Might as well pre-empt the hatas by posting this first. The Home Run King got indicted on perjury and obstruction of justice charges.
Discuss how this bad, bad man has destroyed all that is good and innocent and Cracker Jacks in the world. Extra credit: The disappearance of the honeybees … climate change or Barry Bonds?
Ken Timmerman writes:
A Socialist member of the European Parliament (EP) accused the United States on Wednesday of illegally detaining terrorist suspects in a former nuclear weapons site in Ukraine, Newsmax has learned from sources at the European Parliament.
Or as real newspapers put it — in this case the International Herald Tribune:
“The plane was consistently used by the CIA,” Fava told a press conference.
As for the rest, do you know the song that goes “What’s really bad about extraordinary rendition, secret interrogation and detention centers is that everyone knows about them now” ? It’s a lot like that. Bonus bit:
Some of the CIA fronts exposed by Fava were typical inside jokes. Among these were Premier Executive Transport Service (PETS), Rapid Air Trans (RAT), and Devon Holding and Leasing (DHL). […] By exposing these CIA proprietaries, Fava did tremendous damage to the ability of the United States to conduct covert operations, former intelligence operatives told me. “These [proprietaries] cost us a fortune to set up. And now it’s going to cost us a fortune to replace them,” one former CIA officer told me.
The CIA uses inside jokes to name its proprietaries (hello SAT!) and spends a fortune in the process? Does this mean that there was no point in applying for a job at the North American Merchant Bankers’ Literary Association? Guess we’re stuck in our stupid job at the Society for Advanced Disability and Low-fat Yoghurt of New Orleans! after all.
Mild torture? No biggie. Torture opponents? Totally insufferable.
Terrifying stuff indeed.
UPDATE: Sebastian at Obsidian Wings offers this typically weak response:
Patterico, you work with the government. You know for a fact that it gets things wrong all the time. Even when we go through the huge and complicated process of a trial, it gets things wrong. And we aren’t talking anything like a trial here. In reality, we are talking about torturing *suspects*. That is not a power to be given to the government.
Your hypothetical doesn’t speak to the question of what the policy of our government ought to be, because no important part of the hypothetical actually has anything to do with the empirical reality of governmental torture. You pride yourself at not being distracted by stated intentions which have bad consequences in areas like rent control, housing policy, and education policy. Don’t let Bush wave the national security flag and make you forget everything you know about how the government actually operates.
Dude, stop engaging Patterico like he’s a sane human being. He wants to give the state the power to torture people. He’s a very, very demented individual.
This is basically what Patterico’s argument boils down to: Say your mother was dying of a disease and the last tube of the antibiotic needed to save her was held by a crazy scientist who was refusing to sell it to you at any price. The only way you can save your mother is by gouging out one of his eyes and skull-fucking him in front of his entire family. Will that forced skull-fucking have been worth it?
Chest-thumping moralist LIEberals who whine about the evils of eye-gouging and skull-fucking clearly hate their mothers. Neener, neener, neener.
[Gavin adds: Um, this scenario seems quite unlikely.]
[Bradrocket replies: That’s sorta the idea. Pattycakes has made up an extreme hypothetical in order to justify the government’s waterboarding policy.]
[Gavin adds: I want to note, just in case anyone hasn’t followed these sagas, that Patterico is a Los Angeles County prosecutor. This prosecutor is in favor of confessions obtained under torture. My WTFuckulator went on the blink quite awhile ago, but it’s nagging like a phantom limb.]
UPDATE 2: This is better:
While imprisoning people, we go through one of the more complex social structures around. Through it all, we still make mistakes, but the process can be very exhaustive. A lack of absolute perfection is not the crux of the argument. The problem is that the kind of high pressure situation that is always used to justify torture (ticking bomb, imminent threat, near-term plot) is definitionally NOT conducive to exhaustively determining guilt before the torture begins. Since, as you say, we make mistakes about innocence EVEN AFTER THE EXHAUSTIVE CRIMINAL PROCESS, it is a certainty that torture will be employed against innocents at a much greater rate than is found in imprisoning people.
Nope, you’re wrong, dude. Torture only gets used against the super-duper-mega-evil bad guys who will let a nuclear bomb go off RIGHT NOW IN YOUR HOUSE UNLESS YOU TORTURE THEM!!!!! Just like on 24!!!!
God, I need a drink.
Marc Lynch writes:
I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday… about where Iraq was heading: towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.
I was talking to a friend about this the other day. He understandably laughed at me because I said that the best-case scenario for Iraq is that it turns into Somalia. In other words, an anarchistic mess of warlords who secure their might and wealth through hired militias.
Now, that’s a terrible, terrible thing. But compared to just about every other option there is (becoming an American colonial state, getting a Bush-appointed strong man to run it, being taken over by Iran) it’s really not too too bad.
