October 11, 2008 archive

Old family story.  My mother would never admit she was wrong about anything while we kids were growing up … with six children and little money, I guess she felt she had to be stronger than human or everything would fall apart.

Anyway, one day we were getting out our cereal for breakfast and my sister says, “Ma, this milk is spoiled!”

For some reason my mother didn’t want to hear that.

So she walked over to the table, drank some of the milk right out of the carton and proclaimed immediately “Sweet as sugar!”

A split second later the milk registered on her taste buds and she exclaimed “Sour as hell!”

It became a family joke, of course, used on many different occasions.

I once heard a woman say that having her purse stolen felt like being violated … not rape, but in the same vein.  Now with the giant handbags women wear in New York City, I’d say it’s more like having your car stolen.

I haven’t checked my 401(k) statement yet – I was going to, but I forgot my password.  It’s probably a lot less than it was.

The spy novelist John Le Carre invented a word perfectly suited for Richard Bruce Cheney and George W. Bush — “politopath,” a merger of “politician” and you-know-what.

In a few hours, we’ll reach the beginning of the end of the Cheney-Bush regime, the final hundred days. It ought to be a milestone marked by glee, yes? But knowing how soon we won’t have this pair of politopaths to kick around anymore places me somewhere between an aneurysm and a sigh. Because the puppet master and his perpetually adolescent companion will get to abandon their posts, unpunished for hundreds of lies told, hundreds of people tortured, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians killed, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, trillions of dollars of debt incurred.

Unimpeached, much less tried, they will get to emerge from their eight years of assault on the Constitution and display of royal prerogative with their pensions intact and most of their rap sheets classified. No orange jumpsuits for them, no isolation units where guards videotape their every trip to the shitter, no hard labor, no electronic shackles. Two aging war criminals will soon clean out their desks, torch their hard drives, say farewell to the pleasures of the unitary executive and pal around forever with the feral plutocrats whose vaults they so prodigiously filled during two terms of plunder and rapine.

Like the reckless CEOs who’ve walked away from the wreckage of their companies with tens of millions in salaries, options and bonuses, the ruthless Mister Bush and Bunker Dick seem destined to roam free. Starting on that January afternoon of a hundred days from now, even the suggestion that they – and others on their team – should pay for their misdeeds will be shouted down in wwwLand and elsewhere. Old news, the megamedia will declare. Vendettas erect obstacles to bipartisanship, Democratic Party leaders will proclaim. Too many crucial matters other than justice to worry about, the so-called pragmatists will say. Just as they have said since I wrote A Thousand %$#@#&!!%$# Days 900 days ago.

From the press release from the people who are bringing us the new documentary, Torturing Democracy:

Award-winning producer Sherry Jones presents a comprehensive documentary – more than 18 months in the making – that examines America’s detention and interrogation practices in the “war on terror” in Torturing Democracy, premiering Thursday, October 16 at 9 p.m. on Thirteen/WNET.