Morally Exceptional

When last we discussed torture, we were talking about a survey that showed 75 percent of the respondents endorsing the use of torture in some situations. I find it utterly appalling that anyone would endorse torture under any circumstances, and I'm pleased to note, so do the people I consider friends.

But there's a group of people on both the right and left -- who would generally oppose torture -- who have bought the bullshit "ticking bomb" scenario. That's one where something Really Bad is about to happen and Many People Will Be Killed, and you have in custody The One Guy Who Can Tell You Where The Bomb Is and he's not talking. The question, of course, is, "Do you torture him?"

There are several variants of that ticking bomb scenario, including that most ingenious of variants, the one where you harken back to September 11, 2001, invoke the people killed that day and their children, who had to be told that mommy and daddy wouldn't be coming home. In that variant, the only answer, of course, is "Hell yes" I'd torture to stop that from happening.

That, too, is bullshit, mainly because if we'd only had, say, a competent government that was really interested in national security instead of justifying an invasion of Iraq, 9/11 might have been prevented -- without torture.

See, here's the thing. If you're really gonna portray yourself as a moral or an ethical individual, you don't justify torture. Period. That may mean, theoretically or perhaps even realistically, making the hardest decision you'll ever have to make in your life. But you don't torture living creatures. Not bees, not mice, not cats, not monkeys, not human beings.

It's interesting, though, as that survey showed, that the more "morally right" one considers oneself, the more one is likely to endorse torture. There's a group of people out there -- a sizable group -- that believes it has a lock on morality, that they -- and only they -- know the difference between right and wrong. And yet, when we look at what they actually say, it's not so clearly black and white.

Torture is bad, they say, except ...

Discrimination is wrong, they say, except ...

Bombing civilian sites is wrong, they say, except ...

Brutal dictators are wrong, they say, except ...

Taking a disputed election to the Supreme Court is wrong, they say, except ...

>There's just an awful lot of exceptions, dontcha think? And if the exceptions really do delineate some clear differences, then the exceptions have a purpose. But these exceptions are much more arbitrary. In fact, it'd be perfectly reasonable to finish off each of those sentences up there with "when we do it."

Likening the president of the United States to Hitler is wrong, except when we do it.

Now, before you get all apoplectic on me, please go reread my second sentence, the one that starts "But there's a group of people on both the right and left ... " Actually, that's all you need to read. Just wanted to make sure you remembered the "both the right and left" part, because this next part doesn't fall in that category.

Along with those who can find ways to justify torture, there are others who can find ways to justify murder. Or at least justify fantasizing about it. Take one David Feherty, a CBS golf analyst who apparently lives "about a par 5 away" from GW in that formerly all white Dallas enclave, Preston Hollow.

Feherty, the golf analyst, says he generally hates his neighbors, apparently on principle, especially "the ones that want to talk to me who aren’t doctors or gun dealers or who don’t have their own airplanes."

Oh, or GW.

But here's the point I'm getting to. Feherty, the golf analyst, was asked to write about his new neighbors in D magazine, which I think is something about Dallas, only where most cities have magazines named after the city, Dallas apparently thought just "D" was enough. I have no idea what Detroit and Denver think of that.

Now, apparently, we're all very late getting this news, since the story was published on D's Web site in March for the April issue. I guess nobody of any import actually reads D, but hey. GW probably does.

But anyway, Feherty, the golf analyst, writes about how history is gonna absolve GW of all the crimes he committed and all. He was just "dealt a rotten hand," he says. And then he says this:

From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this, though: despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.

I'm guessing the speaking fees for Feherty, the golf analyst, just went up considerably in certain circles, and I'm betting he'll be talking a lot about free speech too. Because, you know, the first amendment guarantees his right to be a fucking idiot in print.

Now, while cracking what I'd be willing to bet Feherty, the golf analyst, will say is a joke -- because that's what the right does when one of them says something so completely moronic that there's no reasonable explanation for it -- he's also displaying the very same arrogance of those folks who justify torture, except he's actually talking about murder. Murder of people he doesn't like. And the number one person he doesn't like? Apparently Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House.

Not Barack Obama, because that would bring the Secret Service on his ass, and besides, Obama is black and Feherty, the golf analyst, probably didn't want to have to go through the "that's a racist thing to say" bullshit. Now, I don't know if Feherty, the golf analyst, is racist, anymore than I know if he is misogynist since he happened to name the first woman to ever be third in line to the presidency as the one who will take the two bullets. It is true that an awful lot of folks on the right are scared to death of the black guy in the White House, and just hate like hell that a woman has finally settled into her place in the House.

