The Arrogant Stupidity of Dick Cheney
Congressional demands for an investigation grew on Monday over new disclosures that a secret CIA program to capture or kill al-Qaida leaders was concealed from Congress for eight years, perhaps at the behest of former Vice President Dick Cheney.I'll bet this: There is no "perhaps" about it. If the program was concealed from Congress, that was done on Cheney's orders. That is illegal. There is an old axiom in politics that time and time again is proven to be true: They don't hang you for what you did. They hang you for attempting to cover it up.
I see little difference between killing a person with a bullet fired from a sniper's rifle or a silenced pistol and killing that person with a Hellfire missile. If anything, shooting is far more preferable. For one thing, if you kill a bad guy with a slug from a 7.62mm rifle, you are also not blowing up his house and killing a bunch of women and children. You can also gain some level of deniability, for if you use a Russian sniper rifle or a Makarov, the shooter could be from anywhere, but only one nation in South Asia uses Hellfire missiles fired from Predator drones.
There are laws about how secret operations are to be conducted and who has oversight. If those laws were broken, the guilty should swing. And for this, he might.
The point here is that, right now, with just a little revealed and a more-than-likely horrible lot more waiting in the shadows like Orson Welles in The Third Man, it seems that Dick Cheney was, at the very least, concocting with the CIA a plan for a secret assassination army. Surely, we'll hear soon about how many terrorists were killed by crack shots, their heads brought to Cheney so he could use them for a delicious freedom stew, keeping the skulls as trophies until he had enough to construct a throne of bone. And, really, and, c'mon, what would be surprising would be to find out that Dick Cheney wasn't constructing a skull chair.
Yet, bizarrely, some Republicans are saying there shouldn't be an investigation into the potential that the CIA was putting together a death squad and that the Vice President told the CIA to lie to Congress about it. It's as if they're throwing up their hands in a comical "what can you do?" gesture, as if they're saying, "Well, that's just Cheney," and a laugh track will play to cover their asses.
While it's screamingly frustrating to keep saying, "But...but...if Clinton..." and just sigh, Republicans set the bar lower than a snail turd as to what's a scandal worth having investigated. Freaking "Travelgate"...There's your scales of Republican justice: travel office employees fired? It's a crisis that demands millions of dollars spent to discover nothing. Potential secret CIA death squads and the involvement of at least the Vice President in lying to Congress in violation of the law? Nah, why bother? Let's move forward, not look back.
Yet the very nature of investigation and criminal proceedings is to look backward, with the knowledge that the past very much impacts the present. If Attorney General Eric Holder does go forward with a probe of Bush-era torture policies and if Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats are serious about looking into the CIA/Cheney story, then we will be making baby steps back to being a nation that actually gives a flying bleep about the laws we pass.
And if we don't look back, if we simply attempt to bury the past in our inexorable march forward with the knowledge that unpunished crimes have been committed, then we, all of us, become co-conspirators. We all carry that burden then, that we know we are a country that has done wrong, but we are unwilling to prove it and punish those who ordered the commission of crimes in our name.
http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/07/logical-tilt-whirl.html
The next time you're forced to listen to Sarah Palin speak, try this: swear. According to bizarre new research on tolerating pain, it should help.
Researchers from the school of psychology at Britain's Keele University have found swearing can make you feel better as it can have a "pain-lessening effect," according to a study published in the journal NeuroReport…
"Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon," says Stephens.
"It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."
How the scientists proved their theory is both novel and ingenious.
Their study involved 64 volunteers who were each asked to put their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice.
They then repeated the experiment using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.
The researchers found the volunteers were able to keep their hands in the ice water for a longer when swearing, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.
Since listening to Sarah Palin speak can make you feel like your head is submerged in ice water, it's worth a shot to let loose on her. Be creative. Just don't call her a table. That doesn't work.
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Shut up, clown-moose: Erratic wingnut Sarah Palin is ready to rehabilitate her comical image! Only 23% of Americans approve of this fame-crazed snowbilly grifter — Hi, Republican base! — so it's time for Palin to "write" an op-ed for the important neo-con pamphlet The Washington Post. It's an unfunny collection of super-short paragraphs about how Obama will destroy America by, uh, let's see, how about that cap-and-trade stuff nobody in this country understands, even though it might help the Earth, as far as the Melting? Thank Allah the entire WaPo copy desk spent a few days on this thing, so it wouldn't read like Sarah's late-night dumbass Twitters. [Washington Post]
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Brave Army man sues Nobama to avoid war
Army Major (?!) Stefan Frederick Cook is supposed to be shipped to Afghanistan this week, to fight in the war there, as Army people are often expected to do in times of war. But instead, he's seeking some kind of restraining order, in federal court, because he does NOT want to go there to that war, because he has some very legitimate concerns about Barack Obama's birth in Hawaii forty-seven years ago. Also, this Army Major's court complaint says he's super scared of committing "war crimes" or something. Should've thought about that before those recruiter dudes at the strip mall talked you into enlisting! [Ledger-Enquirer]
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