quibbles with greenwald

As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
- Glenn Greenwald (emphasis mine)

Arthur Silber is fond of pointing out that policy which fails to meet the goals of its creators is quickly modified. Glenn's choice of words is inappropriate. The intentions he attributes are how law is often described, but talk is cheap. Law has always been a weapon of the powerful.

Otherwise, right on!

obama's position, as i understand it

the last vestiges of decency in the us government must be slashed, or else the world will end! also, MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR MORE WAR!!!!!!

surely it is our words, not our violence, that causes this violence

All the respectable liberals are supposed to be blaming the violent rhetoric of the political class for the Arizona killings, presumably because that makes it all the Republicans' fault. Mister Smith takes a swipe at this, as does IOZ. It strikes me that Arthur Silber had the best response, but it was written almost four years ago.

If the question is what does the US political class do that inspires violence, I suppose their violent rhetoric might be a concern, but surely a distant one.

We've bombed, invaded, and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're threatening Iran with the same. We're conducting half-secret wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else. Hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority non-combatants, are dead as a result. We provide weapons and support for brutal regimes around the world and flagrantly disregard the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. We spend more money on war than the rest of the world combined (while our healthcare system is a joke, and our education system and infrastructure rots away). Thousands die and millions more are in cages because of our stupid war on drugs. We torture and kill prisoners, including our own citizens.

Insane violence is what the US political class is all about.

update: good stuff, Jack Crow

how to make things better

I recently suggested to some friends that a way to work towards a more equal society would be to get more involved with their union. This was met with rather vehement objection, on the basis that their union doesn't serve their interests. The more I've thought about this response, the more amazed I am because of how backwards this logic is.

Whether they like it or not, their union is the (strongest) vehicle for collectively representing their interests as employees. The union hasn't served their interests well in the past precisely because a small number of biased people have been making decisions on behalf of a larger group (I know this because I used to be in the same union and had many of the same frustrations as them). So I'm advocating that my friends get more involved so as to make their union more effective at representing their interests.

So basically I'm saying: the current power structures of society don't serve your interests, so you need to work more for your own interests and do less delegating of that work to others.

And they're responding: but those others don't work for my interests.

And they seemed to think that undermined my point!

In retrospect, I think that a big source of confusion is that they, like most North Americans, have only the faintest notion of what democracy actually is, aside from voting. Not because they're stupid, but because they're deluged with propaganda and they have little exposure to genuinely democratic organizations. They have little concept of how people could possibly manage their own affairs rather than letting someone else control things. To them "the union" and "the people who've been leading the union" are indistinguishable - pure authoritarianism. Thus, "getting more involved with the union" doesn't work because they can't imagine that meaning anything other than just doing what the union leaders tell them to do. The idea of working together to force powerful people to respect your interests is just utterly foreign. Again this isn't because they're dumb, but because they've never known anything else.

The topic came up in the first place when I made a broader point about helping people that has been on my mind lately. I noted that, given the existence of human suffering, there are two main ways to make things better. You can either find a suffering person (or people) and try to heal them, or you can address the root causes of that suffering. It turns out that social structures can be pretty strong root causes of suffering. (There's a pretty convincing body of evidence that economic inequality leads to all kinds of nasty shit, see this book for a good start, and so I suggested that if you want to help people, fighting for greater equality is a way to address root causes.) Because there are entrenched interests that will resist changes to social structures, and because working directly with a suffering person can create a more immediate improvement, I argued that the root cause approach is too neglected. (Not to mention that there's more money to be made in treatment!) I think that if people shifted their total helping efforts to do slightly more root cause work (even at the expense of treatment work) I suspect we'd all be better off.

