Greeting Rummy

Is this really so wrong?

I don't think so.

Accountability...Plain & Simple

David S Broder has written a piece for the Washington Post stating that President Obama should "stick to his guns" and not prosecute those guilty of instituting and instigating torture.

Bush. Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rice. Those guilty ones.

Really? Let them off the hook when they took this country and dragged it through the mud, all the while touting our moral superiority, and saying that they are our protectors from the mighty Axis of Evil? Just say, You shouldn't have done that, George, Dick, Don and Condi, and shake an index finger at them? Really?

I wonder how those men who were tortured all day every day would feel about that? Their friends and families? Their countries? All those men that were accused of something but never charged, never tried, never convicted, but were nonetheless subjugated to waterboarding and humiliation at the hands of the Good Old US of A.

We cannot, in good conscience, walk the world with our head held high while we're treating people as less than human. Would we, as a country, stand for that, for even a nanosecond, if that same torture and degradation were being inflicted on our citizens in some prison camp on the far side of the globe? Of course we wouldn't, so we shouldn't have been doing it ourselves.

Broder makes the argument that it will be the "underlings" at the White House, CIA, and the Justice Department, that will bear the brunt of prosecution for the torture. It won't be Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, as it should be. But then he makes the most amazing statement of all. He says, and I quote, "if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me."

Yeah. That'll happen.

If Bush had been a man of honor, even a man with one iota of honor, we wouldn't have tortured one single person in the first place.

So, I disagree with Broder. I say go after those who instigated and ordered torture, not the ones who simply followed orders from their superiors, but from the so-called superiors themselves. Let's show the world, and our own country, that this kind of administration is not who we are, what we are, nor what we will be, it's is merely the remnants of one of the darkest, dirtiest ages in US history.

You can read David Broder's piece HERE

More Asshattery Of The Mouth

We've all heard the news about the tragic earthquake, and aftershocks, in Italy. And those of us in the US remember with great fondness the tragic mishandling of the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina, so it came as now surprise to me to read this quote from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaking about the 17,000 Italians left homeless by Monday’s earthquake:

“They have medicaments. They have hot food. They have shelter for the night. Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary. But they should see it like a weekend of camping."

So, cruising the web this morning I came across other Let-Them-Eat-Cake statements form the past, or, as i like to call them, Asshattery of the Mouth. Let's begin:

Barbara Bush suggesting that Hurricane Katrina refugees would enjoy living in the Houston Astrodome: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this—this [chuckles] is working very well for them.”

Tom DeLay to a group of evacuees after Hurricane Katrina: “Now, tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?”

Sharon Stone after the Chinese earthquake: "Then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice, that the bad things happen to you?"

Charles Locke, CEO of the aerospace company Morton-Thiokol, the maker of the faulty rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded in midair in 1986: "This shuttle thing will cost us ten cents a share this year."

Donald Rumsfeld on the looting that followed the American invasion of Iraq: “Stuff happens.”