This is from Slate, so I waited in vain for the “sure, you think torture is bad, but once you get past the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords…”:
My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster, was: “Why is a speechwriter who’s never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?” Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush’s abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you’re not an expert on a subject, shouldn’t you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists. Not once does he cite Army Doctrine—which warns of the negative consequences of torture and abuse. Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense’s opening statement in a war crimes trial.
While many of Thiessen’s opinions are appalling from a moral perspective (he justifies torture and abuse through the religious writings of St. Thomas Aquinas), the book is comprised of errors, omissions, and a whopping dose of fear-mongering.
Fred Hiatt recently hired Marc Thiessen at the Washington Post editorial page.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Thiessen is the jackass that once claimed to have as much war experience as Michael Ware – I watched on a CNN segment a year or so ago. His experience was leaving the Green Zone once with some senators on a fact finding junket which was guarded by a company of soldiers, for a couple of hours.
Michael Ware had a good laugh at this asshat chickenhawk.
Yutsano
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: So Peter Bergen would eat him for lunch. Not that these facts will discredit him in the eyes of Hiatt. Can that fishwrap officially die now?
JGabriel
Good article, Doug, thanks for the pointer.
.
Steeplejack
I sometimes wonder if we are beginning to see the final breakdown of American “exceptionalism.” We really don’t want to let go of the idea that we’re different, that we’re always the good guys. But that illusion has taken a hammering over the last
3050 years, and now we have reached a point where for more and more Americans the evidence is hard to ignore. We have government officials who authorized–and in some cases still promote–actions for which we executed Germans at the end of World War II. Torture. It doesn’t get much more black-and-white than that. And the effort to maintain the cognitive dissonance not to see that gets harder and harder, even for the mass of head-in-the-sand “real Americans.”For the mainstream media outlets there is an extra level of pain, because finally admitting all this raises the specter of their silent complicity and their complete failure to question any of this. So you get people like Thiessen making desperately contorted theological arguments that it wasn’t really torture, or if it was torture it was necessary, or whatever. It’s just so much “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” hair-splitting at this point.
Kryptik
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:
Who has the last laugh though? Thiessen has a job straight-peddling his pro-torture bullshit where he’s taken seriously (mostly due to proximity of similarly batshit individuals), while Michael Ware…still works for CNN. Who’s getting the better end of things here?
Kryptik
@Steeplejack:
Are you kidding? American Exceptionalism has never been at its strongest. Ok, not the kind de Tocqueville talked about, but the wingnut idea of American Exceptionalism: Whatever America does is right because We’re America and you’re not.
Torture, health care, economy, military integration, etc. No matter what else has worked across the world, especially in the fellow 1st World industrialized countries, our way is best, because America is by definition the best.
And as the idea of the US as the City on a Hill dies, so rises the world leader of Political Calvinball.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Kryptik: Whichever, but either way, Theissen is a chickenhawk POS. Nothing changes that. It is why we have special rules for handicapping the white majority party. They need the extra stroking to stay in the game, and to keep their plutocrat masters in control. Follow the money.
Steeplejack
@Kryptik:
I think it’s getting harder to maintain the illusion. That’s why the noise level is higher. “I can’t hear you! La-la-la-la-la!” Fingers in ears.
ajr22
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: I remember that interview. At the time I didn’t really know Thieson, but remember thinking he was a huge idiot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WMIJEVq-Y
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@ajr22: Wow. That’s pretty damn quick finding that clip. I thought about trying, but figured it would be too hard since it happened so long ago. Good work!
TenguPhule
Is it a war crime to execute war criminals still breathing free?
ajr22
@General Egali Tarian Stuck:The youtube machine is great!
ajr22
By the way, I’m watching that video again and it is an epic destruction. Ware hits him with about 12 knock out blows, and then laughs at his responses. Theison seems like he is gonna cry.
Allan
Thiessen is a ferret-faced pusbucket. And those are his good qualities.
asiangrrlMN
@Kryptik: Gotta agree with you here. Hm. I seem to be doing that a lot. I am glad that there is more than a murmur against this bullshit, but look how far the conversation on torture has moved in the last decade. It’s discouraging, to say the least.
arguingwithsignposts
Because you can use pretty words, you can get a job on the WaPo op-ed page. Kill. me. now.