But the truth is, Feherty, the golf analyst, didn't make his statement out of some racist place, or some misogynist place. Instead, it's about his complete conviction that he and others like him -- and no one else -- know the score around here. The rest of us shoot bogeys, literally and figuratively.

But it also does something else. It attempts to taint all U.S. soldiers with his ugly disease. Richard Smith, a veteran who writes for had something to say about that:

Evidently, Feherty believes that we are mindless machines of death, who would without hesitation accept a loaded weapon from a stranger in civilian society, and then use that weapon to assassinate political leaders of the country we have sworn to defend. ... Feherty, who to my knowledge has never served his country or ours in uniform, makes the assumption that he knows Soldiers and Veterans, and that 'any U.S. soldier' has such hatred for (again) the political leaders of the country we have sworn to defend, that we could not be professional enough to help ourselves from committing murder on the spot. What Mr. Feherty might not understand is that there are few Americans who have been as loyal to Veterans and Soldiers as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. If I found myself in that proverbial elevator, the first thing I would do is thank them both profusely.

Honestly, that little statement of golf analyst Feherty was kinda outta the blue. Was it really necessary in an article about having the former president become his neighbor to insult soldiers and let us know that he wouldn't mind seeing the top two Democrats in Congress dead?

And sure, he has the right to say whatever he wants. But it's kinda interesting ... here, I'll let Mustang Bobby from Bark Bark Woof Woof say it:

The point is that the people who complain the most about their restrictions of free speech rights are the ones who both abuse the right and have no compunction about restricting it for other people. They also don't get the basic concept of taking responsibility for your own actions. The right of free speech includes the responsibility for using the judgment to know when to not say something that might come back and bite you in the ass. A mature and responsible person would know that and not blame the consequences on someone else.

There's more to the right of freedom of speech than just saying something.

And more than stamping the ground and screaming "I'm right, I know I'm right."

And that's the real thing about morality, see. It's consistent. People aren't arbitrarily dropped into groups of "good" people (not to be tortured) or "bad" people (can be discriminated against). That way of thinking is, well, it's medieval. And it has no place in the 21st Century.

So, for those of you who agree with Feherty, the golf analyst, say whatever you want. But do us a big favor and step out of the way.

After all, if you're not for us, you're against us. And you get to decide -- the moral path, or the one with all the exception clauses?


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Demented

So the television is on this morning. One of those cop dramas, and the case is about a bigoted asshole who shot and killed a black man because he was pissed that a black guy took a taxi he considered "his." Turns out, of course, the guy has a history of racism, like writing letters to his co-op board opposing interracial couples and accusing a black co-worker of stealing his clients. The prosecutors charged him with a hate crime. His defense? Bigotry is a mental disorder.

It is. But it's not one you're born with, or one that just has a later onset. It's a learned behavior. But at any moment you can step out and start unlearning it. Or, you can keep teaching yourself bullshit, and teach it to your children too. That'll make it much harder for them to get along when they get older. Kinda like those assholes in New Jersey who named their children JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie and Adoph Hitler.

I'm just sayin. Plenty of people are obviously batshit insane, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions.

Like Fox "News," for example, and a whole bunch of newspapers. They showed you plenty of images from Wednesday's teabaggeries. Images like this one. Now, there's much we can say about the sign behind the taxes sign -- "silent majority no more." Things like, you've never been silent, and you aren't a majority, but we'll let them have that little delusion. Tea-ed off about taxes, that's kinda delusional too, because these same folks want a return to the Reagan years, when taxes were 10 points higher than they will be under Obama's budget. But hey, we can't all have brains and actually use them.

But that was the stated purpose of Wednesday's protests. Unless you were actually there. Then, as CNN's Susan Roesgen correctly pointed out, "This is a party for Obama bashers." She asked a guy holding a sign picturing the president as Hitler why he did so, and his response was "He's a fascist." Several times she tried to ask him why he said that, and his response each time was "Because he is."

That's kinda 8-year-old logic. Because I say so. I'm king a da world! And an asshole. Because you're not 8 years old. You're a grown man.

And that brings us to the images the right-wing media and their blind followers don't want you to see, because they want you to think they're a legitimate group of Americans just complaining about high taxes -- and we won't even go into how America has the lowest tax rate of any developed nation or that what the organizers of the teabaggeries are insterested in is not help for the average American taxpayer, who is getting a tax cut this year courtesy the president, but rather for their rich-ass selves. Go figure.

Nope, they don't want you to see the prevailing attitude at the teabaggeries -- the attitude fueled by the bloviators on the radio and tube. They would prefer that you not see images like this one.

