We have our answer.
Frickin’ frackin’ rassin’ frassin’ grumble grumble…
UPDATE: At least the Brewers came back to win that game…
Imagine a man on vacation, riding an ordinary bus on his way to the ordinary airport where and ordinary airplane is waiting to take him back to his ordinary life. Imagine that the bus tops, short of the ordinary airport, and this man is taken off the bus by an ordinary police officer. But the ordinary police officer has an extra-ordinary reason for taking the man: a cash bonus for every “terrorist” he turns in. Imagine the ordinary man riding, in chains, on a quite extraordinary airplane to a prison where he is kept outside, in the freezing cold and asked daily about things no ordinary man knows of. Where are the terrorists? What are their plans? Who do you know and what are you training to do?
Imagine that our ordinary friend is tortured on a regular basis, so that the torture becomes ordinary. Hung from his arms for days at a time. Beaten with his head underwater so that he is forced to inhale water. Electrocuted so that his body went numb. All to find out the extraordinary things our ordinary man does not and could never have known.
Imagine being sent to another prison, where the ordinary rules of justice and decency don’t apply. Imagine the very extraordinary notion of not being allowed to talk to a lawyer, of never being charged with a crime, of being beaten and deprived of sleep and human company on a regular basis. Imagine police forces — three of them — outside the walls of the prison doing the very ordinary investigations and coming to the unanimous conclusion that our ordinary man is, indeed, an ordinary man with no connection to terrorism at all. Imagine our ordinary man kept in that extraordinary prison, where they beat and freeze and mistreat him to find the answers to questions the police already know he cannot answer, for three and one half years after the police have made that determination. Imagine being let go only after the head of the man’s government personally asked for his release. Imagine the ordinary man being asked to sign a confession stating that he is, indeed, a terrorist as he is being escorted home.
When Kafka wrote about a man caught in a court system that would not tell him what he was imprisoned for an did not give him an opportunity to defend himself against the charges, they called him a surrealist and turned his name into an adjective to describe the peculiar horror he wrote about. Today, that horror is an every day part of the official policy of the government of the United States of America. The government, egged on by people who, in their fear or their racism or their innate viciousness, apologized for torture and threw away concepts like innocent until proven guilty and habeas corpus and independent oversight, abused its power. Imagine that.
From our friends and TennViews:
The Sunday “spring break’s over, back to work” edition of the TennViews weekly blog roundup showcasing the best bloggers in Tennessee and what they are talking about…
• 10,000 Monkeys and a Camera: Five Years. 4000 Dead.
• 55-40 Memphis: So the Clintons want Obama to lose to McCain, so Bill is still in power and Hillary has a shot at the presidency in four years.
• Aunt B.: Why, you may ask, are toll roads in Tennessee a stupid idea?
• BlountViews: Our education system is preparing students for jobs that do not even exist.
• Carole Borges: At a time when our economy is grinding to a halt, why outsource this plum contract to a foreign firm?
• The Crone Speaks: Shorter version, protect the companies, screw the people, and let’s not deal with correcting the economic bubble.
• Cup of Joe Powell: My Congressman thinks I’m an idiot.
• Don Williams: How Arthur C. Clarke’s voice of cosmic wonder changed OUR lives.
• The Donkey’s Mouth: The scurrilous claims made by a fellow Republican about the inappropriate use of campaign funds could be a problem for Blackburn further on down the road.
• Enclave: The voters are leaving party leaders in the dust today, in the rodeo dust of a Ft. Worth Coliseum.
• Fletch: The Tao of Dinghy
• KnoxViews: Scenic Vista Act update (Bonus: Spirited Democratic primary strengthens candidates and the party)
• Lean Left: But, aside from setting the Republican double standard in concrete for all to see, Rice’s remarks are kind of amusingly pathetic.
• Left of the Dial: More lottery suspicions
• Left Wing Cracker: After this, it doesn’t matter. She can win in Pennsylvania but it doesn’t matter, her campaign will end unsuccessfully.
• Liberadio: Dana Perino is so uncomfortable answering for President Bush’s crimes against humanity that I almost feel sorry for her.
• Loose TN Canon: Hobbs deleted my comments!
• NewsComa: Newspapers, this is the new world of communication and how news is evolving.
• Pesky Fly: The only credible conclusion I can come to is that Mark Penn, whose lobbying firm is run by one of McCain’s top advisors, is simply teeing up Obama for a general election sweep.
• Progressive Nashville: Insurance companies don’t want you to use the insurance. They just want you to pay for it.
• Resonance: What’s the point in holding elections if the delegates need not honor the results?
• RoaneViews: Congressman Lincoln Davis… Relaxed
• Russ McBee: In Dick Cheney’s mind, the misguided and mendacious decisions made by his “boss” are somehow more of a burden than the loss felt by those 4,000 families.
• Sean Braisted: Now, in an effort to show that Hillary Clinton is the only person left running for President who can answer a phone past 2:30AM, she tries to tie the economy to late-night/early-morning phone calls:
• Sharon Cobb: Another day, another lie from Hillary
• Silence Isn’t Golden: (W)ine in the grocery store won’t drive the big-spending customers away from the retailers.
• Southern Beale: President Bush and his economic advisers assume that people will rush off to WalMart to load up on more cheap Chinese-made crap they don’t need as soon as the check arrives.
• Tennessee Guerilla Women: If the old guard Democrats were to succeed at pushing the woman off the Democratic ticket only to face a Black woman on the Republican ticket, that would mean there really is a goddess and she really is pissed.
• TennViews: New challenger in TN Senate 4th District
• Vibinc: No one is going to heal the divisions, fix the crime, educate our kids, stop the cycle of poverty, or lower teen pregnancy and infant mortality for us Memphis, we have to do it for ourselves.
• Whites Creek Journal: There is a serious problem for both Clinton and McCain in this election cycle… They are both up against an honest person.
• Women’s Health News: Nipple Ring as National Security Threat
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
