Even more Benito Giuliani goodness

TPM is pretty good at finding stuff like this. Now it's been picked up by the NY Daily News.

For those too lazy to click through, here's the Daily News item in full:
This guy really isn't all that bad though. I'm not sure he should be fired from Rudy's campaign. After all, he wasn't necessarily advocating genocide. I mean, there are probably less politically incorrect ways of "getting rid" of them other than, you know, exterminating the whole lot of them.

UPDATE: Reached for comment, Giuliani stated that, as president, he would prefer that his power to engage in genocide be exercised "infrequently".

Benito, cont.

At the risk of beating the dead horse which is Rudy "Benito" Giuliani's political career...

This quote (via TPM) is taken from a recent Benito ad running in Florida:

When you try to take something away from us, like freedom," Rudy proclaims, "the Americans are going to be one in resisting it. So the Islamic terrorists would make a terrible mistake if they confuse our democracy for weakness.

A few points:

1. I don't think the terrorists are bombing our buildings to take our freedom away from us. I think they are trying to kill a lot of us as a means of encouraging us to change our foreign policy.

2. But assuming Rudy is right, and they really are trying to take our freedom from us, they seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. After all, since 9/11 the terrorists have repealed habeas corpus, repealed the Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, parts of the First, and most of the Fifth. The terrorists appear to be well on their way to abolishing the entire bill of rights, thus taking away our freedom. And far from Americans being "one" in resisting this, it certainly appears like hardly anyone is even noticing, and even fewer are complaining, much less "resisting".

3. Oh, wait, did I just write that the terrorists have done those things? On second thought, I think that must be wrong, since the terrorists have no mechanism whatsoever for doing these things specifically or "taking our freedom" generally. Sorry, my bad. It appears that these things have been done by George Bush and Dick Cheney, with Rudy backing them every step of the way. Does that mean that George, Dick and Rudy are "the terrorists"? I'm confused.

4. Oh, hell. Now I'm even more confused. I just went back and read my blog post below, and it tells me that, according to Rudy's own formulation, when he says "freedom" he means ceding control over one's actions to the state. So, if the terrorists are trying to take away our "freedom", does that mean that the terrorists are actually trying to wrest control over our actions from the state and return it to us (i.e., free us from slavery)? That seems really odd, and I think I must have made a mistake somewhere.

5. Because if that's true, then what possible interest would we have in resisting them? Except, of course, those among us who do truly desire to cede control over their actions to the state. Maybe that's what Rudy meant?

Freedom is Slavery

I've not heard of the magazine calling itself The Amercian Conservative before, but for some reason they commissioned an article from Glenn Greenwald. But maybe the magazine means "conservative" in the pre-Bush sense; that is, at least in part, the idea that the government should keep its nose where it does not belong. This happens to be Greenwald's reason for being.

Anyway, their recent issue is dedicated to analyzing Rudy "Benito" Giuliani. As you can see from their cover...













... they don't think too highly of him.

Greenwald, needless to say, shares this opinion. Some excerpts:

As constrained as a mayor’s power typically is, Giuliani never ceased pushing those limits. In a 2001 retrospective on the mayor’s tenure, the New York Times concluded, “the suppression of dissent or of anything that irked the mayor, became a familiar theme.” Giuliani’s idiosyncratic—one could say Orwellian—understanding of “freedom,” expressed during a 1994 speech, reveals just how literally authoritarian his worldview is:

What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

This, you will note, has that Rove-ian flavor of taking reality and then: not skewing it, not spinning it somewhat one way or the other, but turning it exactly, 180 degrees on its head. Like when the public got overwhelmingly up in arms about the Iraq war, and elected war-opposing democrats in landslides, and the Preznit's response was... to escalate the war. Yes, as we all learned back in grade school, freedom is the willingness to cede a great deal of discretion about what you do. In fact, we are the freest when we cede all discretion about what we do. Cede it to whom? you might ask. To Rudy, of course.

Next:

Almost uniformly, Giuliani’s presidential campaign has been measured and highly disciplined, but he has had momentary lapses that expose the authoritarian impulses that New Yorkers know so well. In the midst of the September controversy over the MoveOn.org ad criticizing Gen. David Petraeus, Giuliani opined that the antiwar group “passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass.”

