Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

Right now, I kinda miss living in a city with snowplows, just like I miss living in a country with a sane government. Although, come to think of it, I've never really lived in a country with a sane government. It's just that they used to be a tad less insane.

Let's lead off with Dick "I've Shot Friends in the Face, Why Not My Country?" Cheney, shooting his mouth off on the torture he happily admits authorizing:

In an interview earlier this week, Vice President Cheney admitted to personally approving the torture of high-profile detainees. In a new interview with the Washington Times, Cheney stridently defended the Bush administration’s torture policies, saying, “I feel very good about what we did. I think it was the right thing to do.” He added emphatically that he would “do exactly the same thing again.”

Most audaciously, Cheney specifically defended the morality of torture, suggesting that it would have been immoral for the United States to not torture:

“In my mind, the foremost obligation we had from a moral or an ethical standpoint was to the oath of office we took when we were sworn in, on January 20 of 2001, to protect and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said. […]

“I think it would have been unethical or immoral for us not to do everything we could in order to protect the nation against further attacks like what happened on 9/11,” Mr. Cheney said.

[snip]

Rather than keeping us safe, former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan warned that Cheney’s torture policies will lead directly to another domestic terrorist attack:

Based on my experience in talking to Al Qaida members, I am persuaded that revenge in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland is coming; that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans; and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

I think, in the neocon lexicon, "keeping us safe" actually means "making sure the pissed-off terrorists attack the country while a Democrat's in charge." It's the only way any of Cheney's bullshit makes sense.

You'll be glad to know, however, that other countries have longer memories, and that if Obama doesn't throw these fuckheads in prison, there'll be a long line of Europeans waiting for our torture-loving ruling class to take a little trip abroad:

At the recent Harper's-NYU forum on how to deal with Bush-era war crimes, TPMtv caught up with Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, who has worked on torture prosecutions of Donald Rumsfeld in Europe. Ratner gives the rundown of future travel options for the Cheneys, Yoos, and Addingtons of the Bush Administration: France, maybe. Germany, harder to say. Italy and Spain? Not so much ...

There's an interview at that link you really should watch. It'll warm your hearts.

Condi Rice is going for the insanity gold this week. Now she's just oh so proud of the liberatin' we did in Iraq:

This morning, CNN aired an exit interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the interview, reporter Zain Verjee asked Rice if she “regretted her role in the Iraq war.” Rice responded by saying that she had no regrets about the war and is “absolutely so proud” of invading Iraq:

QUESTION: Do you regret your role in the Iraq war?

SECRETARY RICE: I absolutely am so proud that we liberated Iraq.

QUESTION: Really?

SECRETARY RICE: Absolutely. And I’m especially, as a political scientist, not as Secretary of State, not as National Security Advisor, but as somebody who knows that structurally it matters that a geostrategically important country like Iraq is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Um... excuse me, Ms. Rice, but I do believe you're totally frothing batshit fucking insane.

Rice’s pride is misplaced. Indeed, leaving aside the fact that the war was predicated on false intelligence, Rice cannot credibly argue as a “political scientist” that invading Iraq was in the interest of the U.S. “geostrategically.”

Indeed, Iraq posed no military threat to the United States in 2003. As Rice herself explained in July of 2001, Saddam Hussein had been unable to reconstitute himself militarily following the 1991 Gulf War. More importantly, the invasion of Iraq destabilized the region and empowered Iran politically and militarily. And contrary to neo-conservative predictions, Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

That sounds like fucking our own interests up the ass without the benefit of lubricant, actually. But, of course, in the Bizarro world our nation's soon-to-be-ex leaders inhabit, this counts as an unqualified success.

Next they'll be wondering why so many Americans say "incompetent" when someone asks them to describe Bush in a word. Oddly enough, while a few delusional fucknuggets described Bush as "honorable" or "honest," not a single one described him as "Christian."

Here's another word for ye: firesale:

On Friday December 19, the Interior Department will hold an auction of pristine Utah wilderness to oil and gas companies for exploration and drilling. Robert Redford joined members of Congress--lead by Congressmen Baird (D-WA), Hinchey (D-NY), and Holt (D-NJ)--and a coalition of environmental, preservation and business groups to stop the auctions.

Friday’s sale would include lands that were recently made available to industry through hastily approved resource management plans that will have serious ramifications for public lands. Affected are 3 million acres of land which include the nation’s greatest density of ancient rock art and other cultural resources, which are also the habitat for many native species.

Redford commented about the Bush administration:

What you keep getting shocked about is how devious and secretive -- and basically, in my mind, morally criminal -- their behavior has been. These lands are not Cheney's and Bush's. The lands are ours. ... They're part of our legacy.

But not part of Bush's apparently, so up on the chopping block they go. I think he believes the Robin Hood myth was something about robbing the public to engorge the rich.

The endless parade of outrageous fuckery won't quite come to an end when Bush gets booted from the White House, but at least this fucktard and his minions won't have their hands directly on the levers of power. Europe will await their opportunity to indict them for war crimes. And a new administration may decide to take a good idea from Switzerland and line some golden parachutes with lead:

Entertaining news from the gnomes of Zurich:

Credit Suisse Group said Thursday it will use up to $5 billion of its own illiquid assets such as mortgage securities to pay senior staff year-end bonuses at its investment bank, a move meant to spread risk more evenly between the bank and its employees.

The Zurich-based bank plans to pool commercial mortgage-backed securities and leveraged loans it can't sell because demand has seized up, then dole out units in the entity to managing directors and directors as part of this year's pay, according to a memo made available by a spokesman.

I love the idea of forcefeeding the financial fuckheads who got us all into this mess a heaping helping of their own toxic sludge. Marie Antoinette once said, "Let them eat cake." I think it's time we retorted with a rousing chorus of "Let them eat shit."

Call it just desserts.