And he pulls the 9/11 card as being “under fire.” {head/desk}
not to blogwhore, but i’m dj-ing at blip.fm – 2liveis2fly is my username.
Yutsano
If y’all haven’t watched that video, watch it. Mrs Dan Senor spends virtually all her moderation time saving poor Marky from the big bad Aussie who knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Our wonderful liberal media at work right there.
@asiangrrlMN: YESH!! We needs more kitteh!
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: You know what we need? Moar SMUDGE!
@Yutsano: Oh, OK. But only if you insist.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Holy shit. Marc Thiessen is a smug, ugly, smarmy asshat who doesn’t know anything! Michael Ware looks like he wants to punch out Marc Thiessen.
Good god. Marc Thiessen is a tool. 9/11? He pulled that out? Good fucking god. Oh, whiny Marc Thiessen has to ask mommy to interfere!
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: If I’ve never mentioned before how much I love Australians and their attitude towards scrapping before, I have been sorely remiss. Ware would have throttled Thiessen as the smarmy idiot he was and not even Mrs Senor was gonna save his bacon there.
Kryptik
@Steeplejack:
Of course, they only need to maintain the illusion as far as our coasts and borders. Who cares what the rest of the world thinks after all long as you can get the “Joe the Plumber” demographic to get huffy about allowing accused Terrorists (with the ‘accused’ part conveniently left out of the conversation more often than not) getting THEIR American-born rights.
@Yutsano:
Can you really chalk it up to Ware’s Australianness? I think most human beings with some sense of common decency would have wanted to land a punch right between Thiessen’s eyes.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: No shit. I couldn’t finish listening. I would have punched Thiessen in his smarmy face, and I am a pacifist! Angry pacifist, yes, but pacifist, nonetheless.
@Kryptik: Wait a minute! I’m from the Midwest. Don’t lump me in with Not-Joe-not-the-Plumber!
Kryptik
@asiangrrlMN:
I think you along with nigh everyone who comments here (outside of a certain BOB and Makewi, amongst others) are safely out of the Sam the Joe demo. Then again, you DID put that denial up pretty quickly. Hrmmm…
So, asiangrrlMN, are you now or have you ever been a plumber? Don’t make me call in the HUAC, now!
Bill E Pilgrim
@ajr22: I just watched that video, and the fact that that guy was given a column at the Washington Post says more about the decline of our country than anything else could.
Yeah, we had jingoistic McCarthy periods before and all the rest of it, but they aren’t looked back on as our high points or anything to be proud of, and this has definitely been one of them.
When all of this is over there’s going to be a terrible evaluation of what we became over the last decade, an evaluation which has already started but certainly not finished, and it will leave the country hollowed out and questioning its very core beliefs and so on, and you don’t come out of those unchanged.
Who knows, over the long haul, where things go but I can tell you from seeing it first hand and intimately that that’s the feeling at the core of certain countries who are forever looking back at the moment when the sense of permanent decline started, and it involved things that looked very similar to this.
asiangrrlMN
@Kryptik: Hey, what I claim to be is my little secret! I will never tell.
@Bill E Pilgrim: Eloquently said. Sad as hell, but very sound.
GregB
Thiessen is just another pasty-faced, dimple-assed armchair warrior talking head like the Cheney Junta(Dick, Lynne and mini-Dick) who’ve never been near cheerleader slap-fight, never mind an actual battle who think that elbowing their way to the front of the line of a buffet is doing is worthy of a purple heart.
God I hate these assholes.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I listened mostly just to listen to Ware talking (yeah yeah yeah the Aussie accent makes me weak, sue me) but also to see how much Mrs Senor was gonna save Marky’s bacon there.
@Kryptik: I also chart it up to Ware having a low bullshit tolerance. Embedding in a war situation lets you build bonds with the troops you’re serving with. They develop a relationship that is hard to understand from the outside. When Ware recognized Thiessen was a clown pretending to understand the situation in Iraq Ware pounced. The only thing saving Thiessen in this whole exchange was Mrs Senor.
asiangrrlMN
@GregB: But, but, but, he has been to Iraq! He was there on 9/11! How dare you impugn his manliness, Sir! Like I said, he makes ME want to punch him.
