Update on the future of the Republican Party

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from the publishers Rowman & Littlefield for $34.95, from Amazon for $31.65, from Barnes and Noble for $26.21 ($23.58 for members), and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here.)

When I last wrote on this topic in July, I compared the various factions within the Republican Party to see which segment was likely to take leadership. The four major groupings I identified were the old style conservatives, the rank-and-file social values base, the Christianists, and the neoconservatives.
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The deathers get routed in Cleveland

On Wednesday evening, Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio’s congresswoman for District 11, held a town hall meeting for her constituents. These events, once staid and even boring exercises in democracy, have recently become notorious for the groups of vociferous opponents of health care reform who have stormed them, armed with a strategy formulated by the health care industry and its Republican Party allies to shut down meaningful discussion on this important issue, intimidate elected representatives, and give the impression that those who oppose reform are more numerous and care more deeply about their point of view than those who support reform efforts such as single-payer.
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Here come the nutters!

Am I imagining it or does there seem to be a sudden upsurge in the number of people who seem to be disconnected with reality? To elaborate, is there an increasing number of vocal and visible people who are believe strongly in some crackpot idea despite the complete lack of plausible evidence in favor of their belief?

Into this category I put those who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution did not occur. Also included are the so-called ‘truthers’ (those who think that the events of 9/11 were planned and executed by the US government or that they had advance knowledge of it and yet allowed it to happen), and the ‘birthers‘, those who think that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the US and is thus ineligible to be president. And then we have the ‘gunners’, those who are convinced that Obama is going to take away their guns and enslave them. They have been forming militias and stocking up on weapons and ammunition ever since the election, presumably to prevent the military takeover of the country under the orders of Generalissimo Obama.

It is not surprising that this kind of paranoid climate would encourage individual nutcases like the Baptist preacher who is asking god to put a hit on Obama. Some have even gone on murderous rampages as a result of their beliefs

The health care reform debate has spawned yet another group of crackpots, called the ‘deathers’, who roam town hall meetings and yell about how the health care reform plans currently under consideration will result in government bureaucrats deciding who will live and who will die, and that they seek to kill off old people and anyone with any defects. This is quite an amazing level of delusion

The fact that there exist a sizable number of people who believe in each of these things is not surprising. I have long felt that there is no proposition, however crazy, that you cannot persuade up to about 20% of Americans to take seriously, simply by using spurious arguments that seem to have a veneer of plausibility, along with ‘evidence’ consisting exclusively of vague references to ‘they say’ or ‘I read somewhere’, with the source never specified. For example, a survey finds that 23% say ‘no’ or ‘not sure’ to the question of whether they believe Obama was born in the US. (Among Republicans, the figure is an incredible 58%!)

It is quite likely that there is strong overlap amongst all these groups, given their common basis in irrationality, so that the total number of believers may not be that much larger than the number that believes in just one of them. But given the rapid proliferation of such groups, it may be useful to adopt an umbrella label of some sort that covers everyone. How about the ‘nutters’? Tom Tomorrow describes the weirdness of these people in a recent cartoon.

These people are helped in their paranoia delusions by prominent politicians, who should know better, reinforcing their beliefs. A report says that Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) said “spoke of a “socialistic elite” – Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law.”

Then there is the ever-reliable serial exaggerator Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page she says the following about health care reform: “And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Her statement has no connection to reality. Can she really be so stupid and ignorant as to believe this? Can she really not know that the proposed health reform legislation does not say anything of the sort? Or is she cynically deceiving and exploiting her followers? In addition, she once again shamelessly uses her baby as a political prop when it suits her purposes, while whining that her family should be off limits.

(To make it worse, Palin uses for support Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman, a person with an Alan Keyes level of craziness. Deciding which of Bachmann’s statements and actions is the loopiest is not easy, but my favorite was when she warned that Obama was thinking of abandoning the dollar as the US currency.)

