The Republic of T.

They’re going to get away with it.

I mean those Bush administration officials who redefined torture for the twenty-first century, and brought America’s longstanding enthusiasm for torture out of the closet.

Yeah. Them.

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It was five years ago today that we first glimpsed the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

We were told that it was all the fault of “a few bad apples.”

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This is getting ridiculous. Now conservatives are volunteering to be waterboarded. Now? Seriously? Where were they for the past eight years, when we were doing that and much, much more to people, many of whom weren’t guilty of more than jaywalking, let alone of terrorism against the United States?

Now, here comes Sean Hannity, belatedly offering himself up to be waterboarded.

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I’ve been spending my evenings pouring over the torture memos. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what I expect to find, but I want to get an idea of how bad it got. (Besides, you can find amazing things in the footnotes. Ask Marcy Wheeler a/k/a EmptyWheel. Though if I found something, it’d be days before I actually had time to post about it. Maybe even a week. Unless I just did a quick copy-and-paste. Otherwise, I’m pretty much left with analysis long after the story has broken.)

It won’t make headlines, but I have given the “torture memos” a nickname, if only in my own head: “The Not-So-Funny Papers” or the “Un-Funny Papers.”

Anyway, while researching material for a possibly upcoming post, I came across all kinds of editorial cartoons about the Bush administrations torture policies. “The Not-So-Funny Papers” popped into my head again, and this post was born as a means of sharing them.

Enjoy.

Sometimes ya gotta wonder if Republicans can actually hear themselves when they talk. And then, you hope they don’t, because it’s infinitely more frightening to think that they do, and that they mean to say things like “We should be more like the Taliban.”

Frustrated by a lack of bipartisan outreach from House Democratic leaders, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said House Republicans — who voted unanimously last week against the economic plan pushed by President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — will pitch a “positive, loyal opposition” to the proposal. The group, he added, should also “understand insurgency” in implementing efforts to offer alternatives.

“Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban,” Sessions said during a meeting yesterday with Hotline editors. “And that is that they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person’s entire processes. And these Taliban — I’m not trying to say the Republican Party is the Taliban. No, that’s not what we’re saying. I’m saying an example of how you go about [sic] is to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that insurgency may be required when the other side, the House leadership, does not follow the same commands, which we entered the game with.”

Oh well, IOKIYAR. Now if a Democrat said something like that? Well, you can only imagine what we’d be treated to by every right wing talking head who could prop themselves up in front of a television camera or a microphone.

But here’s the thing. It’s not the first time.

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Wow. In one day, I’ve become a little prouder to be an American, and now I’m a little prouder to live in Maryland.

The days of unwarranted snooping by the Maryland State Police may be over.

Democratic state legislators on Jan. 22 introduced a bill to protect the First Amendment rights of dissenters.

Entitled the Freedom of Association and Assembly Protection Act of 2009, the bill would require the police to have at least “reasonable suspicion” before they could start collecting dossiers on individuals.

The bill is an outgrowth of the controversy that erupted last year when it was revealed that Maryland state troopers had been gathering intelligence on—and infiltrating groups of—nonviolent anti-war and anti-death penalty groups. Dozens of individuals and groups were surveilled, and the state police accused some of being suspected terrorists.

Nice to know my state is living up to its nickname once again.

Finally.

With this, I think Obama is off to a good start.

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Never mind this guy.

If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop in Iraq, it’s these guys you should be concerned about.

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[Ed Note: Graphic NSFW images below the fold.]

As I write this, I’m watching president George W. Bush grant pardon to Stars and Stripes in 2003, on a television show about turkey. At the same time, I’m reading about another who seeks pardon from president Bush, and pondering the irony that the prisoner should have to seek pardon from someone whose crimes — the number and nature of which vary depending on whom you ask — outnumber his own and outweigh them in seriousness.

Not to mention who has the bigger body-count.

His name is bound to inspire fits of apoplexy, and plenty of people won’t read any further once he’s mentioned, but John Walker Lindh is seeking pardon.

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Source.

After the previous post, it seems appropriate to move delusion to delusion. So, let’s look into the case of Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan. In what world does Peggy Noonan reside? And what color is the sky there?

I ask because, though capable of surprising moments of clarity (which I hope to get to in a another post), her latest WSJ column sounds like a dispatch from the mental space to which Noonan decamped during the Clinton years, a place I’ve wondered about since her bid to let dolphins determine child custody and immigration policy — somewhere unrelated to the world I’ve been reading about in the headlines lately.

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In a previous post we explored the spectacle of George W. Bush bungling through an attempt at an expression of remorse — this time over the state of the economy — as only he can. It’s what you’d expect from a guy who believed he was on a mission from God, and has watched it go horribly wrong.

He still has to “Keep the faith,” and convince himself that all is pretty much as it should be, close enough, or well on its way there.

But the rest of us don’t.

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Back in May of this year I asked, “What the matter with US?”

And by “US” I mean the United States.

Why can’t we get behind this?

This, at the time, was treaty to ban cluster bombs,adopted by over 100 nations at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. The United State of Dubya was not among the 100+ plus nations that agreed to the treaty.

I ask then and I ask now: What the fuck is wrong with us?

Because now the treaty is finally being signed by those 100+, but for some reason the United States doesn’t want to ban cluster bombs.

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In fact, too few to mention?

Quick, what — of all that’s happened in the last eight years — do most regret? Of all that’s happened during the Bush years, what do you wish hadn’t happened? We’ve all got a few, and we could all probably start a list right here, right now.

But what does Dubya regret? Very, very little.

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Sometimes the most pointed — or preposterous — comes from unexpected sources. This time, it’s The Onion providing the former and the Wall Street Journal serving up the latter.

The best satire comes wrapped around a grain of discomforting truth. Daniel De Groot unwrapped one in a headline from The Onion that should give Democrats something to think about. Read his post for more on that.

The jaw-dropper, though, comes from the Wall Street Journal, (hat-tip to Steve Benen at Political Animal) where they’ve apparently learned well (or not so well) something Rick pointed out earler: Conservatism never fails; it is only failed.

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