@Yutsano: I just couldn’t listen to Thiessen any more. God. What a total prick.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I got to the point where I tuned Thiessen out. He stopped making any sort of points not even halfway through. Or it’s just my masochist tendencies showing again.
Mark S.
How stupid do you have to be to buy this argument?
Next on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, Are We Water-Boarding Enough?
(I don’t believe for a second that we only water-boarded three people. And it’s a fact that a hell of a lot more than three were subjected to “enhanced interrogation.”)
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I couldn’t tune him out. He has the petulant whine down pat, and it penetrated all my defenses.
@Mark S.: I would say willfully-ignorant rather than stupid. They need the end result of U-S-A, U-S-A!, and they will twist the means to get there.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Maybe it comes from teaching grade schoolers oboe, but I got very very good at minimizing a noise that really annoys me. At any rate, the sniveling rat just prattled on and this beautiful Aussie baritone cut him to ribbons.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: True. I did get a tingle up my leg every time Ware spoke with that sneer cutting across his face.
P.S. If there ever is a biopic of Bernie Madoff, Alan Rickman HAS to play him. I will brook no argument on this point.
Mark S.
@asiangrrlMN:
That reminded me of one of the all time great chickenhawk statements by Hugh Hewitt:
What’s hilarious (and I didn’t know this until now) is that the Michael he’s talking to Michael Ware.
It’s like we’ve come full circle or something.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: It was actually rather easy imagining Ware eating Thiessen like a rabid animal. In fact there would be no contest if that confrontation ever got physical. What I would pay to hear Ware call Thiessen an assclown. I think I would be turned on for days.
asiangrrlMN
@Mark S.: Holy shit. I had forgotten that. Good god. I think Michael Ware should have a full-time job just punching down the rightwing chickenhawks. Damn.
@Yutsano: No shit. Seriously, we need a reality show featuring Michael Ware taking down rightwing batshitcrazies. I would actually watch that one.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Wet dream for both of us: Michael Ware and Rachel Maddow tag teaming. The bloody bodies left in their wake would be phenomenal.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: I was just watching today’s Maddow. Oh yeah, baby. I would watch that show twenty-four seven. Maddow could be the sweet one, leading the hapless prey into the trap before Ware springs in and verbally slits the prey’s throat. Very nice. Holy shit. I’m getting turned on just imagining the two of them taking down Liz Cheney.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: Oh man I watched Rachel today too. She wants Liz Cheney so bad she was almost spitting about it. Of course Spawn of Shaytan won’t dare go on. She wouldn’t even need Ware for that smackdown, although it would indeed be a delicious sight.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: No kidding. I like how Maddow is not backing down from Cheney–not one little bit. Maddow has ovaries. I admire her for that.
ajr22
I like the part at the end, when they come back and are supposed to say something they agree on. Theison says “we can both agree that no torture took place at guantanamo.” Uhh no. I wish Ware just said we can both agree Theison is to big a bitch to do what these soldiers do and he doesn’t want to send his first son over there to fight. Also he may one day get caught leaving a gay night club drunk.
Yutsano
@ajr22: Oh Gawd. I don’t even want to come close to claiming that simpering weasel. Of course just from watching him he’s a total closet case (then again what pasty soft Republican these days isn’t?) so I’m pretty much losing the battle there. Sigh. Get off my sexual orientation plz.
@asiangrrlMN: This is where I’m so glad I know the Spanish slang for balls. Huevos, which is literally eggs. So to say she has huevos fits even if she does have indoor plumbing.
asiangrrlMN
@ajr22: I couldn’t watch until the end. I just couldn’t. Why the fuck they gotta agree about anything? I think we can all agree that Ware OWNED Thiessen in that clip.
@Yutsano: Excellent. Huevos. I dig it. Yeah, isn’t it infuriating that many of these asshats play for YOUR team?
Mark S.
@ajr22:
Yeah, I liked how Candy was really hurt that Ware wouldn’t agree that no torture occurred at Gitmo.