Their resistance to my idea tells me I'm fighting an uphill battle.

ouch

I read footnotes 20 and 21 here and my heart breaks a million times in a row.

spectacle

I have a friend who has a tradition of going to a mall Thanksgiving night to watch the "Black Friday" shoppers. He doesn't buy anything; he just enjoys watching the insane spectacle. I find the whole thing too rotten and sad to get any pleasure out of it, perhaps for the same reasons I don't think I could possibly enjoy watching a dog fight or a cock fight: fighting animals and Black Friday shoppers are both pitiable creatures conditioned to enthusiastically destroy themselves for someone else's benefit.

I manage to avoid the consumerist frenzy of the Christmas season for the most part, as I don't watch TV or go to malls. There do seem to be more parties to attend though.

yo, so i'm an anarchist and whatnot, and that is an unpopular stance. let me just say once thing. this man is the fucking leader of the world's 10th largest economy.

yeah. authoritarian power-based governments are awesome ideas.

short post about a long article

Read this and then read this.

Pretty impressive, BO, pretty impressive.

Another challenge: botanical edition

A while back I mentioned Andrew Carroll, an 18 year old kid who is really fucking brave.  He stood in the middle of his town holding some pieces of a plant, knowing what the result would be.  

Men with guns came, put chains on him, and forced him into a cage.  

Soon he'll face a "trial" in a "court" that is supposed to deliver "justice."  He'll make strong moral arguments, which will be ignored in favor of immoral laws that say he is guilty.  The state will punish him.  Because he possessed a plant.  

Challenge: justify this.

(Reminder:  your taxes pay for this kind of thing.)

If you aren't up to the challenge, Andrew has made his point.

you will respect my authoriteh

Man sentenced to 93 days in jail for sitting down too slowly while on trial for having a couch in his yard. Justice.

Fuck you, Keene, New Hampshire and "Judge" Burke.


other links about this:
http://anarchyinyourhead.com/2008/11/16/thank-you-mr-burke/
http://freekeene.com/
http://noiri.blogspot.com/2008/11/taste-of-ussa-united-socialist-states.html

I want change too. This ain't it.

Infatuation with Obama is pervasive. I can't get away from it. People ask me about the election in class, in hallways, in the lab, at a bar. I try to read or watch basketball, but it is there too. I was just trying to read about beer and there he was.

It exhausts me and makes me sad. I'm glad that people everywhere recognize that Bush has been a complete disaster for the people of the US and for the world. That frustration is driving all this enthusiasm for change. But people don't understand why Bush was such a disaster, and thus don't know what real change would be.

Obama ain't it. He's a fresh face atop the same corporate-military empire. He's distraction, a sleight of hand. He'll do all the same things Bush did, only he won't be so brazen about it, which will make all of the operations go more smoothly. But those operations will have the exact same results: continual erosion of personal liberty, suppression of Democracy, bloody slaughter of impoverished brown people, enrichment of an elite few at the expense of the masses.

No, I'm not pleased with the outcome of the election. No, I'm not enthusiastic about an Obama presidency. No, I don't think change is coming. No, I don't care about the symbolism of a black man being the supreme warlord.

Eugene Debs said (and Dennis Perrin reminded me):

"I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition."

People who are excited about Obama are being led by their hands, not their heads. BO is not a savior, but he'll certainly foster that imagery for his own political benefit, and for the benefit of the elite interests he'll serve.

this is what you did

Can you say this?

Now I say that I will only vote for peace candidates. If I lived in Ohio, the swing state where I was born, I still would have voted for her. I will never again cast a vote for a war criminal. That conviction means I am disenfranchised. My vote will never count and I can only play the role of spoiler. I no longer care. I can't pretend that America's aggression around the world can be dismissed if it is carried out by the lesser of two evils.

Because if you voted for Obama or McCain you can't. You voted to support evil. Yes you did. And as long as you live, you'll have to remember that.

I know I do from 2004. I don't know if I'll ever get over it.

Voting for Symbols? Symbols of what exactly?