Have I mentioned that our government should really be doing more to help Iraqis get the hell out of Iraq? No? Well, it should. (COUGH! DEMOCRATS! MAKE BUSH VETO IT! MAKE HIM LOOK STUPID! COUGH!)
Gavin adds:
Selections from the Norton Anthology of Iraqi Bear and Puma Poetry:
The bear weeps for his country’s shame
His axle’s squeaky: who’s to blame?
‘Tis YOU! Yanks like Michelles and Michaels
Care NOT for ursine unicycles!
–Righteous Bubba
There once was a blogger named Mark
Whose support for the Surge was quite stark
“Thanks to Bush,” he declared
But we know it’s the bears
And the pumas that patrol after dark
–J—
Bears and Pumas arrived in Iraq
Just as things were looking black
As they ate al Quaeda, hope began to flicker
So go get another bumper sticker!
–Mikey
Bears and Pumas stalk the sands of Iraq
Steady on, lads, now there’s no turning back
With tooth and claw they tear and rend
They’ll see it through to the bloody end
No militia can stand, nor insurgency fight
While Bears and Pumas stalk the Baghdad night
We’ll see peace in our time in the middle east
Secured not by man, but rather by beast
–Mikey
The Clarks of New Hampshire are great.
They’ve pledged help for the bear surge, they state.
But if this is to work,
None of us can dare shirk.
Let’s stake Noonan in Basra, as bait.
–RubDMC
Uh-oh. It looks like Hindy has ditched Bush and has redirected his irrepressible man-love to another target: one John Sidney McCain, III:
Today, McCain held his more or less weekly blogger conference call. He was his usual direct, irreverent, uncompromising self. […] On every topic he was good-humored, engaging, knowledgeable, tough and conservative. I can’t think offhand of anything he said I disagreed with; much of what he said was inspiring. McCain talks with the freedom of a candidate who knows that win or lose, he will go down in history as a hero. He also has complete confidence, I think, that on the big issues of our time–the threat of Islamic extremism, the need to rein in federal spending for the sake of future generations, the superiority of market solutions to government programs–he is not only right but on the side of history.
Funny- it wasn’t long ago that Hindy was saying that McCain had “strayed too far on too many issues to be a good choice for 2008” and that his buddy Deacon was calling McCain a member of the “terrorist rights wing of the Republican party” because he opposed water-boarding.
I wonder how many free corn dogs the McCain camp had to offer these guys to get ’em turned around.
Gavin adds: Ditching Bush has become something of a cottage industry lately:
What’s Next For Blogs For Bush?
Blogs For Victory will replace Blogs For Bush. Some of the more popular and blog entries have been copied over, should you want to continue the discussion there. Unfortunately, importing all the posts and comments proved to be too cumbersome.
And don’t worry, Blogs For Bush won’t be closing down. the archives will remain intact, but no future posts will be made here.
We hope you enjoy our new home.
We’ll enjoy it all the more since ‘blogs’ is still unaccountably plural.
[rings]
Excuse I and I; our phones is ringing. Helloes? Yes, this is we.
The annual War on Christmas by gay godless baby-killing liberal Democratic Islamophiles has begun early this year. According to the American Family Association, that godless cabal at Lowe’s printed a catalog that made a reference to — brace yourselves — “family trees” instead of the Biblically correct term, which would be “Christmas trees” (Isaiah 41:19).
The elite gay atheist set is, of course, laughing itself to death that the American Family Association had its teats in a twist over somebody using the word “family.” “Ha, ha,” these haters are no doubt chuckling, “doesn’t that mean that Lowe’s should boycott the American Family Association until it renames itself the American Christmas Association?” (We’ll see how much laughing these gay atheist liberals will be doing when they are cast into the fiery pits of Hell, won’t we?)
But Lowe’s wasn’t simply content with using a sacrilegious name for its Christmas trees. Oh no. Lowe’s even went so far as to desecrate a Christmas tree. According to the AFA:
Lowe’s even has one of their “Family trees” turned upside down on a stand. We are not sure what the significance of that is.
I’m not a Satanist, but even I can figure that out. It means that naked Lowe’s employees will be pouring steaming goat blood on a virgin stretched out on a picnic table over in the patio furniture section every Friday at sunset.
And Randy Hall, crack crackpot reporter for Cybercast News Service, is all over the Lowe’s story, and even provides his readers with some historical context (emphasis ours):
Cybercast News Service has documented several examples of what some call the “War on Christmas,” the earliest of which were reported in 2000. The following year … Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano banned Santa Claus displays and other religious symbols on public property.
You know, it wasn’t all that long ago that the wingnuts were complaining that Santa and his antics were taking Christ out of Christmas. Now, it seems, the jolly elf has become part of the Christian religion. Next thing you know, they’ll be hanging him on a cross and then resurrecting him each year before he hops in his sleigh to deliver toys to Christian children everywhere.