Stooleo
The thing about American Exceptionalism that I recall is; isn’t NOT torturing prisoners, part and parcel to that? (sorry for the double negative)
asiangrrlMN
@Stooleo: U-S-A!! U-S-A!! Oh, I’m sorry. Were you saying something?
Mark S.
@Stooleo:
9/11 changed everything, including what we are exceptional at.
Of course we aren’t exceptional in that we torture; we are exceptional in that we’re the only people who torture because we love freedom so much.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: My opinion? Unless you got the huevos to admit that you’re a raging homo, you’re not on my team. I realize that sounds awful tribal of me, but IMHO you don’t get the benefits of gay sex without the social ramifications, especially when you’re active in keeping those social stigmas in place. So if you’re a closeted gay Republican get the hell outta my sexual orientation.
ajr22
@Mark S.: I thought we all agreed we didn’t torture?
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Agreed. Hypocritical and contemptuous all wrapped up in one package. They are in a class of their own.
@ajr22: OK, now I am laughing hysterically, and I haven’t had a drop to drink all night.
@Yutsano: Did you see those clips of W. on Maddow yesterday? I cringed just remembering how inadequate he was.
Yutsano
@ajr22: That must be true because The Decider said so and Yoo and Bybee backed him up on that! WOLVERINES!!
ajr22
I’m still amazed how easily Cheney and his gang of hacks have changed the debate from holy shit we are running a torture ring, to we only tortured three people, to is enhanced interrogation ok? to you are a pussy if you don’t take every brown person we catch and shock their balls with jumper cables. Now they are accusing lawyers representing anyone they accuse of terrorism traitors. depressing.
Mark S.
@Yutsano:
That reminds me of one of my favorite Kids in the Hall sketches (actually from their movie).
Dogs know it!
ajr22
I’m still amazed how easily Cheney and his gang of hacks have changed the debate from holy shit we are running a torture ring, to we only tortured three people, to is enhanced interrogation ok? to you are weak if you don’t take every brown person we catch and shock their balls with jumper cables. Now they are accusing lawyers representing anyone they accuse of turrism traitors. depressing.
Yutsano
@Mark S.: HA! Awesome.
@asiangrrlMN: Missed that unfortunately. Work flipping my start times pretty much fucked me up. And I really haven’t recovered from that yet, so I’m out.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: Night, babe!
@Mark S.: Ha! That’s fuuuuuunnnnnny!
@ajr22: I know. It really saddens me how we’ve shifted so seamlessly to ‘only tortured three people’.
And, I’m out, too. Night, all!
slightly_peeved
I’d claim nothing particularly Australian in cutting a fool down to size; that belongs to the world, and there are plenty of Australian fools it doesn’t get done to enough.
That being said, something core to the Australian ethos is mocking stuck-up pricks (historically the English, but we’ll take all comers) and Thiessen was so, fucking, begging for it. Michael’s expression and delivery were a masterclass in How To Mock a Stuck-Up Prick, Australian style.
SRW1
Well, Marc Theissen was a speech writer for Bush the Lesser. Isn’t that like a commissioned officer in the 101st Chairborne?
Batocchio
Matthew Alexander has delivered some of the best op-eds and interviews on this subject. Predictably, the torture apologist crowd has almost completely ignored him, as they have ignored almost all of the historical record, expert testimony, and the actual record of what the Bush administration did. Thiessen and others claim torture “works” because of 1) claims from people in legal jeopary for war crimes and 2) they saw it on 24. Seriously. That’s all they’ve got. But that’s more than enough for Wolf Blitzer!
Redhand
Yeah, I’m sure the clerics running the Spanish inquisition though they were doing God’s work too.
Redhand
Yeah, I’m sure the clerics running the Spanish Inquisition though they were doing God’s work too.
someguy
@ Stooleo
The only thing really exceptional about America is that it is an exceptionally badly behaved nation most of the time, including dressing up that bad behavior in shiny clothes. As for torture – don’t worry about it! We’ve stopped doing it.