This all sounds nice. Until it gets to the part where Bernard is going to vote for BO because of this:

"My dad grew up being told a black person couldn't be a pilot, and my son is growing up knowing that a black person can be president," she said. "It's not that racism is gone, it's just that it's not about the idea that all black people are excluded on the basis of their race from any part of society or any particular job. That was the racism my parents grew up with."

Being the President of the United States is to be the most powerful gangster of all the gangsters. This isn't something to which little kids should aspire, or that parents should want for their children.

I guess maybe there's some race victory in seeing that a man with an African father can be the supreme leader of an international crime syndicate. In which case the victory is that the power structures that exist, however evil and flawed, at least aren't so racist as to disqualify an otherwise talented criminal from ascending to leadership.

Seems like kind of the same empty victory as gays in the military. Hooray, I'm now allowed to drop bombs on innocent children and suck cock on the weekend!

These are the great victories of our times? We congratulate ourselves on our non-discriminatory selection of death dealers? I guess if this is victory, I'm content to watch from the sidelines.

who's next? looks like Syria

US troops killed civilians in Syria tonight, including women and children. Whoever is responsible will never be held accountable. What a great world.

Why I won't vote: Lesser Evilism is a sham

So I wrote a sprawling reply to a comment, only to realize that by the end I had written my way into a pretty good point that should have been more emphasized. I ought to rewrite it, but, let's face it, I'm just a lazy writer with a thinly-read blog whose audience disappeared when he stopped writing about poker. So I'll add some more thoughts here at the top.

Anyway, the point is this: if you accept the lesser-evil logic of voting for Democrats, you're basically saying that you'll support anything as long as you're convinced that the alternative is worse. And once you admit that, you become completely exploitable and hope is lost.

Given a choice between two evils, the lesser evil is better. That part of it isn't wrong. But the flaw in the lesser-evil argument in favor of supporting Democrats is that there are more than two choices. There's always another option for a better outcome, it just might be very unlikely to win. If you make it known that you'll always support the lesser evil and never opt for the risky 3rd choice, those two evils can get worse and worse, knowing that you'll have to support one of them. So at some point you have to make a stand with the third option.

When should you stop favoring the more likely lesser evil and opt for the unlikely 3rd (or 4th, etc) option*? Well I think that is a judgement everyone has to make for themselves, but I think we can agree on 2 things. First is that the more evil the two evil options are, the more we should favor the highly unlikely 3rd option. And second is that the more similar the two evils (i.e. the lesser evil isn't really that much less evil), the more we should favor the third. Much of the discussion below is about the second point, though I discuss the first as well.


* - equally important question is "what is that third option?" Here, as usual, I argue for boycotting the election. I think there is also honor in voting for 3rd party candidates, like Nader or the Green Party. My preference for boycott over that option is a topic for another time.
----
Some recent comments by David are worth considering.

Even if you recognize that both Democrats and Republicans are basically two factions of the same party, working together towards an authoritarian corporate police state domestically, and endless violent interventions internationally, all for the enrichment of an elite few at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us, there is still the question as to whether one faction is preferable to the other because of their minor differences. And due to the tremendous amount of power and control wielded by various holders of public office, those minor differences can add up to be very meaningful for lots of people.

I've argued repeatedly that the best response to our sham democracy is to boycott the elections. I generally think that refusing as much as possible to interact with a system that is hopelessly rigged against my interests is the most effective and honorable way to dissent. That's my approach. But everyone has to make their own decisions, and maybe my moral calculus is different than yours.

I do believe that it is possible to construct good arguments in favor of participating in these elections. I think that if they exist, they'd look something like what David said: that these small differences add up enough to justify supporting one side over the other. But here's the thing. I think there's a huge burden of proof to be met, and I'm not at all convinced that David or people who make similar arguments have met them. For his reasoning to stand up, I'd need to be strongly convinced that these differences actually exist, considering not just the immediate short-term impact of the minor policy changes, but also the long run consequences of various decisions. By going out and voting for BO, you're casting a vote in support of a candidate who has repeatedly lied about matters of extreme importance, who fully supports the framework of the US using lethal military force around the globe in the so-called "War on Terror," who fully supports domestic lawlessness for the executive branch, who fully supports using taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street lunatics, and so on and so on. In order to actively support such monstrous evil, you need to be very very sure that what you're doing really does somehow lead to a better result than your other choices.