As you may remember, this political organization took out an ad. In a newspaper. And expressed an opinion that not everyone agreed with. This, citizens, is a line that we should not allow political organizations to pass.

Next:

In April, Cato Institute’s president, Ed Crane, asked several candidates if they believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, and detain them with no review of any kind. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reported Giuliani’s response: “The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.”

I suppose that's better than using it frequently. I mean, I smoke cigarettes infrequently. Infrequently, I will drink so much vodka that I drop my glass on the tile floor and puke in the sink. On the other hand, Ted Bundy infrequently picked up young girls, raped them, and deposited their mangled bodies in roadside ditches. You know, just once every few weeks.

If you're curious about life as a U.S. citizen under President Rudy Giuliani, let me paint you a paint you a picture: imagine a boot stomping on a human face, forever.

... same as the old boss.

Scott Harper (who at one time was a partner in the same law firm as good ol' Mike Mukasey):

So let’s get this right. The Department of Justice has no available resources to deal with contractor crimes. It doesn’t even have a warm body to send before a Congressional probe of the matter to state its position. But it is deploying all its available assets to justify criminal conduct, to secure immunity for persons who unapologetically broke the law based on the criminal solicitations of government officers, to cover up official criminality related to the torture and abuse of persons under detention, and to obstruct Congressional investigations into other potentially criminal acts in which it was involved. A person observing this from some detached point in space might well conclude that the function of the Department of Justice under President Bush is not to enforce the law. It is to commit and promote criminal conduct. At this point, it’s clear that breaking the law is the Justice Department’s number one, two and three priority. And law enforcement? That’s disappeared from the scene.

Worth reading the whole thing.

Apogee

Football watching in my household has reached its highest point. I don't mean the games or the teams (that would be the 2006 Rose Bowl, of course), I mean the watching itself.

Sure, when you combine a big plasma teevee with a high definition NFL game streamed via Verizon FIOS Digital Broadband Super-Deluxe IPHDTVNET, you've got a great football watching experience. But add a DVR and adept use of the remote control, and you can refine the thing to an essence of pure teevee football gold.

Here's what you do:

1. Set the game to record.

2. Go do some other stuff, get a bite to eat, head to home depot, surf some political commentary (or porn, whatever), just kill time in whatever way suits you.

3. About an hour and a half after kickoff, sit down on the couch and hit play.

4. Fast forward through 10 minutes worth of useless intro commentary (or, in the case of a Sunday night NBC game or a Monday night ESPN game, 20 minutes worth of useless intro commentary, plus a stupid montage, plus a crappy cover of a crappy pop song, reworked with crappy self referential football-teevee-watching lyrics, performed by a crappy washed up pseudo-celeb).

5. Watch the opening kickoff, with index finger smartly placed on the "30 second skip" button.

6. Immediately after the runback of the kickoff, and each play thereafter throughout the game, press down on the "30 second skip" button and you will instantly be transported through a lot of extraneous crap, and the next thing you will see is the offense trotting up to the line of scrimmage to run the next play.

You can watch an entire NFL game in about 45 minutes using this method. Of course, games you are really interested in, you won't want to hit the skip button after every play. Sometimes the announcers have some decent commentary, and you'll want to watch the slow motion replays of the exciting plays. Also, if the game is nearing the end of a half, the team on offense may go into hurry up, in which case you can either judiciously use the skip button only after plays that stop the clock (out of bounds plays, incomplete passes, time outs, penalties, etc), or you can first hit the 10 second replay button and then immediately hit the 30 second skip button, which usually works out exactly right during a hurry up offense.

Missing all the commercials is great. Even better is missing all the dead time on the field during replay challenges, injuries, referee conferences, extra point tries, and -- the best thing of all to miss -- the times when the announcers throw it down to the old, used up, man-voiced sideline chick for some balky, ill-informed, often uncomfortable non-commentary.