Man, they got pissed off when idiots on the left compared GW to Hitler. Or called him a fascist. Or a torturer -- and we all know how that turned out.

But nobody at the teabaggeries said word one to guys like this one. Pity the photog didn't get his face. I'd like to splash it all over so anyone who runs into him would know what a dick he actually is.

And just like the McCain-Palin rallies during last year's campaign, the anti-Obama folks like to lie and say it's just a small part, that they're not all complete jackasses.

That much is true. They're not all complete jackasses. But most are on the scale somewhere.

Here we see Obama portrayed as some kind of maniacal street thug attacking Uncle Sam from behind. I think the text says "we must resist." How about resisting hyperbole? Somebody hit the panic button and these guys went totally berserk. It doesn't help, of course, that their heroes on the airwaves are telling them this shit.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not advocating that we take 'em off the air. Just that we be more honest about what's going on. It's really hard to have a radio show that keeps its audience by having a rational, intelligent discussion of the issues, a true debate about one approach versus another. Much easier just to say "SOCIALIST!!!!!!" and wait and see what happens.

I mentioned children earlier. Here we return to the Obama as monkey theme that featured so prominently during the campaign, this time with a child.

They like to use children -- and, interestingly, complain bitterly if the left does so. But it's really quite clear that everything is fair game if you're a conservative or Republican.

It's as if they think they own the market on children, that children on the left don't matter, I suppose, because they're parents are so incredibly wrong and perhaps gay on top of that.

Which reminds me ... remember the right wing extremist report from Homeland Security this week? And how the right got all crazy about it -- as if it were talking to them specifically? Apparently, it was, and they're not afraid at all to admit it. But get what Christian extremist Pat Robertson said? Here's a hint -- remember that he thinks gay men and lesbians are responsible for hurricanes.

Give up? Aw, try again. It's not that hard. I mean, it's not like the Bush administration ordered the report ... oh, yeah, they did. Well, it was prepared by Obama's people ... oh right, the department that prepared is headed by a Bush appointee.

OK, here's what Pat said:

It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question.

Only a fucking queer would ever question the patriotism of somebody who advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Jeez. What was I thinking.

I might have been thinking that people had a little more sense than that. I'd have been wrong, of course. After all, we're talking about folks who don't accept certified copies of birth certificates as certified copies of birth certificates. Not to mention the idea of impeaching a president after two months in office for doing pretty much what he was elected to do.

It's that whole "taxation without representation" thing again. See, these lunatics like to try to link themselves with the colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor. Colonists who had no representation in London. Seems I remember having an election not to long ago in which we chose 435 members of the House of Representatives, several senators, and, oh, yeah, a president.

Are these folks sore losers or what?

Remember when they called Al Gore and Joe "I really am a traitor" Lieberman "Sore Loserman" for taking the 2000 election to court after they won and had the election stolen?

This time we have Norm Coleman still fighting to keep Al Frank from being Democrat No. 59 nearly six months after the vote -- Minnesotans are rightfully getting pissed -- and in New York, the special election for Kirsten Gillibrand's seat is being held up while Republican Jim Tedisco challenges his loss to Democrat Scott Murphy. This week, despite trailing by several hundred votes, Tedisco petitioned the court to declare him the winner.

And then there's the threat of violence. Rick "Gov. Hairdo" Perry of Texas joined traitor Chuck Norris in talking openly about the Lone Star State seceding from the Union. That didn't go over so well last time, as I recall. I wasn't there, but I have read rather extensively about it. The teabaggers seem to be very confused about what constitutes treason too.

But there's that airwaves thing again. When the leaders of your party are media celebrities who command big paychecks as well as your attention, the black guy at party HQ means very little. As does IQ, apparently.

American history, of course, isn't the only thing the teabaggers have trouble with. There's that little thing they keep talking about -- socialism.

By their definition, just about any government program is socialist, including -- especially including -- the military. But given the right's propensity for hired mercenaries, maybe they'd like to open the military to a free market system too. And they'd probably take no-bid contracts on it, which means the taxpayer would be paying wayyyyyy more for the hired hands than what we pay now.

We already know what they think about that other great socialist program -- public education. And the very idea that all Americans have equal access to affordable health care, well, that's just anti-American.

I don't know of Marx would be proud, but I bet he's laughing his ass off.

So, they don't know much about history, systems of economics or government, official documents or the law, and they have no problems displaying their ignorance and bigotry.

Talk about embarrassing. Sheesh. Then there's that little problem of our president's name. It's Barack Hussein Obama. Personally, I love it that we have a black president with a funny name, if for no other than to watch the right spin itself into a frenzy over the very idea of not having a president named John or Richard or Ronald or Herbert.