Sort of. Technically, outsourcing it to other countries is consistent with the statement “we’ve stopped doing it.” Sure, we’re complicit. We may even be asking them to do it. But we aren’t the ones doing it. So we’re exceptional again! Yay! Now everybody loves us!
kommrade reproductive vigor
LAT has an ill-informed chicken shit neo-con on its op-ed page. Fred wanted one for the WaPo too.
Bill E Pilgrim
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
One??
POST OPINION WRITERS
Jackson Diehl
Michael Gerson
Fred Hiatt
Robert Kagan
William Kristol
Robert Samuelson
Marc Thiessen
George Will
I probably left some out, and no George Will doesn’t quite exactly qualify as a Neocon, but he might as well for how extreme right wing he is at times.
Those are just the steady regulars, then there are guest columns regularly by Karl Rove, Sarah Palin and others.
Kristol and Kagan are the two top Neocon theorists out there. Adding another is beyond absurd. You’d really have to have Noam Chomsky and an entire cast of imitators to have anything like “balance” to this rogues gallery. They imagine that it’s balanced by extreme left wing liberals like….. Michael Kinsley.
serge
My father was an authority on Thomas Aquinas. He taught his work over the 400-500 years of his tenure at Georgetown. My father was also buried at Arlington National (something he would have hated) with full military honors. It turns out he had been short-listed for a Congressional Medal of Honor.
I expect him to explode from his grave. Thiessen is a toady, opportunistic, anti-intellectual, evil dollop of smegma.
mai naem
Marc Thiessen et al have just grown up watching Bruce Willis action movies and think that’s the way stuff works in real life. Really no different then eighteen yr olds who think they can afford a “Friends” type apartment in Manhattan by working as a barrista at Starbucks. Except that these jerks actually influence govt policy.
kay
I’m not a biblical scholar, and I’m not nearly as morally superior as any random conservative, but something really important has gotten lost here.
There’s a simple moral justification for not torturing people in your custody. They’re yours. You’re responsible for their welfare. You assumed that responsibility when you tied their hands and locked them up.
The custodian, the jailer, has rendered them helpless. They can’t flee and they can’t fight back.
That’s what “in custody” means.
That’s why it’s cowardly to slam them into a wall. They can’t defend themselves.
Cat Lady
The pro-torture chickenhawks are to a man ugly (inside and out) soft-handed man-boobed pasty faced losers (cough Cheney cough) who were shoved into lockers in high school and as adults have all joined The Torturer Apologist Club to act out some kind of twisted psychological adolescent payback fantasy. The fact that they’re allowed to influence policy is the shame that is our FAIL media.
me
@kay: What are you some lily-livered pantywaist? We own them like a child with a Gi-Joe and an M-80 or a cat with a mouse and we’ll make them talk! If what they say is true that’s gravy! Cause when you reach over and put your hand into a pile of goo that was your best friend’s face, you’ll know what to do! Forget it, Marge, it’s Chinatown!
Svensker
(In my best Ralph Kramden voice) And do you know WHY Fred Hiatt hired Marc Thiessen? Do you know WHY? Because Fred’s a fucking neo-con warmonger, that’s why.
John O
@Steeplejack:
This.
Linda Featheringill
Good morning, folks.
About the torture thing: The whole scene fills me with shame. The problem is that I am not the one who should be ashamed. That burden is being borne by the wrong people.
Of course, there is very little justice in life. The really disgusting people will probably never see the ugliness they have created.
Svensker
Oh God, just listened to the Ware/Thiessen thing. Twits like Thiessen are why the Republican party
is dead to medeserves to DIAF and have its crispy corpse stabbed through the heart eleventy billion times with a silver cross, before being tied to an anvil, thrown into the deepest part of the ocean and then being blown up with a very large nuclear bomb.John O
@Svensker:
Never really got Gleason’s appeal, but that really made me laugh.
(I also seem to have been shorted in the Stooges gene dept.)
Svensker
@John O:
Me, too, although my brother doing a Stooges bit could always get me ROFL. Why was he funny, but the original wasn’t? Ah, the mysteries of life.
WereBear
@John O: Jackie Gleason was a genius.
