Liveblogging Gonzales
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) is on the floor of the US Senate explaining that the president does, in fact, have the unchecked fiat power ascribed to him in the original torture memo, but that it is to the credit of Bush and Gonzales that he hasn't yet used it. What a perfect Soviet citizen Mr. Sessions would have made.
Russ Feingold is speaking at 1:15 pm; I'll check back in then.
12:09 pm: Sessions' mendacity is almost too revolting for words. He's now defiling the upper chamber of Congress by arguing that captured prisoners aren't necessarily entitled to a full array of rights because (of course!) the soldiers who captured them would have been justified in killing them in combat.
2:31 pm: Well I fucked up on that Feingold thing. But that's because I trusted C-SPAN. To borrow a sage line of defense used on Condoleeza Rice's behalf, I was a consumer of intelligence, and really, when you think about it, a victim. When last I checked, former Ku Klux Klan recruiting officer Robert Byrd had assumed the floor of the Senate. His speeches aren't quite the same thing as recitation of the phonebook, but they tend to go on longer and to less inspirational effect.
posted by Finnegan @ 11:47 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Im glad you've mentioned Robert Byrd's former affiliations and disposition. It only recently came to my attention the extent of Byrd's unbelievably biggoted rhetoric and affiliations back in the day when boys kissed girls and crosses were burned instead of flags. Thought this does not speak to anything particular going on in the politcal discourse today, that itself may speak to the political discourse of the day. For all this talk of political correctness and Desouzian end-of-racism, the fact that Byrd is still alive and kicking really unveils the American political landscape as bizarre. The huge controversy over Strom Thurmond really just shows American mainstream's ignorance of the racial situation. Thurmond is not some wild outlier. 90 percent of African Americans today have white blood, the vast majority of which derives from plantation rape. That was what was so comical about the whole Jefferson thing. Whether or not Jefferson put it in the slave girl, and it seems that he probably did not at least in that particular slave girl, that was the standard and norm of Southern life, in general, as such. The idea that someone like Byrd no longer believes what he said (involving preferring to see America burn to ash before the negroid is recognized as a fellow citizen), if he does not, does not in anyway ameliorate the situation. I suggest that we give too much credence to context. Many people back in the mid to late forties were NOT making such statements. That Byrd did reveals a bad bad cognitive disposition, not just ignorance due to context. And this is the man who Hillary turned to in her young Freshman days. In these days of utter kowtowing to center-right positions on almost every domestic and foreign policy issue, it may one day be the civil rights issue again, really just a euphemism for the historical struggle for American black power in the face of massive disdain, that could bring the chickens back home to roost. Go Barack go barack go . . .
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