Stephen Colbert gives his take on the death panels.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Death Panels
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As I said earlier, some greedy geezer seniors are prominent among the deathers who are trying to whip up anger against health care reform with their insanities, perhaps in order to preserve their own government-run Medicare health privileges. Christopher Beam writes: “To be sure, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for seniors to be concerned about reform. Seniors already have universal health care in the form of Medicare. There remains the possibility that a broader universal plan will drain resources from a program they like as it is, thank you very much.”

The Daily Show has some thoughts on the motivation that drives these people.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Healther Skelter
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So what is making these people so unhinged? Is it the thought that any Democratic president must necessarily be evil, and that a black one has to be the anti-Christ? Could they be that unhinged? It is strange because Obama is not even a liberal. He has kept and even increased the secrecy practices of the Bush regime, he is not planning a total pull out of Iraq any time soon (if ever, which I doubt), he is rapidly escalating the US war in Afghanistan, he has done little to advance gay rights, he has refused to close down the torture prisons that the US runs in other countries or to forbid the policy of extraordinary renditions, he is not prosecuting the lawbreaking torturers of the Bush regime, he has continued policies friendly to Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, he has undermined support for a single-payer health care system, he continues the violation of human and constitutional rights such as habeas corpus, and so on.

We should not be that surprised. As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow points out, Obama has made vague promises into an art form that enabled his starry-eyed followers to read into his speeches what they wanted to hear and thus believe he was far more liberal than he really is. As a reality check, this website keeps a scorecard on Obama’s promises. Sam Smith also keeps tabs on Obama.

So why are these people so angry about his presidency when he is really not opposed to their interests in any fundamental way, just making changes in the margins? I do not believe that their anger is completely artificial, although powerful interest groups are definitely bankrolling and urging these groups on. Is it as simple as racism, that these people cannot stand the prospect of white people not having exclusive control of the power structure, even if the minorities who replace them pursue pretty much the same policies?

The Daily Show has some thoughts on the racial fears that seem to be driving at least some of these people batty.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Reform Madness – White Minority
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POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the level of current discourse

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Healther Skelter – Obama Death Panel Debate
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When lese majestes collide

By now everyone must have heard about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. flap, where the Harvard academic had a confrontation with a Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley, when he was seen by neighbors breaking into his own home when could not open his front door. What should have been a simple misunderstanding that was quickly settled ended up with Gates being arrested and even president Obama being dragged into it as well.

As might have been expected, people have focused on the race aspect of the incident (Gates is black, Crowley is white) and the class aspect of the town-gown divide (Gates being perceived as a member of the privileged Harvard faculty and Crowley as working class).

So were race and class factors? In America, any encounter between people of different races always carries with it a racial subtext. That is inevitable and unavoidable. Underlying this whole episode is the almost universal feeling among black people that police treat them far worse than they do white people. Black people are always conscious that actions that would be seen as innocent if done by white people are viewed with suspicion when done by blacks. This is because black people of whatever status in society have usually experienced an incident where they were personally treated negatively by the police and other security personnel, even though they were totally innocent. This feeling is so strong in the black community that it explains the rare verbal misstep that Obama made when, instead of keeping out of the fray because he did not have all the facts (and he should not feel obliged to comment on every incident anyway), he ventured the comment that the police acted ‘stupidly’ in this incident.

It is a rare white person who has had that kind of negative experience at the hands of the police. At the risk of over-generalizing, white people, especially those in the middle and upper classes, tend to look on the police as their friends and protectors, while black people tend to look on them as a necessary evil.

Class conflict is a trickier issue in the US, since it is less spoken of by the general public but, like race, is always present in any encounter between people of different classes. Police officers in general get infuriated when people try to intimidate them with the “Do you know who I am?” and the “I know important people and can make life hard for you” class-based rhetoric that some people try to use to intimidate officers who are merely doing their duty, in order to avoid being charged with some minor offense.

So while race and class had to be factors in the Gates-Crowley incident, the real question is whether race and class played a greater role than usual here. That is hard to say, without knowing more about the people involved and the details of the incident. And since much of the contentious elements of the exchange occurred when only Crowley and Gates were present, we might never know.