Gavin adds: If you ask me, it’s about time we put the ‘God’ back into ‘Godzilla’:
Jillian adds: Will somebody just hack the AFA site and add a link to Snopes to the bottom of all their “news stories” already?
Lowe’s has said that the reference to “family trees” in their Holiday 2007 catalog was a printing mistake not caught in the proofreading stage, and that their holiday 2007 television commercials, print ads, and advertising flyers do indeed identify their decorated artificial tree products as “Christmas Trees”
Matt Yglesias, our Harvard-appointed overseer, reports:
There’s something pretty cool about the shape of the Miami-related sprawl when you pull it out to an appropriate distance. I’d been interested to know what, if anything, is legally or practically preventing the city from just expanding further and further west if anyone happens to know.
Oh, that’s where the mountains are. No use building there; alligators top to bottom.
Meanwhile, Megan McArdle is being Megan in Vietnam this week (on whose tab no one knows), all like, ‘gosh, I never anticipated that things in Asia would be so…Asian.’
She’s trying to explain the market situation there, libertarian-style, whilst carefully avoiding any reference to the so-called “V__tn_m W_r,” which obviously had no political or social effect upon anything. The prequel:
Twenty-four hours worth of travel time gives one a lot of time for thinking, even with a new Nintendo DS Lite (sent to me, weirdly, as a free gift by Comcast). A lot of what I thought about was this blog, and the occasionally wearying job of political debate. The night before I left, I had a conversation with a friend about the practice of calling people closet cases, which he mildly defended by asserting that excessive protestations against homosexuality are often a way to bolster one’s masculinity.
Really? We’ve never heard that idea before. Could it be true? Occasionally wearying though it is, let us debate.
Every day we thank Providence for the wisdom of the Alphas.
[Hanx! Aaron]
ITEM! It’s nice to know that the spirit of the ’60s hasn’t died: at Columbia University, the College Republicans are demanding the hiring of a dozen conservative professors and the seizure of Negro-held lands, or else…they’ll eat.
Above: “Don’t make us use these”
ITEM! Ever since Skyy Vodka introduced their new line of ‘Smartinis’, Crazy Pammy has gotten extra-cunning. Luring us in with a picture of breasts other than her own, she pulls a quick switcheroo for anyone who, for a brief wonderful second, was enjoying being on her website by engaging in a fantasy genital mutilation of a beautiful lady who has had the poor taste to purchase property in an area adjacent to ragheads.
But wait, there’s more! Says shrieking harpy Pamela Oshry Geller Wildenstein Marmeladov von Rockso of Jolie’s real estate crime against humanity:
It gets more unfathomable.
Do you see how bad this is? It starts out impossible to understand, and then gets even more impossible! I think we can all agree, that’s pretty bad.
ITEM! Brand new name, same old morons! Over at the newly created “Blogs for Victory”, Matt “Noonan is Here to Make Me Look Good” Margolis claims that an “independent study” predicts that several new energy bills by Democrats would slow the economy, cost consumers billions, and put five million people out of work. The “independent” study was released by API, a leading trade organization for the oil and gas industry, and carried out by CRA International, a consulting firm that specializes in helping huge corporations evade anti-trust suits. So you know their report is reliable! BOO, DEMOCRATS!
Okay, okay, okay. Quiet down and listen. ‘Triple non-fat latte, hold the foam, with a twist.’ Am I right? Guaran-fucking-teed yuks, people. Never fails. And if you really wanna kill? Do the ‘veinte’ thing. Like, what the fuck is ‘veinte’? Can I get a fucking large? Is that too much to ask in America? Skreeky the cup-o-friggin-joe, kemosabe? Bam! That’s what she said! Pow!
– Prof. Jeff Goldstein, The Humor of Cyberspace, Online Master Class, Nov. 14,
19922007
Walter E. Williams, the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, isn’t your ordinary professor. He’s distinguished. So when he writes a column at Clown Hall titled “Congressional and Leftist Lies,” well, attention must be paid — even if after reading it you want to slam your car at 60 miles per hour into a brick wall.
An important component of the leftist class warfare agenda is to condemn President Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. This claim is careless, ignorant or dishonest.
Whoa, Wally! You mean Bush didn’t give tax cuts to the rich? If you can prove this, then, okay, I’ll grant that you really are distinguished, even if only distinguished at George Mason University.
Article I, Section 8 [of the Constitution] reads, “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes . . .” That means the president has no taxing authority. … The bottom line is that all taxing authority rests with the U.S. Congress. The next time you hear someone condemn or praise Bush’s tax cuts, ask them whether the Constitution has been amended to give the president taxing authority.
Then shout “Bwahahahaha!” and spray Mountain Dew all over them. And when anyone talks about Bush’s “War on Terror” tell ’em that the Constitution says that only Congress can declare war.