David lists 3 commonly-cited reasons to think Democrats are preferable. (1)They make better judicial appointments. (2)They are less influenced by irrational factions (specifically Christians), and (3) there is better treatment of persecuted groups of people under Democratic leadership. First I'll make a few scattered rebuttals to these notions, then I'll argue that even if he's right, that isn't a convincing case in favor of supporting Democrats.

In regards to the first point, it seems to me that the pattern of judicial appointments is roughly like this. Under Republican leadership, the most radically far-right judges that can possibly be taken seriously are pushed through the system with little obstruction from Democrats. Under Democratic leadership, highly conservative judges are appointed, but called "moderate" by Democrats to make them sound reasonable and responsible, and yet fiercely opposed by Republicans who push for even more conservative jurists. There is no force for a genuinely liberal judiciary, just a two-pronged approach towards an ever more conservative one , that moves a little more slowly to the right under Democrats. I should note that this is 'measured' relative to public sentiment, meaning perhaps overall the courts could become more liberal on an absolute scale, but the force of the political process is to move them as far right as the public at large can stomach.

Do women and gays and minorities receive better treatment under Democrats? Well, not the ones in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia. They'll keep getting slaughtered at roughly the same rate under BO or McCain. And it seems to me that plenty of Democrat leaders would be quite willing to give up on abortion, or to turn the other way on gay-bashing. They'll maintain the policies that keep black people at a disadvantage, and keep locking up black men who turn to the underground pharmeceutical economy as an inevitable response to that disadvantage. Cause, I mean, what are the black people going to do, vote for Republicans?
Last is that under Democrats, the insane Christian Right won't have the President's ear as much. But Democrats have plenty of other insane people pulling their strings. Like who? Well how about the lunatics who got us into this economic meltdown in the first place? The insanity and influence of the Christian Right is benign compared to the murderous pyschopathy of corporate influence. And it isn't like the rabid Christian Right is powerless under Democrat rule. In fact they might work themself into such an outrage about being ruled by a terrorist Muslim nigger with a funny name that they become even more of a political force.

Real political change doesn't happen from the top down, but from the bottom up. The President doesn't dictate how gays are treated, the people do, and the President responds. BO might treat them better than McCain, but how do we know that the further outrages under McCain wouldn't be some kind of tipping point to drive people towards some kind of social revolution (the reverse of the Muslim-nigger effect on the racist Christians)? Just because the government might be more officially hostile under Republican executives or judges doesn't necessarily mean the public will be.

So those are my scattered rebutals, and you might point out that all of these objections can still be consistent with Democrats being a relatively lesser evil. The conservative Democrat judges are better than the ultra-right Republican ones, right? The Republicans and Democrats are both run by corporations, but at least the Christians are more ignored under Democrats, right? And the Democrats might be a bit less willing to stomp the queers, right?

Say that is the case. Does that actually justify supporting a blood-drenched criminal for President? Does more support for gay marriage merit participating in a system that guarantees perpetual war and suffering on a monumental scale? Does the slightly lower chance of Roe v Wade being overturned make it worth it to lend the appearance of legitimate democracy to a ruling class who privatize profits to an elite few while making risk and losses public? Does having fewer Liberty University graduates in the Justice Department make it ok to vote for a party that passed retroactive immunity for companies that spied on us, a party that passed laws to make torture legal, that has refused to impeach Bush?

