This Has To Be the Funniest Thing I Have Seen In A While

The Chasers.. They take on John Yoo and Dick Cheney in a way I have never imagined.. It is so funny... H/T to GottaLaff and Paddy for the shorter version and then I found this one.

It is the funniest thing I have seen. Really over the top and unbelievable.

Matt Taibbi Says What Needs to be Said

If you have never or even if you have read Matt's blog, The Smirking Chimp, today's is especially good.

So many times I have heard the same thing he is saying. You are against Americans, you are for the terrorists. How can you say we tortured them, whatever we did was legal because they weren't actual armies, and weren't fighting for a real country.

Even Cheney and his daughter were saying the same things yesterday all over the TeeVee Machine and have been for the last 3 months.

I have had arguments with my own daughter over this very thing, more than once. She says they had no rights, because they attacked us without provocation. They flew planes into buildings.

I tried to explain to her, it was the same as what the Japanese did in Hawaii at Pearl Harbor, but she didn't see it that way.

For some reason, people don't recognize al Qaeda as human, they only see them as less than animals I suppose. They must because even animals would be treated better than what some of these people were treated.

Here is what Matt had to say in part:

The thing is, we’ve been listening to this stuff for so long that when we hear it, we don’t recoil in confused disbelief anymore — we’re so familiar with these arguments we’ve forgotten that they don’t make any sense. It’s similar to that other Bush-era standard: “We fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.”

I never understood what the hell that was all about. The best I could figure is that the people who were saying this think of the world like a big Stratego game, and they think that if we commit a big force to some place like Iraq, the “other side” will have to leave all his forces over there or something to keep us from moving through Eurasia. This might make sense in a real war, in a war-between-nations war, but it’s completely absurd in a conflict where the “other side” is actually hundreds if not thousands of different/unrelated actors and can successfully attack a country like the U.S. using just a few people at a time. Sending 160,000 troops to Iraq does absolutely nothing to prevent a terrorist group like al-Qaeda from sending over a couple of “exchange students” to dump botulinum toxin into the Akron reservoir.

Okay check that — it does nothing positive. Because it might prevent such attacks in the sense of giving foreign terrorists an array of more enticing targets to shoot at who are closer to home. But in real terms the idea “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is just magical thinking, the kind of notion that feels like it makes sense because your brain is running amok in the unconscious making unsupervised connections between unrelated things, sort of like an OCD patient who believes that if he steps on every third sidewalk crack he won’t get into a car accident. What’s amazing about this sort of propaganda is that once it gets hammered into your head enough, the logic of it begins to feel self-evident, above the need for explanation. Over and over again on the campaign trail last year I had people explain this concept to me by simply repeating themselves. I once asked a guy in South Carolina who had laid that line on me if he thought our forces in Iraq were, simultaneous to their occupation mission, physically blocking the airports in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to keep potential terrorists from coming to the U.S.– if that was why fighting them over there kept “them” from committing terrorist acts here.

“You’re not listening to me,” he said. “The point is that if we weren’t over there, we’d be fighting them here. Now that we’re over there, they fight us there.”

“But why can’t they attack us here anyway?” I asked.

He stared at me for something like thirty seconds. I remember having enough time to check to make sure I had tape left on my recorder. “Because we’re over there,” he said finally.

This is the circular logic of the people on the wrong side of this so called argument. They say we are not fighting an enemy bound by a country, yet we are fighting them "over there so they won't fight us over here". That makes such little sense.

If we could keep them contained in a small area, we could defeat them and be done with it. That would have worked well... the "GWOT" that Shrub wanted to fight could have been done in a few days and we could have brought all our military home and we wouldn't have lost over 5,000 lives and spent ourselves into 1 Trillion dollars of debt.

Matt goes on to say,

It’s the same thing with this torture business. There are a lot of people in this country who genuinely believe that torture opponents are “not upset” about things like 9/11 or the beheading of American hostages. The idea that “no one complains when Americans are murdered” is crazy — of course we “complained,” and of course we’d all like to round up those machete-wielding monsters and shoot them into space — but these people really believe this, they really believe that torture opponents are secretly unimpressed/untroubled by Islamic terrorism, at least as compared to American “enhanced interrogation.” For them to believe that, they must really believe that such people are traitors, nursing a secret agenda (an agenda perhaps unknown even to themselves, their America-hatred being ingrained so deep) against their own country. Which is really an amazing thing for large numbers of Americans to believe about another large group of Americans, when you think about it.

The reason it’s possible is that it’s been drilled into their heads to instinctively perceive opposition to their point of view as support for their enemies. They’ve lost the ability to distinguish between real, honest-to-God enemies (al Qaeda, Kim Jong-Il) and people they simply disagree with or dislike (Boston liberals, the French, gays, the ACLU, etc).

-snip-

They don’t understand that this is not a question of taking different sides in a war; this is two groups of Americans having a disagreement about how best to deal with a foreign enemy both of these groups of Americans despise, fear and revile equally. My group, the anti-torture group, believes that what should make us superior to terrorists is respect for law and due process and civilization, and that when we give in and use these tactics, we forfeit that superiority and actually confer a kind of victory to the al Qaedas of the world, people who should never be allowed any kind of victory in any arena. We furthermore think that the war on terror doesn’t get won with force alone, that it’s a conflict that ultimately has to be won politically, by winning a propaganda battle against these assholes, and we can’t win that battle so easily if people in the Middle East see us openly embrace these tactics.

