Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part II

Things that make me wish for five minutes of terrible God-like smiting powers…

Fresh from his bravura performance as that Little Round-Headed Kid

in the Akron Carousel Dinner Theater’s staging of that least well-known of all Peanuts’ specials -- “It’s not torture when we do it, Charlie Brown” – Little Mikey Hayden started off by explaining to Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday" that admitting we had waterboarded prisoners had endangered us.

That even though the fact we had waterboarded prisoners was already well-known -- was, in fact, being used by al-Quaeda as a recruiting tool -- somehow the reiteration and repudiation of this form of torture by President Obama was so beyond the pale that it makes us all orders of magnitude less safe.

Hayden asks how we'll all like it when the CIA has to clear its techniques with “the ACLU” and the “NYT Editorial Board”. Huh! Huh!

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: we don’t torture; we use “use techniques”.

Hayden really is the giggly, bloodless bureaucrat/butcher from Central Casting; alternately boasting that he himself banned that awful, awful technique of waterboarding...and then turning right around and allowed as how waterboarding wasn’t really torture, and may or may not even “shock conscience”, because that all "depended on the circumstances".

Of course, being that this was Fox News, the question that never got asked was this:

What has turning America into a torture nation done to our soul, our democracy and the foundational moral authority upon which our global leadership depends?

Because, being Fox News, any questions of “morality” that don’t serve to advance the Republican agenda simply never come up.

But what really made me wish a mighty wish for temporary smiting powers, was one minute later, when Hayden was asked about Hugo Chavez and answered thusly and without a hint of irony:

"I’d watch for behavior, not rhetoric. The behavior of Chavez over the last few years has been downright reprehensible."

Really? Why? What makes Chavez’s behavior “downright reprehensible”?

Did he perhaps…torture people? Or did he merely “technique” them?

And doesn’t this kooky theory that countries actually pay attention to the behavior of other countries and should respond to each other according to behavior and not just rhetoric completely negate everything you just said about how the United State should expect the rest of the world to react to the fact that the Bush Administration tortured people -- in one case, waterboarding a prisoner 183 times in one month -- and then lied about it?

Later, Wallace showed some heavily edited and out-of-context video of President Obama’s world tour and asked the pouty, boo-boo-faced Lindsay Graham how he felt about Barack Obama going around the world “apologizing for America”.

You know, over here in the Grown-up World, telling the people that you shit on that you regret it and you’re not going to do that any more isn’t exactly disclosing state secrets, and isn’t weak. In fact, manning up, admitting one’s errors, and apologizing when you are in the wrong is one of the most basic lessons that responsible parents teach their children.

Except, apparently, for Republican children who are taught might makes right, and that only pussies own up to their mistakes.

Then Wallace excitedly read today's Party Line:

Next up, the “grass roots tea party” has “some wondering” if this is “the start of a movement”

Followed by several commercials for penis creams and adult diapers, and then back to Fox News’ Weekend-Long AstroTurf Earl Gray Circle Jerk.

Back on “This Week” it seemed that George Will pecksniffishly explaining to the rest of the Panel that “[Torture] comes from a theory of government called the unitary theory of executive power” was the tipping point.

After that, everybody took a stick to the bow-tied piñata:

Donaldson: Where in the Constitution is this found, George?

Will: I’m just saying here are intelligent people who believe….

Cokie Roberts: First amendment? The Congress?

Will: It is not a theory I agree with, or you agree with, but there are intelligent people…

Donaldson: “If the president does it is not illegal.” Thank you Richard Nixon.

Will: Yes but these are intelligent people…

Yes, George, they are intelligent people, but "intelligent" is not a proxy for "decent" (this has always been a massive blind spot for Will.)

They are intelligent, despicably evil people who sat behind their little desks and eagerly combed through every semi-colon and footnote of every legal decision since Hammurabi desperately trying to cobble together a theory of government where a Supreme Leader rules by fiat and all thing -- torture, warrentless wiretapping, secret prisons, suspension of habeas corpus, outing secret agents – are permitted to his regime.

Frantically trying to origami the United States Constitution into a charter for exactly the kind of monarchy that the Constitution was created to overthrow.

Which is, of course, contemptible.

But what really elevates this into the realm of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol is that not a single person on the panel thought to mention that every inch of this plot to gut the Constitution from crotch to crown was engineered by the very same Party that raises millions of dollars in political contributions every year by prodding the Pig People into going reliably ballistic over those Evil Activist Judges: those black-robed Liberal turncoats who keep insisting that cops can’t taser suspects to death for looking at them funny or kick down your door for no fucking reason.

That the people who tried to ram the theory that George W. Bush was the de facto King of America with virtually unchecked and unlimited power down our throats were the very same people who – ten, short years ago – were screaming IMPEACH! every time another rumor about Bill Clinton getting a hummer on the side appeared in "The American Spectator".

What a pity we don't have a national media that notices little discrepancies like these anymore.

Well, OK, to be fair there is at least one American journalist that sees truth unvarnished with eyes unclouded. (h/t watertiger)

"Following the Republican Party of late has been a movingly depressing experience, sort of like watching Old Yeller die — if Old Yeller were a worm-infested feral bitch who spent the past eight years biting children at bus stops and shitting in neighborhood swimming pools."

-- Matt Tiabbi of "Rolling Stone"