David says we should support a murderous criminal party because their crimes aren't quite as bad as the crimes of their partner. But the obvious fact of their partnership means that by supporting one, you're supporting the other. Not a lot can happen in the USG if one of the parties doesn't want it to happen. Everything that we've seen happen under Bush is fully the responsibility of Democrats as well. There's not the slightest reason to think that BO will set any of those things right, and there's ample reason to think that he'll continue on largely the same path.

But David and many others want to support this whirlwind of bipartisan destruction, in the name of a few very marginal differences that may or may not even really exist. What are the long term consequences of this? It tells the ruling class that you'll accept anything, as long as you're convinced that the only alternative is something slightly worse. Stop and think about that. Say it over and over. Think about how easy this can be exploited. And think about whether a ruling class who has slaughtered a million Iraqis and stolen trillions of your dollars would be willing and able to exploit you in such a way.

Chomsky makes the important point that genuine freedom and democracy means that the use of power should be assumed to be illegitimate unless proven otherwise, and that the burden of proof should be very high. Participation in a national election to decide the holders of offices is certainly a use of power. And I don't see that David's argument has met the burden of proof for the exercise of such power, especially considering the strategic consequences of demonstrating your willingness to support evil out of a fear of slightly greater evil. It isn't clear to me that there is going to be much, if any, difference in real-world results under either option, and it is clear to me that both options are evil. So I'm not voting. Are you?

voting for democrats is ironic and funny hahahhaha

Ha, isn't it funny how Democrats have no interest in democracy at all? But that Palin woman has no experience overturning democratically elected governments, so we can't take her seriously! We must support Obama/Biden! They don't talk funny like she does.

more Josh Howard (updated)

Alright well I still kind of don't want to get too much into this, but I can't help making a few more comments about Josh Howard. Specifically, it seems to me that this is the exact same thing as Jeremiah Wright. A black man (or woman too I assume) in America is not allowed to be angry about the abuses black people face. If such anger comes out, it must be attacked. He is running his mouth off! He's an angry black man! Denounce him!

Henry Abbott, NBA blogger for ESPN.com called Howard's comments "mishandling of his freedom of speech." He went on to explain why his comments were so bad with this gem:

And we know Josh Howard speaks his own version of the truth (which is admirable) even if the timing and general lack of coherence undermine his cause (which is not). By being a celebrity, and addressing incendiary issues of civil rights around a microphone, fair or not he risks presenting himself as an actual civil rights leader. Like the 2008 Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. He's a really nice guy, and his heart is in the right place, but he must not let himself get confused with a civil rights leader.

Are you kidding me? Every black person with an opinion about prejudice that isn't a civil rights leader needs to shut up so they don't get confused for a civil rights leader? What the fuck kind of logic is this? And what is the lack of coherence of saying he doesn't celebrate the national anthem because he's black? That makes perfect sense to me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Speaking the truth is only "admirable" if it is the officially-sanctioned truth that America is great and wonderful. Expressing something else is irresponsible, especially for a black man, who we all know are already prone to irresponsibilities like smoking marijuana (but, hey, grab me another beer while you're up).

The only "danger" of being mistaken for MLK that I can think of is that if dishonest asshats go on to paint everyone who criticizes the system from a black civil rights perspective as a some goofy weed-smoking jackass like that one NBA player. But the proper response to this "threat" isn't to make every celebrity with an opinion shut up. It is to address the dishonesty when it arises. Or, like Abbott, you can demand that people just shut up and not express their non-jingoistic opinion unless they have a doctoral thesis they're ready to present to back it up. That puts a gigantic burden of proof on oppressed people to prove their oppression, and gives the oppressers a free pass. (I've pointed all of this out to Abbott in a email exchange much more politely worded than this bluurg post and I hope he considers revising his statements.)

In the comments to the last post, David points out that a CNN poll says a majority of voters think Howard should be punished for expressing his opinion, and goes on to say that he should love America because he couldn't make as much money elsewhere. So I guess the uppity nigger should just shut the fuck up and be glad for the freedom that we gave to him.