What I would guess is that over and above the race and class issues, what escalated the confrontation between Gates and Crowley is that for each person the encounter created a sense of lese majeste, which Merriam-Webster defines as originating as “an offense violating the dignity of a ruler as the representative of a sovereign power” but now is used more generally as “a detraction from or affront to dignity or importance.”

Gates is an academic superstar and people outside academia may not be aware of how deferentially such people are treated in the normal course of their work lives. Although in any administrative flow chart of a university, faculty members like Gates are at the bottom of the hierarchy, ranking below their department heads, deans, provosts, and university presidents, in reality they are more famous, more powerful, and more valued by their institutions than their nominal superiors. They carry a lot of clout and every one around them treads very gingerly for fear of giving offense because such people will be quickly snapped up by rival institutions if they are not accorded the proper respect. So Gates is used to being treated like royalty and it must have been galling for him to be treated and talked to like just an ordinary person, let alone an ordinary black person.

Police officers are also used to people being very deferential to them. First of all, they are armed and can easily injure or even kill you. They also have the power to arrest, harass, taser, or otherwise make life very difficult for you. So most people, even if they are innocent and think that they have been wrongly stopped or questioned by the police, will talk to them politely, even obsequiously, so that they do not give the police an excuse to book them. When people do challenge police, the charge of ‘disorderly conduct’ can and is routinely invoked against them, as was done against Gates, since this is a very elastic term that gives a police officer wide latitude with which to arrest someone, even if the challenge consists of merely expressing annoyance or anger. The phrase ‘disorderly conduct’ is sometimes referred as being a euphemism for the crime of ‘contempt of cop’.
See this Colbert Report clip of police tasering people, including a 72-year old great-grandmother, who did not show sufficient ‘respect’ to the police officer.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Current Events – Tasers
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Can anyone doubt that the feisty great-grandmother was being punished with a tasering purely because the police officer was offended by her act of lese majeste?

People who are routinely treated with excessive deference, such as Gates and Crowley, are the ones who are most likely to overreact to perceived affronts, unless they are highly self-controlled or have a well-developed self-deprecating sense of humor. It is very likely that what triggered Gates’ outburst against Crowley was the thought that he, a famous academic, used to being kowtowed to, was being asked to show his identification in his own home by a lowly policeman, an act that, while not unreasonable under the circumstances under which the officer was summoned, he would have perceived as an act of lese majeste. It is very likely that what triggered Crowley’s use of the disorderly conduct arrest charge was that Gates talked back at him and demanded his name and number, again an act that while not unreasonable, would have also been seen by him as an act of lese majeste.

What is surprising is that Gates, whose field of study is race, seems to have been taken by surprise by being treated the way other blacks are routinely treated. This may be because, as Ishmael Reed suggests, Gates has benefited professionally from being a leading proponent of the view that America is now a post-racial society, which is why he reacted so angrily to the way that most black men are used to being treated all the time. Reed says that Gates actually got off easy. “If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!”

All in all, it is an unfortunate incident, symptomatic of what happens when two self-important people prick each others’ ego balloons, resulting in an absurd situation in which the president ends up having to invite them both to the White House for a highly publicized beer, further feeding their already inflated sense of self-importance.

POST SCRIPT: Larry Wilmore on the Gates incident

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Henry Louis-Gate – Race Card
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The state of the Republican party

Immediately after the last election, I wrote a series of posts on the future of the Republican Party and said that where it ends up depends on the relative fortunes of the four elements within the party and which group or groups gain the ascendancy.

One bloc consists of old-style conservative Republicans, the ones who used to be known as ‘Rockefeller Republicans’. They consist of people who are pragmatic, technocratic, more managerial and less ideological in their outlook, people who want smaller government, fiscal restraint, balanced budgets, rule of law, respect for personal liberties, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.

The second group is the rank-and-file social values base for whom guns, gays, abortion, stem-cell research, flag, religion, homosexuality, and immigration are the main concerns. Many of these people belong to the lower and middle economic classes. These people were always the rank and file of the party, the ones who existed in large numbers in parts of the country and gave it voting clout, but they were never the leaders.

