Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

I really should read my own blog.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Don’t expect peaches from an apple tree.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

People are weird.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

American History and Black History can not be separated.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

You are here: Home / Politics / War on Terror / War on Terror aka GSAVE® / Irony

Irony

by | 32 Comments

This post is in: 

The next move in the Guantanamo clusterfuck may be a signing statement asserting the administration’s right to determine prosecutions:

While the signing statement and the executive order would leave some room for Obama, they would do little to bring his policy goals to fruition. Over the last two years, Congress and the administration, working separately and in conflict, have woven together a complicated set of categories, policies and restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to close Guantanamo.

What the White House once saw as bipartisan support for shuttering the prison soon became a bipartisan effort to thwart the administration’s plans.

The spending measure effectively bars the president from prosecuting any detainees in federal court or conducting military commission trials on U.S. soil. The bill makes it increasingly difficult to transfer detainees to foreign countries, even if the administration deems them safe to release. And it complicates the review process Obama plans in the executive order for nearly 50 detainees the administration has designated as too dangerous to free.

We’re down to 174 prisoners in Guantanamo, and it looks like they’ve all been effectively sentenced to life in prison.

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  1. 1.

    cleek

    i like how our much-touted “American values” like “innocent till proven guilty”, “the right to a trial”, etc. are shown to be empty slogans when we’re confronted with scary people. they aren’t so much values as grudgingly-accepted procedures.

    and then there’s: “oh noes, we couldn’t possibly let those people have access to our courts! they aren’t even American! our laws don’t apply! don’t you know the Constitution, harharhar! stupid libruls! oh, and when are we going to try Julian Assange for treason?”

  2. 2.

    JPL

    If the President has a signing statement about gitmo, the Republican House will start impeachment hearings.

  4. 4.

    Nick

    @cleek:

    i like how our much-touted “American values” like “innocent till proven guilty”, “the right to a trial”, etc. are shown to be empty slogans when we’re confronted with scary people. they aren’t so much values as grudgingly-accepted procedures.

    this is hardly a new thing, we’ve been talking out of both sides of our mouths since the Whiskey Rebellion.

  5. 5.

    Sly

    @Nick:

    this is hardly a new thing, we’ve been talking out of both sides of our mouths since the Whiskey Rebellion.

    The only thing we have to fear is… a Japanese Fifth Column!

  6. 6.

    Comrade Javamanphil

    @cleek:

    i like how our much-touted “American values” like “innocent till proven guilty”, “the right to a trial”, etc. are shown to be empty slogans when we’re confronted with scary people. they aren’t so much values as grudgingly-accepted procedures.

    Every good American knows the founding fathers enshrined in the Constitution the right to a trial assuming you look sufficiently European and speak American. McVeigh was a scary person and yet we found a way to put him on trial. Wonder what makes him different than the remaining Gitmo prisoners…nope, can’t come up with a thing.

  7. 7.

    magurakurin

    but, but what about the bully pulpit?

    Niagara Falls…slowly he turned…step by step…

    lemon curry?

  8. 8.

    Dave

    I just love the fact Obama is going to use Bush’s tool against the GOP. All he needs to do now is bust out the “unitary executive” theory when Issa comes calling with some bullshit hearing subpoena.

  12. 12.

    Chris

    Every time this issue comes up, I think of Carlos the Jackal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_jackal). One of the most wanted men in the world in his day, super star of seventies/eighties left wing radical terrorism, arguably the Osama Bin Laden of his day.

    And how did his career end? He was captured by the French in a deal made with the Sudanese government, then put on trial in Paris like a common criminal, found guilty, and locked up in jail where he remains to this day. Why we don’t think that system would work on al-Qaeda types, I’ll never figure out.

  14. 14.

    Jude

    If he has to use a signing statement, we should just have the President start wearing a purple toga. I mean, shit. And fuck those weak-ass Congresspeople for running away from applying the laws to people. What a bunch of sniveling little fucks.

  19. 19.

    CVS

    Guantanamo in an affront to even the most basic understanding of human rights. If that is too high-brow for most people in this country, then we really need to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

  20. 20.

    Uloborus

    Gosh. So it turns out that Obama’s been trying to close Guantanamo and have these prisoners fairly tried all along? And he’s been forced to bend into knots to get anything done whatsoever, because congress is so united in stopping him that they can override his vetoes with ease?

    It’s almost as if Obama’s record on civil liberties is actually just fine, and it’s been wildly misrepresented with half-truths and context left out by True Liberals and Civil Libertarians to the more moderate liberals who are merely passionate about civil rights!

  21. 21.

    Alwhite

    @Sly:
    I’d probably vote for Bo before I’d vote for some of those that Blew Dogs.