Fuck you, America. Fuck you.

update: Abbott posted a link to this, which I suppose is a good start.

In support of Josh Howard

Josh Howard, a very good NBA player for the Dallas Mavericks, has caught some shit recently because he openly admitted to smoking weed. This is supposed to be a scandal or something. Then recently, this happened. Basically he was "caught" on tape saying something to the effect that he doesn't celebrate the national anthem because he's black, and then seemed to make a disparaging remark about Obama (not sure about that part, it might have actually been a pro-Obama comment, where his support for Obama came from anger).

I don't intend to follow this story closely or anything, but it is pretty typical of what a fucked up retarded place America is. Drinking is perfectly fine but smoking a joint is some major transgression. The realities of racism and the disadvantages black people have always faced in America are undeniable, but when a black man actually acknowledges this in front of a camera, he's "running his mouth" or something.

I've often thought that a high-profile athlete could be a great advocate for important political issues, since they have the attention and respect of so many young people. Of course they're all millionaires with endorsement deals from corporations, and they benefit hugely from the existing social structures, so it is hard to expect them to do much to meaningfully change things. Sure they'll give money to charitable causes and take field trips to Africa to see the poverty, but they never address the structural characteristics that cause the poverty. You never hear Michael Jordan speak out on political issues do you? He's making too much money from sweatshop-manufactured apparel to worry about that stuff.

So, I'd love to see Josh Howard stand up and defend his lack of patriotism. Why should a black man celebrate the national anthem? Fuck the national anthem! Fuck Obama! Say it again, Josh. Why should the government have the right to tell me what I'm not allowed to smoke? Why would I celebrate a government that does that? But, he'll be under pressure to just say the politically expedient lies and hope people forget about the rare glimmer of truth that crept out.

Happy Anniversary, now wake the fuck up

If 9/11/2001 changed anything, it seems to me that it was that the US Government realized it no longer had to be subtle about its atrocities.

Today you should read this from Chris Floyd, which I'll copy here in its entirety. Then you should watch the video at the end and think about it.

There is, apparently, to be no end to our falling. No bottom to the pit of moral nullity through which we keep plunging, no act of evil which we will not accept, and countenance, and even cheer.

At one time, it required great lies -- elaborate, monstrous deceits, wrapped in myths of goodness and light -- to disguise the brutal machinations of raw power. Otherwise, it was thought, the people might rise up in anger at the crimes being committed in their name, thus threatening the primacy and privilege of the elite.

But this proved to be unnecessary in the end. The foulest deeds could be done in broad daylight, in full view of the world, before the eyes of our children, without the slightest consequence for the perpetrators. The crowd would applaud, or, at worst, simply shrug and move on.

Actions and policies drawn from the horror stories of history -- things which the people had been taught to abominate from the day they were born -- were freely and openly embraced.

The Nazis launched unprovoked wars of aggression and despoiled whole nations. So do we now; who cares? The Gestapo and the KGB snatched people from the street and held them without charges in secret prisons, tortured them with brute force and with exquisitely calibrated techniques approved by the highest authorities. So do we now; who cares? The Soviets spied without qualm or restraint on their own people, no warrants needed, no evidence required, just a nod from some faceless official in the security organs. So do we now; who cares? The Nazis believed that the national leader is beyond the law, that any order he gives is rightful and just and cannot be punished, simply because he has given it. So do we now; who cares? The Soviets and the Nazis treated protests against the established order as security threats and acts of terror, and repressed them with mass arrests and police violence. So do we now; who cares?

All of these things, and many more besides, have been done and are being done by the government of the United States today, with either the full-throated approval or the meek acquiescence of the political opposition and the nation's institutions. The people too seem largely in agreement, or completely indifferent. We have just finished a primary campaign in which tens of millions of people voted for candidates who support the system described above in almost every particular -- quibbling about some of the details and tactics perhaps, but expressing absolutely no dissent from its basic premises.