Whether or not you agree with that is up to you — we could be wrong, after all — but when you respond to these arguments by asserting that people like me didn’t “complain” when Americans were tortured and murdered, what you’re really doing is calling me a traitor. And while it may be more interesting and exciting for you to think like that, in reality it’s just nuts. Seriously. Trust us on this one. So think it over and ask yourself again if it really makes sense to say that torture opponents like me didn’t “complain” when Americans get their heads chopped off. Ask yourself if you really mean that, before you say it. And then get back to me.

He sites several things others have said and argued such as Charles Krauthammer who thinks torture is okay in certain instances... and then lists them. Well, sorry there Charles. I disagree. Torture is WRONG. Always has been, Always will be.

Besides, it is illegal. You know, I am and have been amazed by the Republicans who always LOVE to spout Reagan as their HERO... yet in this they seem to have covered his eyes and turned their back on him and forgotten he even existed.

Reagan signed a treaty, specifically outlawing torture. However, to get around this, Bush just told the OLC and the DOJ to write him some memos making torture look legal. He then preceeded to torture at will. According to Cheney Sunday, Bush knew what was going on, he signed off on it at the least. If he didn't know what was going on then he was at least complicit by signing off on it.

We, have to keep pushing this until something is done. Right now there is testimony in the Senate. I am watching it and hoping we can get something done.

The pictures will be out soon. Children were raped, children were killed and tortured. This has to be punished. We have to make sure people know and get outraged by this and finally maybe they will want something done.

Torturing Democracy

This was something I found that Sully had posted yesterday... thought it was interesting so I read it and thought I would post it. There are 6 video's but they are not long.

At the web site, Torturing Democracy is an interactive timeline you can look at and see what our country has been through in the torture debate, and how we have stood. It also outlines the memos and the stances the Shrub Mis-Administration took on all of it.

Very interesting. I spent a little time there reading and learning. They have 3 videos you can watch that are compelling stuff. This should be on the TeeVee Machine and people should be watching it.

This is why we are so torn, people do not know the real story behind all of this. This is the type of thing people need to see. Here are the video's.. Like I said there are 6, but they are only about 1 minute or so each.

Torturing Democracy Clip # 1



Torturing Democracy Clip # 2



Torturing Democracy Clip # 3



Torturing Democracy Clip # 4 Probably one of the most important.



Torturing Democracy Clip # 5



Torturing Democracy Clip # 6 This is the longest, but very chilling.



This was done by PBS, according to some of the comments.. but I don't know if it was ever played. It should be on all broadcast networks for everyone to see. Over and over again.

If we can see pictures of Pres. Obama shaking hands with Hugo Chavez played 100 times a day, and be told it is a scandal, why is this not being played over and over and being told it is a crime?

I hope you will take the time to visit the web site, Torturing Democracy and look at the information they have there.. it is very informative.

An Officer's Obligation -- Say No to Torture

Matthew Alexander, Air Force officer, and leader of the interrogations team that located Abu Musab al Zarqawi, is very well respected. I have written about him before and he has been on with Keith and Rachel several times.

He is a wonderful, authoritative voice of reason in this discussion about torture. He has written a book called How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

He has a post up at Huffington Post that is a spanking to a certain extent to the other officers and military who let their values and their morals be compromised by the higher ups and by the Bush Mal-Administration.

The first thing he says is this:

As a former active duty military officer, it is troubling to me that other military officers followed unlawful orders to torture or abuse prisoners. Military officers have a sacred responsibility that is embedded in their oath of office: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..."

He goes on to remind us all that in the 8th Amendment to the Constitution of our great Country we are told we must prohibit cruelty to ANY PERSON. Yet, our former president and vice president ordered this done.

As I said this is a good and scathing piece and Matthew (not his real name) does a great job. He also knows of what he speaks. When he wrote his book, he tried to get it approved by the Department of Defense and they redacted it so much he couldn't publish it.

Please take a few minutes to read what he wrote. It is at Huffington Post and is really a good read.

Lawernce O'Donnell Takes on Norah O'Donnell and Liz Cheney

After Norah O'Donnell let Liz Cheney spew for 30 minutes almost unchallenged about Torture and defending her father and the cabal he helped run for the last 8 years, Lawrence O'Donnell and Jonathon Capehart had their turn.

First Lawrence took Norah to task for not letting him in to refute her while she was on the air. Then he and Jonathon Capehart took everything she said apart.

Watch this from Media Matters it is great.

Sometimes Even Fox News Gets It Right

Occasionally Shep Smith will say something that makes me wonder why he is on Fox News.. The only thing I can come up with is they pay him very well for his face and his voice.

Of course that doesn't say much for his ethics if that's how it is.. but he certainly isn't the only "journalist" that is only in it for the money and goes from network to network for that reason alone.

Recently he mocked Glen Beck, and was called on it by Chris Wallace.. not for what he said really, but just because Beck is so high in the ratings... It was over the big show he had to launch his 9-12 project a few weeks back..

But this video is going around now from just a day or two ago, when he was speaking with some others and the Bush Administration Torture policy.. Just watch...