They do have a problem with this name, though. And we've already addressed the impeachment thing. Although these folk may think he should be impeached just because his name is similar to the guy who ordered other extremists to fly airplanes into buildings several years ago. A guy who, incidentally, is still at large despite our previous president's declaration that we would get him dead or alive.

Really, there's just so much wrong with this group. The good news, of course, is that they didn't quite draw the millions Fox "News" tells us they drew -- that's a lie. Five Thirty-eight compiled as many non-partisan estimates of crowd size for the rallies as it could, and came up with a total of 300,000 in about 350 cities across the country -- although I have some doubts about the non-partisanship of the estimate where I live. Regardless, that's a pathetic turnout. Why, more people than that turned out just in Washington for Obama's inaugural.

But that's just it. These folks think they're right, and they think they're a majority, both of which are demonstrably wrong. The truth is that they can't stand it that they are truly and clearly in the minority -- and it's a shrinking minority.

Must be horribly frightening for them. But it doesn't excuse their irrational behavior.

That behavior may be the most pathetic thing of all, But it's par for the course from bigoted extremists, who, while 100 percent responsible for their 0wn actions, are nevertheless quite demented.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Methinks they doth protest too much

The Department of Homeland Security -- with assistance from the FBI -- in a nine-page report, confirms what hate-group watchers have already said: that the activities of right wing extremists are on the rise since the election of Barack Obama, a Democrat, as president of these United States, and the severe economic downturn caused by Obama's predecessors.

That's no surprise to anyone with half a brain. It's what right-wing extremists -- also known as bigots, racists, homophobes and anti-government nutjobs -- do when a liberal black president takes office. Not that that's ever happened before.

The DHS definition of right wing extremism is quite specific.

Right Wing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

But apparently, the conservative bloggers, pundits and radio blowhards either can't read very well -- for which there is already ample evidence -- or they actually do consider themselves to be hate-oriented and antigovernment, because they've certainly gone ballistic over this report.

"Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real," reads Michelle "Lock me up in a concentration camp please" Malkin's headline, even though the word "conservative" doesn't appear in the report and it was begun under the Bush administration.

"Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Republican party," whines Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail columnist Don Surber, even though the word "Republican" is not mentioned in the report and the previous Republican administration requested it.

"The Constitution is a subversive manifesto per DHS," opines Cornell law professor William Jacobson, even though the report is clearly concerned with the potential for decidedly unonstitutional activities such as violent attacks.

"If the Bush administration had done this to left-wing extremists, it would be all over the press as an obvious trampling of the First Amendment rights of folks and dissent," said Republican radio host Roger Hedgecock, even though the Bush administration did initiate a similar report on left-wing extremism that was released by the Obama administration in January.

Some guy from Alabama who calls himself "The Other McCain" calls the report a "terrorist" smear against conservatives, with terrorist in quotes like that, even though the word "terrorist" appears exactly once in the report: at the end, in the paragraph that describes the purpose of the report and others in "a series of intelligence assessments."

"The report is the blueprint for Obama’s war on Conservatives and patriotic Americans," said Pam "I have no clue what I'm talking about" Geller, even though ... well, you get the picture.

Paranoid much? Or are these and others accidentally telling us the truth -- that they are, in fact, right wing extremists?

Because these same folks have no reservations about calling liberal and progressive organizations extremists -- or even calling Democrats traitors. And how many times have we heard that the president is a socialist?

But now they're all in a tither over the possibility that the Bad eVille government is watching them -- the same government that was all good and protecting the American citizens when it ordered warrantless wiretaps on said citizens during the Bush administration. But now that we have a Democratic president, they're clearly worried that they could be targets.

But weren't they the very ones saying that if we did nothing wrong, we have nothing to worry about from warrantless wiretaps?

Anyway, since these heretofore pretend mainstream conservatives are now acknowledging that they are, in fact, extremists, I say we hold 'em to it.

And since a bunch of 'em are claiming that the report is targeting today's teabaggery, even though the report makes no mention of the parties, I say we call today's events "extremist, right wing protests," just like they called protests against the Bush administration's many illegal activities "extremist left wing protests."

Turn about, is, after all, fair play, and we know the right is all about fair.

Although, I really can't recall any recent examples of left wing extremists bombing federal buildings or churches or shooting anti-abortion activists the way right wing extremists have bombed federal buildings, family planning clinics and gay bars and shot doctors who provide abortions.

But DHS is just picking on the poor right. It has no reason whatsoever to be concerned about potential violence.

News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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