But also you get to skip one of the things that infuriates to no end a person with an HD television watching a high definition NFL stream via their Verizon FIOS Digital Broadband Super-Deluxe IPHDTVNET: the halftime highlights which, though they are being transmitted in ultra-clear, 16x9 high definition to a state-of-the-art television monitor, are, for some idiotic reason, intentionally being pixilated, over-saturated, blurred, and/or overlaid with some obnoxious dot pattern so that they look worse than if you were watching them on a 13 inch black and white with rabbit ears. WHY? The first several times I witnessed this phenomenon this season, I thought my head would asplode. My inarticulate screams startled the neighbors.

But now I just skip past the entire halftime show, sometimes mouthing a near-inaudible "Fuck you Chris Berman, and your crappy over-saturated pixilated blurry highlights." And back to the second half of the game, all 20 minutes of it.

Weirdness

Google News is great, but since it is run entirely by software and has no human editors, you sometimes see things like this. Which just don't make a lot of sense, seemingly.

Free Mike Vick

Ok, not exactly. But I've had it up to here with hearing people get all high and mighty about the evil phenomenon that is Michael Vick. He's not a real person anymore, he's a cause to latch onto and condemn.

Mike Vick did something socially unacceptable. It is also legally unacceptable, apparently. When I first heard Michael Vick was running a dog-fighting operation, I thought, oh hell, this guy is going to become a pariah. I wasn't even sure there were real laws against dog-fighting. I mean, of course there are laws prohibiting just about every damn thing, but I had no idea that it was a serious felony punishable by life in prison. (yeah sure, each instance is only punishable by a few years, but if you're involved in dog-fighting, then every time you commit each single act, that's another few years, and they can all be imposed consecutively, thus life for a handful of offenses.)

And it's not just state laws. It's federal and state, and you can be charged under both for the same offense, apparently. (thus, if you ever do get out of federal prison, you then go to state prison to serve out the rest of your life.)

And did you know... Michael Vick not only did the dog-fighting thing, he also tested positive for marijuana! And, get this, he tried to take a fake water bottle through airport security! Lock this fucking guy up forever and throw away the goddamn key.

In this civilized world of ours, we kill all kinds of animals for all kinds of reasons. But we've decided, in our civilized way, that Michael Vick's life is less important than the lives of a few dogs. Sure, the things he did can be considered barbaric. Some of the things he (or his cohorts) did are things you wouldn't want your kids to see, and stuff you don't like to visualize or think about in detail.

But surely we can enforce our distaste for these actions in a more reasonable way than completely ruining the man's life. What we have done is lock him in a cage (for the greater part of his life, probably, once he serves time on all the federal and state charges), take away his livelihood, shame his family, impoverish his children, subject him to jailhouse rapes and beatings, and brand him a worthless criminal non-person.

I don't condone what Mike Vick did. I like dogs. I wouldn't want to see two dogs attacking and killing one another. I don't like to think about them being electrocuted or beaten to death. That kind of thing deserves some sort of societal penalty. But I'm goddamned sick and tired of hearing newspaper writers and radio hosts and teevee personalities talk about Mike Vick as if he were Satan on Earth. The schadenfreude is appalling. And believe it or not, a lot of it has that "well that dope-smoking uppity negro finally got what he deserved" kind of flavor. Fuck You! How many veal cutlets did you wolf down today, fatty? That sure is a nice pair of lambskin gloves. Thank goodness they melted the faces off of hundreds of guinea pigs before they developed a cucumber-melon facial mask that won't melt your face off!

Please. Shove your absurd moralizing up your goddamn ass.

Simulated freedom.

ABC News is on the case: "Waterboarding is a harsh interrogation technique that involves strapping down a prisoner, covering his mouth with plastic or cloth and pouring water over his face. The prisoner quickly begins to inhale water, causing the sensation of drowning."

Hey, ABC News, when you "quickly begin[ ] to inhale water", you are drowning, not having a "sensation of drowning". It's only if and when you stop inhaling water that you cease to be drowning.

If you copy a paragraph from another writer's story, and then later "source" the paragraph by admitting that you copied it from that writer, does that writer then only have a "sensation" of having been plagiarized?

... adding, I assume by "pouring water over his face" they mean "pouring water down his throat." This is the kind of phraseology that outs the phraser as a tool. And in this case, a tool of torturing, sadistic madmen. A kind of tool that should, by all rights, be subjected to the same kind of treatment, and then made to write about his "sensations".