    @c u n d gulag:
    Kafka was exactly what I thought of when I read this but I doubt there are (outside this blog) more than a dozen people left in the US that even get the reference.

    And this is how an empire dies, strangled by its own hands

  23. 23.

    Uloborus

    @Alwhite:
    And rumors of the death of the republic are greatly exaggerated. This is no Alien And Sedition Act, or WWII internment camp of American citizens for the crime of being oriental. This is disgusting, but the US has survived much worse than this.

    Hell, compared to living through the Cold War? I feel positively relaxed, these days. Armageddon has been predicted in every generation by every society facing every problem since… at least the putative birth of Christ. And actually before – one of the major reasons that took off was that people were sure Rome would fall any minute. I’m not sure 1500 years (they were in the Eastern branch) counts as ‘any minute’.

    EDIT – It appears I am habitually sarcastic before breakfast. My apologies, but around here it’s probably a better arguing tactic anyway.

  24. 24.

    Shinobi

    Any real patriot wants Guantanamo closed now. Helping those prisoners to escape and find asylumn would truly be the act of an American hero. Guantanamo is a gigantic hairy wart on the face of this great nation.

    /maudlin patriotism

  25. 25.

    Stefan

    Kafka was exactly what I thought of when I read this but I doubt there are (outside this blog) more than a dozen people left in the US that even get the reference.

    Someone must have slandered Yusuf K. for, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

  26. 26.

    Nutella

    @Chris:

    So you’re saying that cheese-eating surrender monkeys can succeed at capturing, trying, and imprisoning terrorists and we can’t?

    Rich Lowry‘s head just exploded.

    Well, it would have if it wasn’t made of solid granite.

  27. 27.

    Svensker

    @Chris:

    He was captured by the French in a deal made with the Sudanese government, then put on trial in Paris like a common criminal, found guilty, and locked up in jail where he remains to this day. Why we don’t think that system would work on al-Qaeda types, I’ll never figure out.

    Because they CUT OFF PEOPLE’S HEADS. Duh.

  28. 28.

    burnspbesq

    @Uloborus:

    Gosh. So it turns out that Obama’s been trying to close Guantanamo and have these prisoners fairly tried all along? And he’s been forced to bend into knots to get anything done whatsoever, because congress is so united in stopping him that they can override his vetoes with ease? It’s almost as if Obama’s record on civil liberties is actually just fine, and it’s been wildly misrepresented with half-truths and context left out by True Liberals and Civil Libertarians to the more moderate liberals who are merely passionate about civil rights!

    Shocking, innit?

  29. 29.

    burnspbesq

    @Shinobi:

    Any real patriot wants Guantanamo closed now. Helping those prisoners to escape and find asylumn would truly be the act of an American hero. Guantanamo is a gigantic hairy wart on the face of this great nation.

    First and last sentences, exactly right. Middle sentence, not so much. The American people need to nut up. “The only thing we have to fear is … fear itself.”

  30. 30.

    Chris

    @Nutella:

    So you’re saying that cheese-eating surrender monkeys can succeed at capturing, trying, and imprisoning terrorists and we can’t?

    1) Yes – French intelligence and security agencies are very good at what they do (luckily, cooperation between theirs and ours remained all through the 2000s even as our politicians threw tantrums at each other over Iraq).

    2) But, if memory serves, the Americans were also involved in the Sudanese deal that got Carlos the Jackal handed over. Yep, there was a time when we thought terrorism should be handled as a crime.

    Heck, I think even Reagan was saying that in the eighties. Something about how treating terrorism as anything other than a petty crime would help legitimize it, and changing our society in response to it would prove that it worked…

  31. 31.

    AxelFoley

    @Uloborus:

    Gosh. So it turns out that Obama’s been trying to close Guantanamo and have these prisoners fairly tried all along? And he’s been forced to bend into knots to get anything done whatsoever, because congress is so united in stopping him that they can override his vetoes with ease?
    It’s almost as if Obama’s record on civil liberties is actually just fine, and it’s been wildly misrepresented with half-truths and context left out by True Liberals and Civil Libertarians to the more moderate liberals who are merely passionate about civil rights!

    Well, we can’t expect the purists to get the facts right, now can we?

  32. 32.

    AAA Bonds

    What the White House once saw as bipartisan support for shuttering the prison soon became a bipartisan effort to thwart the administration’s plans.

    Pssssssssssssshhhh. Blatantly contradicted by the previous sentence (not to mention the Administration’s activities in court). I don’t know how people maintain this sort of cognitive dissonance. At the risk of hyperbole, this is approaching Brezhnev levels of doublethink.

    Obama supporters can criticize, and criticize heavily, places where he’s stepped off the track laid out in 2008. It doesn’t mean you’re giving up on him.

Comments are closed.