The third group is the Christianist leadership, people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and John Hagee, who claim to speak for the social values base but, as I argued in an earlier post, whose overriding allegiance is to a low-tax ideology (especially for the rich) at whatever cost, and who oppose any government programs that provide assistance to the poor.

The fourth group is the neoconservatives. The neoconservatives are the wild card in American politics, wreaking havoc wherever they go. Their interests lie less in domestic policies and more in creating a muscular foreign policy. They dream of America exercising hegemony over the world, using its might to destroy its enemies. They are firmly convinced that America is a force for good in the world and should not be shy about using its military, political, and economic muscle to dominate it. They see the interests of the US as almost identical to the interests of the hard-line right-wing segments of Israeli politics.

So what has happened since I wrote this? The situation has evolved but not clarified yet, but one interesting feature is how the four groups have started relating to Sarah Palin.

The old-style conservatives seem to have been routed and are even more marginalized than before. At this stage, they look like people unhappy with what the Republican Party has become and not sure if they can bring it back to what they see as sanity or whether it is hopelessly under the control of nutcases and they need to look for a new home. This group hates Palin with a passion, seeing her as perfectly symbolizing the depths to which their party has sunk. They despise her ignorance on the issues, her lack of competence, her fractured logic and syntax, her pride in despising learning, and her anti-intellectualism.

The second group has not grown larger but has grown more militant. It is digging in its heels and demanding to be in the party leadership and will not go back to their former role as mere foot soldiers. This group has always been made use of by their party leaders but never given a real shot at leadership. McCain’s choice of Palin changed that. For the first time, they felt that one of their own was close to the driver’s seat and they are not returning to the back of the bus. This group loves Sarah Palin and will not tolerate anyone who disparages her, which put them at direct loggerheads with the old-style conservative Republicans. Her abrupt resignation as governor of Alaska has not cooled their ardor. They see that, as they see everything she does, as a clever strategy. Whatever her next wacky stunt may be, it will be trumpeted as another example of her mavericky credentials and her policy of not practicing ‘politics as usual’. They fervently hope that she stays in politics and runs for president so that they can rally round her, although such an action probably dooms the party to a massive defeat and gives all the other potential Republican candidates the heebie-jeebies.

Jackie Broyles from Red State Update captures the views of this group precisely:

As for the third group, the Christianists, one does not hear much these days from Pat Robertson and John Hagee and the like. The Christianist leaders seem to be either on the wane or more likely are simply biding their time, waiting to see which of the candidates is most committed to their pro-rich/anti-poor/no-tax policies. They may simply be reeling from the string of sex-related scandals hitting their party and a little wary of aligning themselves too early with someone who may later taint them with scandal. They are political opportunists and although they may like Palin a lot, they love power more and would be quite willing to dump her and align themselves with someone who can win, even if that person is not completely aligned with their religion-based agenda.

The neo-conservatives within the party seem to be lying low too, licking their wounds after they lost the deep access to the high levels of the administration that they had under Bush/Cheney. But one can never write them off. They are always seeking to pursue their war-like agenda. This group is split on Palin. Since they love war and want the US to invade Iran and start fights with practically the entire Muslim world and renew the cold war with Russia, they are attracted to Palin because her own apocalyptic religious views make her sympathetic to these crazy ideas. On the other hand, they are also urbane intellectuals and Palin is simply not one of them. Some are uneasy that she could be a loose cannon they cannot control. Right now the neoconservatives are mostly a media presence on Fox News and other sites. If they think the Republicans are going to be losers for the foreseeable future, watch for them to make overtures to the Democratic Party, where they have some allies.