He understood pathos (which led to him overreaching when he had the chance to make his own movie) but there are few actors able to take a raging, idiotic, blowhard and make him lovable.
After much involuntary study, I’ve concluded that wingers think taking over media outlets, and putting forth their evil opinions, moves the needle and makes it okay.
Jamie
hey, hey hey. Paranoid. sadists need a pundit too
jeffreyw
Gah…morning again. More coffee! STAT! Mr Hawk was back yesterday after a few days absence. Had me worried.
Brian J
I try to be charitable to these guys, because while I find most if not all of what they say repulsive, I don’t think they are actively trying to hurt the country. In their twisted minds, what they are doing is best for the country.
That said, it’s getting harder and harder to do that. It really never occurred to them to interview anyone who has experience with torture? Give me a goddamn break.
And while I try not to actively cheer on the demise of (parts of) newspapers, even ones I might disagree with, it’s become easier to do that with The Post. What is the point of hiring so many former Bush officials? It’s as if there’s no points of disagreement among each of those guys. If the whole point of an opinion page is to expose people to different view points, why not hire someone whose opinions are on the extreme left?
mr. whipple
@jeffreyw: Whoa! Nice shot!
Ash Can
@Svensker: Could be context, timing, delivery, any number of things. I know that for me in a similar situation, it was pace. If I sat and watched Beavis and Butthead or Seinfeld, I’d be bored to tears. But when the husband sat and watched them, then summarized the episodes for me afterward, I’d crack up. Tell me those jokes in two minutes, I laugh. Stretch them out over a half an hour…zzzzz.
SiubhanDuinne
@Svensker:
You just started my Saturday morning to perfection! Please let’s make this happen.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Bill E Pilgrim: Chucky Krauthammer.
Point taken. How about A ill-informed chickenshit neo-con who graduated from a formerly all female college?
Some days I think I should start spewing radical neo-crap and wait for Fred to knock on my door.
Kryptik
@Brian J:
Because of the impression that the Op-ed board is some lefty wonderland in need of a conservative balance. Hiatt, Kurtz, and others at the post peddle that excuse, and people like the WOOOOONDERFUL folks at Daily Beast buy it to the point of listing Hiatt as one of the top 5 most influential LIBERAL journalists in the country.
In other words, high tolerance for bullshit plus no consequences for lying, plus HIGH consequences for being a lefty of any stripe.
Brian J
@Kryptik:
Is there anything to the idea that Hiatt is a liberal? I don’t read The Post very often, so most of my exposure to these people is through blogs and television. Is it one of those things where people can say Lieberman is a Democrat because, in some ways, he is, even if it’s a real pain in the ass, or is it a complete fantasy?
Ash Can
@jeffreyw: Beautiful photo! And isn’t it funny how attached we get to these critters? I’ve been fretting all winter because I haven’t seen any slate-colored juncos this year. I start putting seeds out in the fall and keep it up through the spring migratory period, and every year I can count on seeing juncos in the back yard along with cardinals, sparrows (of course), mourning doves, and blue jays. This year it’s been almost exclusively sparrows, and no juncos at all, except for a few in November and one that I finally spotted yesterday. There have also been fewer cardinals, and far fewer mourning doves. I know that populations fluctuate from year to year, but I’m still concerned.
Kryptik
@Brian J:
From what I’ve seen, it’s so fantastical as to be laughable. Everything I’ve seen from him marks him as a full blown Bush Republican. He may have something in his earlier career that gave him some kind of liberal credentials, but you can even mark the difference in the OpEd section since he became the head of it. Full bore tilt right, and his own personal op-eds reflect this fully. He’s ‘liberal’ by pure dint of working for the ‘liberal media’, as far as I’ve seen, and that’s it.
SiubhanDuinne
@Svensker, Ash Can:
Here’s another who has never much liked or appreciated Gleason, Stooges, Seinfeld — to which names I would add Jerry Lewis, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, and I’m sure I’ll think of others the second I hit the submit button. But I have a brother who does a pitch-perfect Jerry Lewis and he has me in tears of helpless mirth every single time, and a friend who does a Seinfeldesque routine that dissolves me just as quickly. Curious, and I’ve never been able to figure out why I find some comedians or comics boring at best, while other (amateur) wits just crack me up. As Ash Can says, could be timing, delivery, context, or many other factors.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@jeffreyw: The Incoming Bluejay picture made me snort coffee all over.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Ash Can: We’ve had them here (D.C.) this winter but now that you mention it, not as many as in past years.