Dear Leader speaks

Our Preznit has commented on the latest torture story. ABC News faithfully transcribed the Preznit's comments:

As to the CIA videotapes, President Bush said he didn't know about the tapes or their destruction until last week. "My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said in an interview Tuesday with ABC News. "There's a preliminary inquiry going on and I think you'll find that a lot more data, facts will be coming out," the president said. "That's good. It will be interesting to know what the true facts are."

Let's break this down a bit further. The phrase "My first recollection..." is an obvious trick. There are many other ways Preznit could have said "that was the first time I've ever been told about this." His phrasing clearly suggests that he has been told about it before, and that the person that told him about it may, possibly, come forward in the future and state this as a fact. But the Preznit will then be able to say "Well, it is possible I was told about this, but it was in a context where there were more important things being discussed, and I'm an important person, and I get told a lot of stuff and I hear about important things all the time, and I can't be bothered to remember ever single thing I ever hear. Etc.". This is known in the torture business as "plausible deniability".

"A lot more data, a lot more facts will be coming out." This should be taken as meaning two separate things: (1) we have people that are going to come forward with some "facts", (i.e., lies, and a bunch of red herring type bullshit) which will make you, dear citizen, think about this whole situation in a different way, at least if you are a person who buys into that sort of horseshit, and (2) a lot more "facts" will be coming out that make me look like a sadistic tyrant, who ordered people to be tortured, and then ordered more people to cover up the torture, but these kinds of "facts" can easily be explained away if you'll just pay more attention to the other "facts" I've alluded to in part (1).

"It will be interesting to know what the true facts are." For those of you playing along at home, this means: "This has kind of taken us by surprise, because we thought when we destroyed the evidence, that would be the end of the trail here, but now that this stuff has come out, well, we have this whole story we're making up to explain it, but we're not quite finished, we don't have the entire mess of bullshit worked out just yet, but when we do, you can rest assured that we'll "leak" it to the right people, and it will get its day in court, and though I'm not entirely sure exactly what the ending is yet, I think it will be just plausible enough to convince people not to impeach me or drive my approval ratings significantly below the atrocious level they are already at. In other words, it will convince me, as a religious zealot meathead, that I'm doing all of this for the good of mankind, at the direction of Providence, and all of the like-minded fools out there will likewise be convinced, as well as the complicit meathead lying sacks of shit sadists in the "opposition" party who have been with me all along on this kind of stuff, and therefore enough people, and the right people, will support me on this, or a least keep their mouths shut, in order to enable me to continue right along, doing the Lord's work, and keeping America safe. From those scary evil brown people."

You knew this was coming, right?

An astute reader of this blog may have caught onto a shift in the rhetoric here. When I started this blog a little more than a year ago, I frequently harangued against the lawless and corrupt Bush administration's policies. While this is obviously still the case (what sane person could do otherwise?), more recently I've shifted to criticizing "our government" for the various outrages being perpetrated rather than singling out Bush and his henchmen.

Why? Because the publicly available evidence increasingly shows that our country's "opposition party" is equally to blame.

Pretty words are great. I enjoy them. I do, however, enjoy them somewhat less when they are used to perpetrate a fraud on the audience.

Throughout the course of human history, dictators, tyrants, criminals, and other evildoers have stood before their constituencies and uttered pretty words while they and their ilk were acting -- just out of public view -- in the most heinous and destructive fashion. This is axiomatic.

But we don't expect that here, do we? Not, anyway, from our precious protectors of freedom and goodness, those ostensibly opposed to the malevolent Bushies. Our president has been unwavering in stating publicly that "America doesn't torture." All the while, torturing. Our opposition party steadfastly proclaims that it "will not stand for torture." All the while, knowing about the ongoing torture, failing to object, allowing it, making it possible (i.e., standing for it).

Forgive me if I fail to see any meaningful distinction here.

The plain fact of the matter is that our government tortures those people it deems to be our enemies. Our leaders know this, and support it. All of them.

Should this be so? Is it right? Is it a good idea? I, for one, can't say with 100% certainty. My conscience tells me No. But my conscience has been wrong before. But what I can say with certainty is that it is inarguably wrong and bad for a country's government to lie to its citizens about a matter of such importance.