Probably the best barometer as to the fortunes of these groups is Fox News. The people and views that are given the most prominence on Fox are likely the ones on the upswing. So far, it seems to have dismissed the first group of old-style conservative Republicans and has tried to be the umbrella support group for the other three. It tried to drum up some enthusiasm for teabag parties, opposition to Sonia Sotomayor, and the like but those efforts seem to have fizzled, and so they seem to be resorting to even more extreme scare-mongering to raise the energy level of their supporters.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the Palin resignation

If Sarah Palin thought that she could avoid The Daily Show treatment by resigning just as they went on vacation, she misjudged them.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Half Baked Alaska
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Sarah, come back!

My great weakness as a political analyst, and the reason I am often wrong in my predictions, is that I try to think strategically. I keep forgetting that many of the prominent people in politics are divas who think that the normal rules of politics don’t apply to them and thus do things that you never anticipate. Just look at the recent list: David Vitter, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, and Larry Craig.
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On torture-24: What happens next?

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

For the last post in this long and admittedly depressing series, I want to tie up some loose ends.

What Dahlia Lithwik and Phillipe Sands point out, and which this series of posts has examined in great detail, is that the discussion on whether the US committed torture is over. There is no question about it and anyone who keeps saying that it didn’t is ignorant, lying, or relying upon a convoluted reading of history and the definition of torture. At the very least, such people should be willing to agree on the issue being examined by the International Criminal Court, which “is the first permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community.”

Lithwik and Sands point to a highly significant statement given on January 13, 2009, just before Obama took office, by someone intimately aware of what is going on in Guantanamo. Susan Crawford was the convening authority of the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general, is hardly the kind of hippie moonbat Cheney would like to poke fun at. And that’s why everything changed this morning when the Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation that the treatment of alleged 20th Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani at Guantanamo Bay was “torture.”
…
Crawford also told Woodward that the charges against al-Qahtani were dropped because he was tortured. This has devastating consequences for the Bush administration’s entire rationale for the new techniques of interrogation: that they would make the United States safer by producing intelligence and keeping dangerous individuals off the streets. We now know they do neither. The torture produced no useful information from al-Qahtani, and the cruelty heaped upon him will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to justify his long-term incarceration.

There is a third major consequence to the Crawford interview: Her principle objection to detainee abuse is not ephemeral or spiritual, but a damning indictment of the impact it will have on American troops and the prospects for America’s authority abroad: “If we tolerate this and allow it, then how can we object when our servicemen and women, or others in foreign service, are captured and subjected to the same techniques? How can we complain? Where is our moral authority to complain? Well, we may have lost it.”
…
Whether torture occurred and who was responsible will no longer be issues behind which senior members of the administration and their lawyers and policymakers can hide. The only real issue now is: What happens next?

The answer to that question takes you to a very different place when the act is torture, as Crawford says it is. Under the 1984 Torture Convention, its 146 state parties (including the United States) are under an obligation to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.” These states must take any person alleged to have committed torture (or been complicit or participated in an act of torture) who is present in their territories into custody. The convention allows no exceptions, as Sen. Pinochet discovered in 1998. The state party to the Torture Convention must then submit the case to its competent authorities for prosecution or extradition for prosecution in another country.

Torture is one of those cases where we seem to be even less enlightened now than we were in the past when it comes to judging our own actions with at least some impartiality.

In 1901 a US army major was sentenced to 10 years hard labor for waterboarding a Philippine insurgent. Similarly, water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago and a US soldier who waterboarded a Vietnamese prisoner was court-martialed. But now, far from taking action against torturers, we dispute whether these acts are even torture. We excuse and even praise torturers and those who support and authorize torture by saying they acted ‘in good faith’ or ‘in the interests of the nation’. (By coincidence, yesterday’s Sunday Doonesbury cartoon dealt with this.)

We have sunk a long way in the last 100 years. We can only go up from here.

POST SCRIPT: Documentary on torture

Those who have stuck with me through this long series on torture may also want to watch the three-part documentary Torturing Democracy put out by the National Security Archive.

On torture-23: So now what?

(For previous posts on torture, see here.)

None of the architects of the Bush/Cheney torture administration has been called to account, at least so far, for their actions. Of the authors of the infamous memos from the Office of Legal Counsel authorizing torture, one is now a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley (John Yoo) while the other is now an Appeals Court judge (Jay Bybee).

