Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

We're going retro today, my darlings. Dana's trying to put together posts with actual substance for ye, and so lunch hour will be spent researching various and sundry. In the meantime, here's some tidbits from the past week to keep the bar talk flowing.

As if we needed any more proof insurance companies are evil, the New York Times has provided us with a look at yet another dubious practice:

The Social Security system is choking on paperwork and spending millions of dollars a year screening dubious applications for disability benefits, according to lawsuits filed by whistle-blowers.

Insurance companies are the source of the problem, the lawsuits say. The insurers are forcing many people who file disability claims with them to also apply to Social Security — even people who clearly do not qualify for the government program.

You know who the insurance companies are sending over to try to claim permanent disability? People with fucking carpal tunnel syndrome. People with temporary injuries. In other words, people who don't qualify under the "disability is total and permanent" category. And these insurance companies, in order to avoid having to pay claims made by the people who bought their fucking insurance, make these people apply again and again and again, no matter how many times Social Security rejects their claims.



Tell me again why we should trust private insurers to look out for the public good? Yeah. I didn't think so.



And speaking of lack of trust, this is even worse:

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

The Vanity Fair article is one long, outrage-inducing slog through the sewage of this Administration, documenting relentlessly the trail directly from the White House to the waterboarding of detainees. But the part that should have you bellowing, my darlings, is this:

Ideas arose from other sources. The first year of Fox TV’s dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. “We saw it on cable,” Beaver recalled. “People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular.” Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. “He gave people lots of ideas.”

Hellooo, reality to Bush Administration hacks: 24 is fucking fiction! It's not true. I know this is very, very hard to understand, but when you torture someone in real life, they'll confess to being an alien hermaphrodite from Venus just to get it to stop. In other words, it gives you the wrong damned information, it violates the Geneva Conventions no matter how your lawyers torture the law to make it say otherwise, it's a war crime, it puts your country's repution right down the shitter, and it's just the wrong fucking thing to do.



But I know you won't listen to me. So here's Jack Bauer himself here to explain it for you:

In a television interview last month, Sutherland said: "You torture someone and they'll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it's true or not, if you put someone in enough pain... Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is."

Do you know how pathetic it is when a fucking actor has to explain to our fucking government officials that the show he stars in is not a documentary, but rather a bunch of shit some writers made up to entertain the goobers?



You know what? The only thing about all this that's made me feel good is the fact that some judges and prosecutors in Europe are eagerly awaiting the day when one of these complete fuckheads who approved torturing detainees vacations in the wrong damned country. Because that pesky Military Commissions Act immunizes them in the good ol' US of A, but it does bugger-all to save them from getting nailed for war crimes elsewhere.



Oh, yes. The day is coming. They will be so fucking screwed. Good. Let's drink to that, my darlings.