Keep our Torturers Safe

I realize that most people don't care whether our government tortures people, unless the people being tortured happen to be within your monkeysphere.

But if you happen to be one of those who do care, then this story might interest you. Therein you will find detailed how the CIA videotaped its agents torturing "al qaeda operatives" it had "detained", and how when it started to look like, hey, someone might eventually see this and, you know, like register some kind of objection to it, they then dropped it down the memory hole.

In a letter to CIA employees, CIA Director Michael Hayden (aka "Minister of Love") stated that the tapes were destroyed, not to avoid any kind of legal repercussions or negative publicity, but "to protect the safety of undercover officers".

Forgive me. This is transparent bullshit, and insults the intelligence of all primates, much less those who: (a) can read, and (b) have knowledge of our government's scrupulous past practices with regard to protecting the identities of its covert agents.

But allow me to state for the record why this is an utter absurdity:

(1) Obviously these tapes could have been modified so as to hide the identity of the agents (i.e., the torturers) involved while still preserving other relevant information;

(2) Obviously the CIA has procedures well designed to keep secret documents secret;

(3) Obviously the CIA is not in the practice of destroying all documents in its possession which, if leaked, would divulge the identity of its agents;

(4) Somewhat less obviously (and I know it is considered heresy to question this), but is it really credible to simply assume that "al qaeda operatives" have sufficient counter-intel capabilities to get ahold of these tapes, identify the agents, find them, and carry out an act of revenge against them? Are you fucking serious?; and

(5) As has been vociferously asserted over and over again by the Preznit himself and all of his minions, "al qaeda operatives" want to kill us all, every single one of us, and they will do so if at all possible. This being unquestionably true (after all, the President said it!), why then if all Americans are targets, would we think these particular people (i.e., the torturers) would be singled out for some kind of special, targeted extra-bad-death-jihad? Simply incredible.

These tapes were destroyed to cover up criminality on the part of our government. Nothing more, nothing less. Our government kidnaps people, who may or may not have done anything wrong, locks them in a dungeon, tortures them, and then destroys any evidence of its wrongdoing. We are safer because of this.

Sociopath

Ok, I admit maybe I have some kind of sick fascination with this story. It is just so surreal.

[And also, maybe I'm just the kind of person that is intrigued by superlatives. Things that pique my interest are often the extremes one finds in this world. Notice my post down below on the Patriots (best football team ever (maybe)). My possibly unhealthy degree of interest in the doings of Judge Gonzales (worst Attorney General in history) and his boss, Preznit George W. Bush (most awful democratically elected world leader in my lifetime). Etc.]

And now we have the most despicable human being. Or at least a strong candidate.

Witness one Lori Drew, who did the following:

1. In response to her daughter Sarah, age 13, getting into a juvenile tiff with her BFF Megan (also age 13) from down the street, Lori (age 48) created a fake myspace identity which purported to be a "good-looking" male (age 15) named "Josh".

2. Lori then went online as "Josh" and befriended Megan, later forming a romantic online relationship with her, all ostensibly for the purpose of "monitoring" what Megan (the friend) was saying about Sarah (the daughter).

3. As the tiff between Megan and Sarah escalated in real life (or "meatspace" as the myspace crowd apparently calls it), Lori used her alter ego Josh to draw Sarah closer, and then, deciding that Sarah needed "a taste of her own medicine", savagely broke off the relationship, telling Sarah that "the world would be better off without you", in response to which Sarah, a person known to be suffering from clinical depression, promptly went upstairs to her bedroom and hung herself.

4. The End.

5. Or not. When, after Lori's machinations in this sordid drama came to light (as these things will do), the close-knit community understandably turned against Lori. The authorities got involved. Investigations were pursued. Newspaper articles were written. This, after Lori had, in the intervening several months, pretended concern and grief toward Megan's family over their daughter's suicide, going to great lengths to hide her role in same.

6. But and so then in response to the tight-knit community turning against her, Lori then determined that the best course of action would be... wait for it... to create yet another teenage online identity (Kirsten, exact age undetermined), who was ostensibly a schoolmate of Sarah and Megan, and who was in possession of certain heretofore unknown "facts" about the situation that she was constrained to "report" to the world via her blog entitled... wait for it... "Megan Had It Coming."