Of the others who were deeply involved in approving these policies (Bush, Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Alberto Gonzalez, John Ashcroft, David Addington), none appear to be under any threat of even investigation in the US, let along prosecution for their actions. This means that other countries may feel obliged to take action since torture is a crime against humanity that is not protected by national boundaries. Spain has taken an interest in possible prosecutions against six people (John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes, and Douglas Feith) and if, as I hope, they carry it through, then any of them could be arrested and extradited to Spain is they set foot in any of the 24 countries that are parties to European extradition conventions.

But in the US such concerns about law and justice are viewed as quaint and casually dismissed, with the so-called ‘war on terror’ being used as a ‘get out of jail free’ card to excuse each and every atrocity. The rot is deep with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia minimizing the evil of torture by trivializing it saying, “I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?”

Even the children of suspects are being used as part of the torture techniques. The number of deaths of detainees while undergoing ‘questioning’ in US custody is another underreported scandal. Glenn Greenwald tells the stories of some of them.

Because of their deep involvement in torture, the US is now categorized by other countries as one that practices torture, although many are reluctant to say so publicly. A manual on torture awareness put out by the Canadian government and given to its diplomats was accidentally released to the press. It puts US as one of the countries on a torture watch list. Other countries on the list include Afghanistan, China, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Despite his campaign promises to bring back a respect for the rule of law, what is becoming clear is that Obama is weaseling out of his own obligation to uphold the law and has no intention of taking any action against those who instituted torture practices. So he too becomes complicit in the torture policies of the Bush/Cheney regime. Mark Danner says that there is bipartisan complicity in torture, with the Democrats quaking at fears that by opposing torture, they would be seen as coddling terrorists:

Republicans from Dick Cheney on down have been unflagging in their arguments that these “enhanced interrogation techniques . . . were absolutely crucial” to preventing “a major-casualty attack.” This argument, still strongly supported by a great many Americans, is deeply pernicious, for it holds that it is impossible to protect the country without breaking the law. It says that the professed principles of the United States, if genuinely adhered to, doom the country to defeat. It reduces our ideals and laws to a national decoration, to be discarded at the first sign of danger.

This is why torture is at its heart a political scandal and why its resolution lies in destroying the thing done, not the people who did it. It is this idea of torture that must be destroyed: torture as a badge worn proudly to prove oneself willing to ‘do anything” to protect the country.

The only way to gain the moral high ground is to abide by the rule of law and prosecute those who break it, especially in the case of vicious and unconscionable crimes like torture. Glenn Greenwald argues why we should not make excuses for torture and points out that in Britain, pressure is building on the government to investigate and take action on the allegations of torture.

That’s because torture is illegal in Britain, as it is in the United States. But unlike the United States: Britain hasn’t completely abandoned the idea that even political officials must be accountable when they commit crimes; their political discourse isn’t dominated and infected by the subservient government-defending likes of David Ignatius, Ruth Marcus, David Broder and Stuart Taylor demanding that government officials be free to commit even serious war crimes with total impunity; and they don’t have “opposition leaders” who are so afraid of their own shadows and/or so supportive of torture that they remain mute in the face of such allegations. To the contrary, demands for criminal investigations into these episodes of torture (including demands for war crimes investigations from conservatives) span the political spectrum in Britain.

Ray McGovern suggests that pressure may be slowly building here on Obama to have some accountability.

We can only hope. At the very least, we can start, as Phillipe Sands recommends, by releasing all the torture documents, including videos. Secrecy inevitably leads to abuses.

POST SCRIPT: The Ventures

Was there anyone in my generation who did not dream of wanting to play like The Ventures, with their pure, clean guitar sound and the driving, pulsating drums? Bob Bogle, one of the founders, died two days ago.

Here they are in their early days with Wipe Out:

And later they shed the clean-cut look but kept the same music with Tequila:

People probably are most familiar with the theme from the TV series Hawaii Five-O: