So this is what " freedom" tastes like
Brian Morton
So this is what " freedom" tastes like! The Bush administration sold us on its competence and its can-do spirit and the great taste of freedom, and now we know what it really means--everyone gets a brand-new pony!
Honestly, it's never felt better to be an American. Just last week we found out that the United States is holding prisoners in secret camps in Poland and Romania in order to interrogate al-Qaida suspects outside the reach and purview of the Red Cross or the Geneva Conventions. The Financial Times named the former eastern bloc countries in a Nov. 2 story after The Washington Post, which originally broke the story, refused to name the countries as part of an agreement with the government.
Is it just me, or do I recall Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) being browbeaten into apologizing in June after comparing treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to Soviet-era gulags? And here we are, shipping so-called "ghost detainees" off to secret prisons, away from the prying eyes of human-rights organizations and the Red Cross--it gives you that warm-all-over feeling, like the way the military death squads must have felt while making people "disappear" during Argentina's "Dirty War."
After Durbin's remarks were publicized, Bush deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said to an audience of New York's Conservative Party: "Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? . . . Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."
After Amnesty International called Gitmo "the gulag of our time" in May, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the group's charges were "ridiculous and unsupported by the facts."
Let us note, less than half a year later, that Rove is trying to stay a hair's breadth away from a federal indictment, and McClellan is reduced to weak pleas of credibility after lying from the podium about vice-presidential aide I. Lewis Libby's involvement in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. Every time you turn around, we are confronted with the scene of another petard-hoisting.
The fun's just starting! Not one but two new national polls show George W. Bush with approval ratings approaching Nixonian levels; the ABC-Washington Post poll has his disapproval rating at 60 percent, and Zogby has it at 61 percent.
Of course, the president, when confronted with things like polls, acts the same way he does when he's confronted with things like the workings of his own government: He acts sort of befuddled and claims he's busy doing the people's business. And what business that is, eh? His vice president is in a pitched battle to ensure that the United States can torture prisoners held in those secret prisons of ours.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner of war in Vietnam, pushed for and won a 90-9 vote in the Senate to attach a provision to the pending defense appropriations bill that would prohibit harsh treatment of detainees held at Guantanamo or in U.S. custody anywhere in the world. But Cheney and his aides have tried to write in an exemption for the CIA, and later tried to argue that the language used in Defense Department standards for prisoner treatment should not conform to the language in the Geneva Conventions. Cheney aides claim, according to The Washington Post, that the language is vague and would tie the government's hands in combatting terrorism.
There's hope, though. Bush's Supreme Court pick, Samuel Alito Jr., has a chance t0 erode even more of whatever's left of the president's popularity. Firmly in the hard-right, crony-capitalist tradition of Bush appointees, Alito wrote an opinion in an abortion case saying that a woman can't do what she wants with her body without notifying her husband. On top of that, in a 2002 case, he ruled in favor of a mutual fund company while, at the time, he owned more than $390,000 worth of the company's stock and then later complained about efforts to remove him from the case.
Ethics of Scalia, misogyny of Falwell, politics of Bush--you can't get any better than that. It makes you want to break out the flags right here and now, doesn't it? The United States just keeps getting better and better under Bush. You'll excuse me now--I'd keep going, but I've got to go support the troops by purchasing a magnet for the back of my truck. Four more years!
(c) 2005 Baltimore City Paper
Source: Baltimore City Paper
http://citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=11104