Of course it’s been 15 – 30 degrees colder than normal and we’ve had three Snowpacalypses so I’m guessing they stayed away.
Dan Robinson
From the review:
Amen. The sorry bastards who occupied the government for eight years were more interested in a permanent Republican majority than in defeating terrorists.
jeffreyw
@mr. whipple:
@Ash Can:
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Thank ya all for the kind words.
Just got this mounted on the camera, hope to get more and better pics of flying critters.
Brian J
@Kryptik:
That’s what I thought.
jeffreyw
Ack! moderation for thanking too many people, I guess
Wanted to show off cool new way to take pics of flying birdies.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw: I love your hawk, and I’m in increasing awe of your photographic skills. But c’mon, you can hardly blame him for disappearing for a few days. I mean, the blue jays in your neighbourhood evade his cruel claws *every single time*, and hey, a hawk’s gotta eat. Plus, this time of year I imagine he’s got a wife back home nursing a clutch of eggs or hawklingchicks, and she probably told him in no uncertain terms to check out more productive hunting grounds. So that’s why he’s been away.
jeffreyw
@SiubhanDuinne:
That awe would certainly diminish greatly could you but see the log of deleted pics. LOL
Svensker
@Ash Can:
So THAT’S what those little guys are! I was thinking they were an odd looking titmouse or chickadee — thank you for solving that little mystery!
Mike in NC
Precisely. Which is why they keep slinging this bullshit, and will continue to do so until the Washington Post and the rest of them are able to enthusiastically endorse Mitt “Double Gitmo” Romney in 2012. It’s going to happen.
SiubhanDuinne
@jeffreyw:
Not at all. It simply means that you have a high measure of aesthetic judgment and artistic taste to go along with the technical skills.
jeffreyw
@SiubhanDuinne: Thank you Ma’am, you are too kind.
batgirl
This is all you need to know about Mark Thiessen and friends when it comes to torture: America doesn’t torture, q.e.d. anything America does cannot be defined as torture. That is the extent of their intelligence and logic. It is American exceptionalism taken to its absolute exchange: The United States can do no wrong. The U.S. is always right and always the best. Suck. On. That.
WereBear
@batgirl: Indeed.
Is is subterfuge when they are telling us what they think, and we openly find it appalling? Or is it overtfuge, then?
asiangrrlMN
@SiubhanDuinne: Ditto this. jeffreyw, you have a great eye for the perfect composition.
@SiubhanDuinne: Me, four or five or six! Yeah, shorter makes them funnier. Like reading shorter neo-cons makes them…bearable.
@Brian J: Duh! Eugene Robinson and EJ Dionne. (Yes, that’s sarcasm, though I love me some Eugene).
asiangrrlMN
@WereBear: It’s appalling. That’s what it is. Or rather, the appalling part is that the media (as a whole) laps it up.
WereBear
@asiangrrlMN: Fortunately, I think they are destroying people’s trust in them as a good source of information. That’s why the Daily Show and Colbert use how the news is handled as a point of satire, and might be doing more good for the public than any other shows on television now.
I know, it’s surreal and highly ironic! These are the times we are apparently in.
Jonny Scrum-half
I agree with everyone here who says that the way we’ve treated “detainees” is shameful and not consistent with what I understood to be American ideals. But I had a conversation with some older relatives last week — one a former peacetime Marine and the other a Korean war veteran — who complained matter-of-factly that people were making a big deal out of how we treat detainees when during WW2 it wasn’t uncommon simply to kill enemy troops rather than take them as prisoners (at least in the Asian theater, according to another relative who earned a Silver Star for his actions in the Pacific).
My relatives live in wealthy East-coast suburbs. They are intelligent, thoughtful people. They are not the stereotypical “teabagger” or “redneck” types. But they are almost reflexively incapable of looking at things even somewhat objectively, without the “American exceptionalism” blinders that have so distorted our world view.
