Of course, if he doesn’t bless us, we’ll attach wires to his nuts, force water into his lungs and beat him until he relents. We just can’t be too careful with an intergalactic free agent like that, whose name gets invoked on numerous battlefields and sports stadiums since we can’t tell exactly who he roots for. I mean, what if he’s a Toronto fan?

Why do we have to go through this mind-numbing discovery process about the origins of all the torture techniques that suddenly came in vogue under George Bush’s administration and watch our legislators pretend to be shocked that they came from an oppressive Communist country that successfully forced false confessions, too?

George Bush, in the year he gained the presidency, had already become the deadliest governor in US history and was averaging an execution every nine days then. If Texas was a country, it would have been the fifth deadliest in the world in applying the death sentence.

Since April of 2004, when the Abu Ghraib tortures first hit public light, we’ve had more than four years of reckoning on this torture topic. The American people sought to buy the initial administration excuses. Since it was ‘only a few bad apples’, we re-elected the rotted root six months later. Two years after that, enough Americans could see through that lie. Mom, hot dogs and the whole sour apple tree was clearly running a Soviet gulag, conducting Argentina-style renditions, and torture methods that track back through many dictators and hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition.

And enough Americans voted against all the rotten apples in November 2006.

Nearly two years later, despite the evidence, the memos of Bush’s ‘legal’ torture team, the lawsuits by formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated detainees, Congress continues to look at it all and gasp, then refuse to act.

“People who have lost their hunger for justice are not ultimately powerful. They are like sick people who have lost their appetite for what is truly nourishing. Such sick people should not frighten or discourage us. They should be prayed for along with the sick people who are in the hospital.” — Cesar Chavez

From April 2004, when Abu Ghraib reached our eyes, intelligence experts have said repeatedly that torture doesn’t work. It produces false information in most instances, it provides a means by which actual enemies can escape conviction and it’s repugnant to any and all civilized societies. And though the Bush administration claims it’s yielded useful information, they’ve never produced any evidence that backs up that claim.

The deadliest governor became the deadliest president we’ve had in the past 34 years. More Americans have died because of his choices than by any president since Nixon. More citizens and civilians of a foreign country have died, too. Bush has provided us our most expensive war and our third longest war. If Obama is elected and actually withdraws all our troops in 18 months, it will remain one year short of the American Revolution and one year short of the Vietnam War (from the Gulf of Tonkin resolution through the final withdrawal). And throughout this war and the War in Afghanistan that preceded it, Bush has been using the brutal and often ineffective techniques of the world’s worst war criminals.

Without Congressional penalties. Without judicial prosecution.

And the Democratic candidate for president remains predisposed to ignore the calls for justice, too. He calls instead for bipartisan compromise.

I can recall a bipartisan approach from an earlier era that dealt with a similarly sociopathically indifferent president. In 1970, South Dakota’s Senator McGovern and Oregon’s Senator Hatfield proposed an amendment to end the Vietnam War by December 31st of that year.

Via Wikipedia:

The amendment was heavily opposed by the administration of President Richard Nixon. A revision of the amendment intended to gain more widespread support extended the deadline for withdrawal to the end of 1971. Nevertheless, the amendment was opposed by Nixon and his backers in the Congress, who argued that a withdrawal deadline would devastate the American position in negotiations with North Vietnam. On September 1, 1970, the amendment failed by a 55-39 margin.

[edit] McGovern’s speech

Minutes before the voting began, McGovern appealed for support with the strongest and most emotional language he had ever used regarding the war:

“Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land - young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes.”

“There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes.”

“And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.”

“So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: “A contentious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.”

According to historian Robert Mann, McGovern’s brief, passionate speech shocked his Senate colleagues. As McGovern took his seat, most senators sat in stunned silence. “You could have heard a pin drop,” recalled John Holum, McGovern’s principal staff advisor on Vietnam. As the Senate prepared to begin voting on the amendment, one senator approached McGovern and indignantly told him that he had been personally offended by the speech. McGovern replied, “That’s what I meant to do.”[1]

Unlike then, we now have a Congress ready to exonerate telecom companies who broke the law and assisted a president who illegally spied on millions of Americans. A Congress with leaders who’ve repeatedly said there’ll be no impeachment of the people responsible for these atrocities.

This Congress also has lots of blood on its hands. The blood of women and children and babies. The crimes and practices of vicious dictators.

Every Senator. Every Representative. And every American.

Only unlike many of those other countries, there’ll be no prosecution of the ruthless and vicious responsible for the atrocities. On the Fourth of July, we’ll have fireworks and grand speeches to celebrate 232 years since we began the struggle for our independence and freedoms. We’ll hear how God has blessed us again.

And in the week that follows, our bipartisan Congress will rubberstamp a Bush decision again, granting major corporations their assent to break the law, destroy our rights and do so without penalty while they build a database on millions of Americans who aren’t remotely connected to any enemy of the United States.

That database, too, has been a feature of tyrants past and present.

And it’s a damnable puke of a deity that blesses that.

Addendum: via Gary Farber, here’s another well-blessed man.