Reply #8: Part 1: [View All]

[GrpCaptMandrake]

European leaders were looking for political "cover." When Kindasleazy Rice said "We don't torture," she gave them that.

Part 2: "the leading promoter of democracy" has been a leading promoter of torture since about 1637 and has proceeded unabated ever since. Colombia, Vietnam, Nicargua, Haiti, the Phillipines, the entire nineteenth, eighteenth and seventeenth centuries with the Native Americans. Thinking we're so freakin' moral is a palliative sap we self-administer to give ourselves moral "cover."

Cunningham didn't "get away with it." He's entered a guilty plea. The better, larger question is why we let the rest of Congress "get away with it." Why is capital punishment OK for a poor black man who murders a white man, but not for a rich white one who murders democracy?

None of this behavior would be countenanced in a democracy. This isn't a democracy and never has been. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was modelled on and significantly resembled the ancient Roman republic. That came to a screeching halt after the Civil War with the rise of the administrative state.

Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush have simply put the final nails in the Republic's very tight coffin. And that's the undercurrent of discontent that you feel.

The transition to fascism is always uncomfortable for those who see it and recognize it.

I hope nothing I've said is taken as being a smart aleck. It was not intended in such fashion.