and running into 2009 with the exact same attitude toward THE LAW that defined 2008. Just what is the difficulty the dems have with following laws, rules and directives? Here are a few that come to mind:

*The presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. This is covered by the 5th, 6th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. And it should cover Blogojevich in his present pickle, if I'm not mistaken.

*When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of each State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies. This is from the 17th Amendment to the Constitution. And it should speak to Blagojevich's duties, again, if I'm not mistaken.

*Did I mention 'Everyone is supposed innocent until having been declared guilty'? This is broached in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the legal codes of untold numbers of the nations of the world.

But it's evidently not included in our majority leader's vocabulary. Just this morn I listened to him declare Blagojevich guilty of contemptuous crimes, thereby nullifying that governor's rights and duties of office.

Right.

I guess we can just dispense with that whole indictment, plea and jury business.

The Company We Keep

'I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.'

The author of this lethally nonsensical statement was assistant to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld from 1975-77, and arms control director under President Reagan.

AND, he is also now another...wait for it...ENDORSER of Senator Obama!

With friends like these...

Regarding the Vastly Vaunted Endorsement of Senator Obama by Colin Powell...

The media is rewriting history and I find that terrifying.

When I worked in intelligence, I became very familiar with the compelling insidiousness of propaganda, all the while I was clothed in the lofty knowledge that our country was largely above such devious and deceitful methods of dealing with its populace.

We've come a long way, Citizens.

Now I'm not so naïve as to think our media is free of proselytism, or ever has been, but we have now arrived at a place where the majority of facts are not just being parsed, or slanted, or omitted, or ignored—ALL of which describe what the Fourth Estate has done in this last shocking decade--but rather, invented. Our national media is taking it upon themselves to rewrite history.

As Blue Lyon cogently says on her blog, the Colin Powell of yesterday's endorsement bears little resemblance to the Colin Powell we all know and love. She also discusses the hypocrisy of the left in their embrace of a sometimes-reviled Republican, but as the left barrels remorselessly down its path of no-return, I'm learning to step out of the way rather than be mown down.

I've no such compunction with our national media. It continues to be an outrage of the highest order that our sources of information—FACTS—can be wholly controlled by an increasingly powerful corporatocracy with everything but Americans' interests at heart.

For reasons that I still cannot thoroughly refine in my mind, it serves our media best to elect Senator Obama to the presidency. For this, it will pervert and scorn any and every 'fact' that comes its way. The latest incarnation of this is the glow that surrounds Colin Powell. To listen to the media, he is the most respected voice in America, the voice of reason, the final say.

So let's go back a lot of years. I liked him. He seemed fine, upstanding, honest, honorable. That was until he joined the Bush team and then Colin 'Macbeth' Powell went over to the dark side. And in the worst way possible. He used the esteem of the military and his laudatory service in it to dupe the countries of the world. If smarmy Cheney had made that same presentation at a plenary session of the UN, postulating the lethality of Iraq's intentions, there might have been some hesitancy to sign on. But Powell is a soldier, endowed with all the dignity, honor, and respect of his military career and years. When C.L. Powell speaks, people listen.

And with his help, the Iraq slaughter was born. He betrayed the troops who would die for years to come by using the honor of his uniform and all that entails. I find that insupportable.

Disgraceful too, is the betrayal of his oath. It is incumbent on every officer to desist from obeying an unlawful order. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) says,

'An order which is unlawful not only does not need to be obeyed, but obeying such an order can result in criminal prosecution of the one who obeys it. Military courts have long held that military members are accountable for their actions even while following orders -- if the order was illegal.'

The last I heard, the order to lie is illegal. He knew what he was doing when he lied straight into the eyes and ears of the world, watching and trusting what he would say.

And this is the man who has now endorsed Obama, the man whose endorsement is the final jewel in the crowning of the media candidate, the man who holds all sway over our voting choice because he and his honorable career are unimpeachable.

Nice invention, media. I marvel that you think you may rewrite a history that is still ongoing.

Our kids are still dying in Iraq and Powell's words helped put them there.

Rewriting history only works if we let it.