Well….this one is the continuation of the one down below where I started to comment on the article by John McCain in the Washington Post today where he takes the torture apologists that fox news has trotted out to task…calling their assertions that the information that led to Osama bin Laden came from torture lies….you know I’m not a big McCain fan…but it is about time someone on the right stood up and told the truth just once….It was not ole GW that did everything but order the raid that killed him…his waffling and reliance on his “gut” instead of facts let bin Laden live for so long and these are facts…something I know that the repubs really are not acquainted with. So, I will thank McCain for this too little, too late, denunciation of the fox liars…and hope that more on the right discover the truth and their spines…geez…
Look down…I added to the Red Wings post…
Well…just got back from the bike ride and I am sore…but that’s pretty normal for me….I did want to weigh in on the controversy over the pictures of a dead bin Laden and the president’s decision not to release them. I think it’s the right decision and is part of the type of things we need to do to restore our standing in the world; a businesslike way of running the country that takes the emotional bullshit out of decision making….something the Bushies never could figure out with their faith-based administration. I know, I should get over the Bushies at some point in the near future, but when people like Peter King continue to support and give credit to them and make excuses for them, I need to call them out on it. If you hadn’t heard from rep King, he trotted out the old repub talking point that torture got them the information that led to bin Laden’s capture and death….even though everyone in the intelligence community dismissed that years ago and he ignores the fact that torture did more to turn the world against us than anything else in the history of the country. Well…that may be a little hyperbole, but seeing these guys continue to want our names, as citizens of this country, associated with this dark episode still irritates the hell out of me…geez…
Well…wanted to get at this one before the day gets busy…it deals with a fear I have about how the news of bin Laden’s death will be exploited by the fear-based community (repubs and the security-military complex) to place further restrictions on American citizens and continue the undermining of the constitution and our individual rights. Now, I realize that bin Laden had pretty much been marginalized by the manhunt for him, left to communicate by human couriers to the world outside his complex, and that there were still terrorist attacks attributed to his metastitizing organization going on around the world; dangers that may or may not get worse with the killing. But, we already see the security-military complex taking advantage of the purported higher risk by asking for more money to increase police patrols and surveillance on the general public in the oft chance there may be reprisals. When is this going to stop? When are we, as a country going to say “enough” that we can take a little danger if it means that the government won’t be reading our e-mails, tapping our phones, and watching us with cameras everywhere we go. One of the things that the security organizations do not want you to know is the experience of England, where there is a camera on every corner and every move of their citizens is watched…with all of that watching, not one terrorist attack has been prevented by seeing the perpetrators ahead of time…at best, it may be a tool for hindsight but it is not preventative…and isn’t that what the increasing intrusion in our lives was sold as? I think the death of bin Laden should be the trigger for a real dialogue on what kind of society we want to be…a free one or the one of George Orwell from “1984″….we can’t be both….
Well..I know I commented on the death of bin Laden in the earlier post but I have a few more thoughts that I would like to share….some of them kind of personal….in that terrible week in 2001, so many punches hit that when I look back, I wonder how I got through it as well as I did….on the day of the attacks, my beloved mother-in-law died heaping shock upon shock…and only a week later, the job that I had held for 28years was eliminated and I was out of work for the first time in my adult life. If you’ve read this at all, you know it was initially intended as a chronicle of the life of an “overqualified and unemployed” old guy looking for work in the worst economy in the past century….and that as really the focus for the first few months…oh, getting off track here.
When I thought about bin Laden’s death this morning out for coffee, my mind goes to the changes for the worse in our society that came from the overreaction of our government to the threat…the warrantless wiretapping, taking your shoes off at the airport, getting groped by strangers as a price for flying…how do we go back from this restriction on our freedom? After all, we did this to ourselves and, as Ezra Klein said this morning ” we can undo this if we have the will”, that was a paraphrase…not a quote…and I hope we start undoing these as soon as possible…
What you never want to be….