7. Though the provenance of the blog in question is somewhat in doubt (see the second update to my post below), it appears to my somewhat trained internet discernment skills, to actually have been published by the actual Lori Drew.

8. In addition to the, shall we say, provocative title, the blog contains many interesting nuggets. In the first of three posts to the blog (which is peppered with pseudo-teen slang such as "whatev" and "pwnd") , "Kirsten" makes the following claims:

(a) she was "friends" with Megan,
(b) Megan was not "this innocent girl" that everyone made her out to be,
(c) Megan was a "fat" "psycho" "drama queen" who often "freaked out" over nothing,
(d) Megan was also [insert numerous other shallow character assassinations here],
(e) Megan was a total "bitch", who was "soooooo shallow" and "talked shit" about everyone, to the point where she "had it coming with all the shit she did", and
(f) "I don't think Lori Drew is so evil as everyone says."

9. In the second of the three posts, "Kirsten" posts various comments from supporters (probably other sock-puppets), which continue the character assassination of the dead 13 year old in the most explicitly vile and abusive terms, annotating the comments approvingly with stuff like "OMG INTERNETS! lolololololol" and "Here's another smart guy who has a good grasp on what we're saying. Way to pwn them!" and "Smart girl you rock!".

10. In the third of the three, "Kirsten" informs us: "It's time I dropped the charade. Yes, I made this blog. Yes, I'm Lori Drew." This is followed by a long and detailed recounting of the whole nefarious plot, into which are interspersed meandering, self-serving justifications galore, allegations of media conspiracies, astounding vilifications of Megan, ludicrous pretensions to her own victimhood, and angry diatribes against Megan's parents and the people who "defamed" Lori by divulging her role to Megan's parents.

11. Lori then, in response to the predictably venomous (and voluminous) commentary, posted dozens of pathetic and insane comments which were, apparently, meant to defend herself against the "irrational" and "unbalanced" mob who were, at that very moment, posting hundreds upon hundreds of comments describing in explicit and disturbing detail the various ways in which they hoped her life would end (or be prolonged, on a basis so gruesome and disgusting that sweet death would become her fondest, most heartfelt desire). (note: it is truly shocking the depths to which pure, uncensored hatred can drive the human imagination.) (further note: I am not an easily shocked person, but sheeeeyaat. some of the things I read in that comment thread are gonna haunt me.)

Smoking Gun coverage is here.

The blog purportedly* published by Lori Drew is here. (don't count on it being there much longer though.)

*as I noted below, if Lori Drew didn't write this blog, then she is merely a terribly misguided, supremely self-centered person, a bad parent, and someone who desperately needs to rethink her life. If, on the other hand, she did write this blog, then I think her commenters -- even the most shocking and outrageous of them -- may indeed be right on the money.

Just when you think you've seen everything...

In my 30+ years on this earth, this blog is quite possibly the most outrageous thing I've ever seen.

I won't go into detail about my fantasy resolution to this matter, but suffice to say it does not end well for Ms. Drew. There is almost nothing too horrible that could happen to this woman that I wouldn't cheer for.

via Liberal Lean. (read my comment to see a brief outline of my further thoughts.) (Update: Barry apparently "moderated" my comment out of existence. oh well.)

UPDATE: I just can't stop watching the train wreck. There are 1200 comments to the latest post, and 97% of them are seething hatred against this despicable person. But the train wreck part is that the other 3% are from her posting under the name "meganhaditcoming" attempting to justify herself against the virulent (and supremely well-deserved) wave of utter loathing.

UPDATE II: Some commenters in the thread claim that the blog is a hoax. I suppose it could be, but if so it is an extremely sophisticated hoax -- and still an engrossing train wreck.

But I guess I should be clear: if this blog is a hoax, then this woman does not deserve the level of scorn being heaped on her. I mean, causing the girl's suicide in the first place was bad; what she did was immature and incredibly irresponsible, and shows very bad judgment. But you could chalk it up to a lapse, a mistake, and if she sincerely apologized and sought to make up for it then she might deserve the benefit of the doubt. But if she is actually responsible for this blog, then all bets are off and she most certainly deserves all the vileness and villainy found in those comments (and some of them, all I can say is wow. Just, wow).