I understand that sometimes people have to take horrible action in order to prevent or oppose even greater evil. But I’m concerned that the people who have authorized and are attempting to legitimize the wrongful treatment of detainees (and even torture) are going to end up destroying at least some of the ideals upon which America was founded. Once you say that torture is not only acceptable, but appropriate if it might save innocent lives, there’s really no intellectually honest reason not to use the same techniques in law enforcement against criminal suspects.
Mike G
I’m sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I’m sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target…Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago.
Shorter Huge Assclown Hewitt:
I’m standing on the very ground where the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest was fought between the Romans and the Germanic tribes in 9AD. This makes me practically a Centurion and an expert on all military matters.
WereBear
@Jonny Scrum-half: Yes, I agree:
But that is how we can make it a pivotal moment; if we can create a groundswell of opposing thought. And I think we are.
At some point, a focus will be reached and we can set our (the voter’s) natural will in motion. Because there’s no question that the Senate is thwarting the will of the majority of voters. So it doesn’t matter that the Senate was designed that way. It’s been doing it way too much lately.
Time for some separation of powers.
Jonny Scrum-half
WereBear — I hope you’re right, but my experience with my relatives suggests that “the will of the voters” might not lean the way you and I would like.
Steeplejack
@Jonny Scrum-half:
Horrible things happen in wartime, but that they happen doesn’t make them okay. And it certainly doesn’t make it okay to extrapolate them from a conventional, “declared” war to a gray area that probably should be treated not as a war but as a criminal law enforcement issue with some military aspects. The “war on terror”–WTF does that even mean? As long as there is one crazy person anywhere who is willing to throw a bomb in aid of his cause, the war is not over. Good times. Compare and contrast with, say, how various European governments dealt with the bomb-throwing radicals of the ’70s.
In many ways the Pacific campaign in World War II was a race war, with both sides seeing the other as subhuman. It was extremely brutal. I highly recommend E.B. Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed (1981) as an eloquent, chilling account of infantry combat in the Pacific. It is one of the source documents for the upcoming HBO miniseries The Pacific.
Redshift
At least the title of the book is accurate. Just not in the way Thiessen thinks it is…
WereBear
@Steeplejack: On your rec, I got that for my Kindle, but am keeping it for a good long stretch of time.
Steeplejack
@WereBear:
I have been thinking about rereading it in advance of the HBO series. I’m not a huge military history buff, but it is a damn good book. Sledge joined the Marines in December 1942 at age 19 and saw combat on Peleliu and Okinawa. He kept handwritten notes in a Bible that he carried with him, then worked on the book on and off for years before it was published.
WereBear
@Steeplejack: I am sure I will read the book first, since I no longer have HBO, and will have to wait for it to appear through some other outlet for the filmed version.
It’s inevitable to make comparisons in any case, and I prefer reading the book first.
Jonny Scrum-half
Steeplejack @ 110 — I completely agree with your first paragraph. Also, thanks for the book recommendation. The battle of Pelilieu was where one of my wife’s relatives earned the Silver Star, and we’re going to purchase the book to read about that campaign. (He won’t discuss it except in the most vague terms.)
TuiMel
Whenever I think about Pelilieu, I always think of this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/US_Marine_in_Action_at_Peleliu_Island_1944.gif
A thousand words as they say…
Steeplejack
@WereBear:
The Pacific is being done by the same people who did Band of Brothers, which I thought was excellent, but I am wondering about them possibly “softening” things. The Pacific campaign was horrific. Unlike Europe, much of it was fought on islands uninhabited or lightly inhabited by civilians, so it was total war. (Not that civilians were spared. There were mass suicides of civilians on Okinawa, a Japanese “home” island, because they had been brainwashed to think the Americans were going to torture and kill everyone.) The Japanese had a long history of atrocities from the very beginning of the war, and too often the Americans responded in kind. The Japanese military saw themselves as members of a master race, and the Americans saw the Japanese as “monkeys” or “yellow Nips.” As I said before, it had elements of a race war.
Steeplejack
@Jonny Scrum-half:
If you read Sledge’s book you will understand why.