The two major candidates left standing after this appalling process are as similar in policy and philosophy as it is possible to be and still maintain a semblance of "choice" in the election. Both support the continuance and expansion of the "War on Terror." Both pledge to use massive, lethal, violent force, at any time, anywhere in the world -- with no options, not even the nuclear one, taken "off the table" -- in the service of ever-nebulous and self-defined "national security" interests. Both support the warrantless surveillance of American citizens, and immunity for vast conglomerates that collaborate with the state in blatantly illegal activity. Both believe that even those who have not committed murder can be executed by the state. (And neither has said a single word about the shame of America's prison system: more than 2 million people behind bars, more than any other nation on earth, in both sheer numbers and proportionately, and rivalled historically in those numbers only by the Stalin's gulag at the height of the purges.)

Both support a continuing American military presence in Iraq, under one euphemism or another. Both mouth pieties about opposing torture and upholding the rule of law, but neither of them applied their considerable powers as senators -- or their great personal popularity -- to make the slightest move to bring the perpetrators of the White House-approved torture regime to justice. (McCain has even voted explicitly to allow the CIA to torture captives.) Both have just finished conventions at which American citizens seeking to exercise their constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly were herded by armed police into wire pens (dubbed, with sinister irony, "free speech zones"), harassed, arrested, in cases beaten, invaded, and charged with thought crime and terrorism. Both support, and are supported by, the same corporate interests whose predations and corruptions have shredded the social and civic fabric of the nation and are now leading millions into penury.

Where are the hands, as in Rilke's poem, that can hold up all this falling? There are none. And so we keep falling, down and down and still farther down.

Biden on prosecuting Bush: "Don't worry my conservative friend, not a fucking chance!"

Mentioning this on Trakker's blog would probably get me double-banned, so I'll do it here. As I said recently, there's no fucking way these blood-drenched Democrats will prosecute the blood-drenched Republicans. This has been obvious for a long time.

To be more straightforward for those of you who don't like clicking on links, Chris Floyd wrote this last November:

No mainstream Democrat will ever allow full-fledged criminal investigations and prosecutions of Bush II officials for torture and the war crime of military aggression. You know and I know that's not going to happen. We will get, at most, some soaring rhetoric about "healing national wounds" and "coming together again" and "moving on." (With the outside possibility of a few small fry being offered up as sacrifices, to let the Dem president preen as the "restorer of the rule of law" -- and also purge the Republicans, and Bush, of the worst taint: "Hey, it was a few bad apples, and now they're gone. We've got a clean slate!")

A few days ago, internet liberals got all excited because Biden made some vague hypothetical comments somewhere about pursuing criminal investigations. A few days after that, Biden rushed to Fox News to correct the record on this matter:

Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends raised that issue with Biden on Thursday morning, asking about "a report that if you guys are elected ... you're actually going to pursue criminal charges against President Bush's administration and different people that served there."

"That's not true," Biden immediately replied. "I don't know where that report's coming from. What is true is the United States Congress is trying to preserve records on questions that relate to whether or not the law has been violated by anyone. Anybody should be doing that."

Biden emphasized that "no one's talking about President Bush. ... I've never heard anybody mention President Bush in that context." He noted that "there's been an awful lot of unsavory stuff that's gone on ... but I have no evidence of any of that. No one's talking about pursuing President Bush criminally."

Biden concluded his comments by explaining that possible misdeeds are
"being looked into now, just so it never happens again in any other administration. ... The Obama-Biden administration is not going to start off saying, 'God, let's go take a look at what this --.' The American people want to know what we're going to do, not what happened."

But internet liberals will ignore this, or somehow convince themselves that Obama/Biden just had to say that for political reasons, but really in their hearts they want to prosecute, and we'll see that once they get elected. If Obama gets elected, this will also be proven wrong, but McCain is going to win now anyway so they'll forget all of this.