People who know me, who’ve been to this untidy, dilapidated place where I live, would all agree I have many more important things to do right now than stew about politics.   I know it is a symptom of something else, but I can’t clear my throat sometimes.  There are things that stick there like poisoned steel wool, irritating to no end.   So let me try to pump this one up, like a cat with a hairball, and get on with my life today.  

President Change You Can Believe In (you can also believe in the tooth fairy or the patriotism of men willing to torture suspects– so he’s not really misleading anyone)  casually spoke the word “torture” the other day, I heard the sound bite.  He admitted explicitly, for the first time, that our great nation had descended to torture in the so-called War on Terror.  Torture was committed in secret, in our names, against people who are abstractions. It was authorized and justified, under a changed name, in secret memos, with surprisingly little legal support, that were authored by Bush Administration lawyers, one now a federal judge for life, the other a tenured professor of constitutional law at Berkeley.

It’s not like there were witnesses as actual people we know were hung by their arms for hours at a time, forced to soil themselves, stripped naked, kept in freezing cold or boiling hot cells, kept awake for days at a time, kept in airless cells too small for them, thrown against walls (harmless, just to get their attention!) shaken, punched, slapped, kicked, water-boarded.   Some of these people were guilty as hell, even if many were not.  At any rate, full disclosure, agents of We The People tortured people, we’re not going to do it anymore, and that’s that.  There’s no point prosecuting anyone, heck, we’d probably have to prosecute ourselves too, which would suck!  In addition to posing an uncomfortable conflict of interest.

It was as shocking hearing the president finally say “torture” as it was hearing the word “poverty” come out of his mouth for the first time in public during his second inauguration.  I heard it like this “we murdered some people, frankly, we did,  in cold blood and without any real legal defense for our actions.  We also engaged in systematic rape, of men and women, some admittedly quite young, and other atrocities.  We killed babies, and old women, we broke down doors and beat up and sometimes slaughtered people in far away lands who had nothing to do with terrorism.   We grabbed people in airports that we sent to savage regimes to be tortured and found out only years later that many of them were innocent.  Guilty as charged.  These things are terrible, unforgivable, and we abhor them to our core.  I say, not without some personal sadness, that as a practical matter we will never hold anyone accountable in any way for any of these policies.  We made sure that our contractors are immune from prosecution, and we sure as hell are not going to prosecute the wealthy and powerful men who created the secret torture program.  Get over it, America.”

“After all, we are wealthy beyond counting, as a nation, but 21 million of our children go to bed hungry every night, is that not in some ways a greater national shame than torturing people we don’t even know?    We have neighborhoods where the death rate is as high as in third world nations engaged in civil wars.  Shit happens, people.  I say these things not because I will hold anyone accountable for crimes we committed in the past, for the crimes we continue to commit or for a system that allows the wealthiest to increase their wealth beyond the wildest imaginings of the greediest while children, by the million, are asked to eat shit and die.  I mention these things only because I am a man of conscience and an expert in constitutional law.  If you think it is easy to be an expert in constitutional law, think again.  I challenge you, for example, to find the three discreet phrases buried in that succinct document that formed the constitutional basis for human slavery and its strict legal protection for almost a hundred years.”

“We do some very bad things, I will admit.  Most of these terrible things we keep secret.  You have 1,000 channels of TV programming to distract you, a fantastic network of professional sports where some of the greatest athletes in the world compete for your enjoyment, many fake news channels, a hundred Darwinian contests, scripted reality TV shows with colorful people in many cases even dumber than you are.  You have great stores full of wonderful products and you can buy anything you like on-line, from the comfort of your favorite chair.  You have everything you need, unless you’re really poor, or working class, in which case you may feel left out of the American Dream.  I pity you, I really do, it’s really a great dream.”

“But I must also point out that I will be very, very strict with anyone who tries to make public things that the public must not know.  If the U.S. military has a digital video of an American helicopter crew getting permission to gun down unarmed Iraqi civilians who come to try to rescue other civilians shot down by that same American helicopter crew, that is their business.  The military knows best how to deal with these things, it has been doing so for over two hundred years.  Things like this are classified for a reason and anyone who releases such information is a traitor and enemy of the state worthy of death.  And guess what?  As we’ve already shown, we no longer need to even accuse you of a specific crime or have any kind of due process before we take you out with a flying remote control death machine.  Thank you for listening and God bless these United States of America.”

“Oh, and one more thing.  Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a shady character out of the Iran-Contra scandal and former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Reagan, was pitching a data mining system that could be used to keep tabs on the activities of conspiracies to undermine America.   It could be used, for example, to get the names of everyone opposed to a specific government policy, the phone numbers of everyone involved in street protests or petitions, those subscribing to internet lists or those organizing for any purpose that might run counter to the best interests of America as defined in secret by unaccountable persons.  I am not at liberty to say if the NSA data mining program recently revealed by a traitor worthy of death, a reckless and dangerous young man named Edward Snowden, is that same program Poindexter was peddling or not.  Does it make any difference to you?  God bless America.”

“And goodnight, Gracie.”