Tortured answers

Elizabeth Edwards’ lies

Roger Simon of the Politico asks some pertinent questions of Elizabeth Edwards.

A tilt

A friend of mine, Martin, sent me an e-mail with three pictures attached. I have not asked his permission to post this but this is the subject line of his e-mail: “Three pictures one of slang, the other of a little box, and the message from Obama to his people, apparently the world, not the armed forces”

Here’s his e-mail, which I took the liberty of chopping into paragraphs:

The first picture:

Hi Guys!

I always interpreted the term “guys” instead of more respectful custom as the totalitarian modality of work and consumption of higher-based custom after Hitler took over Europe.

These are fast paced times, good to know that.

I have a hard time waking up in the morning if it wasn’t for my cat, Jasper.

I have no reverence for the activities I pursue on a day/to/day perspective but have little faith in anything other than god, the government is out of control and we are living here in the United States in a personal holocaust for the mentally ill, and if that includes for you Foucault’s jail population, then you are on par with me at the end of the links.

Someone has to save these people and they are dying.

The Second picture:
They took the sixties and they put them either to forced work by owning their materialist homes where they found vagrancy of comfort after the likes of Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Martin Luther King, Janis Joplin and John Lennon, JFK and all the others slaughtered for the right of passage to the end of the world.

I’m sick I have you know that each e-mail, but who is going to take care of the people in my family whom need help when they need it, like always, evermore. ???

I hope that sometimes when people think of me they will think of the concept of survivor, not akin at all to the retro-demand of Hitler from all corners and walks and likes of the Earth just to make yourself busy and survive for the Establishment to come stomping on the ground you walk on soon as you’re able to look down outside of your watch.

The third picture:
I never read the Harvard Classics, most of my education came from the school of hard knocks, but I do know this:

we’re doomed, unless someone or something can listen and learn and listen as they act, which takes a lot of tightrope wakling and a lot of zen buddhism while I’m only a buddhist I am not the zen variety that sort of practise is doomed unless you combine it with a healthy job which pays enough money to clean the sheets on the mattress once you “just go” and “let it be”.

We need more people to act as the great Sacha Baron Cohen and his message of love peace and tolerance as he smashes all the dim-witted ideologues to hell incarnate when they are so embarrassed as to lose their job at the catholic church due to embarrassment, after so much hatred.

I’m beginning to think not only a dog doesn’t learn new tricks also God doesn’t, spelled backwards or forwards, dog/god is out to get each and every last goddamn fascist in the book and I know from checking, or like the back of my hand that every person on this dang list of e-mails is a good person. Don’t worry.

A diplomat is a man who says you have an open mind, instead of telling you that you have a hole in the head – Unknown

Authenticity

John Edwards had the right message both times when he ran for the presidency. The problem was that he himself seemed fake. The harder he sold himself, the less I was willing to buy.

One of the things he sold hardest was this idea that he had a wholesome family. And when it turned that his loathsome wife was sick, they pushed that too as reason to vote for him for president. It turned out that the biggest betrayal of all and, perhaps, the reason Edwards appeared so fake, was that it was all a lie.

Edwards had left his wife in mind and spirit and could not wait for her to die so he could be with his true love.

John Edwards did not even think this transgression was enough to keep him from running for president. He showed in New Orleans with his fake jeans, fake pompadour, fake teeth, fake smile and asked that we make him president because only he cared about black people, only he cared about poor people, oh, The Two Americas, he prattled on.

And Elizabeth Edwards was a handmaiden to all this deception.

I don’t wish ill on anyone. But I want Elizabeth Edwards to shut up. I want John Edwards to shut up. Please don’t prosecute him for his deceptions and chicanery with campaign cash to hide his affair. I want all these people to crawl into a cave and never be heard from ever again.

UPDATE: Kathleen Parker makes the case against the Edwards more intelligently than I tried to above.

In a dark place

For girls, attending school in Pakistan’s northwestern region has become a life threatening prospect. Since 2007, at least 168 schools have been blown up by local Taliban militia in their campaign to enforce their extremist interpretation of Sharia law which forbids girls from going to school.

In 1960, Rockwell painted a picture called “The Problem We All Live With,” showing kindergartner Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to attend an all-white school in the South, being escorted to school by US Marshals. In Pakistan, if the Taliban gets its way, girls will be marched away from school.

The Taliban threat

Last week the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, signed off on a truce made in February with the Taliban in the Swat valley, which appears to have only emboldened them and increased their threat in the region.

On PBS NewsHour last night, Margaret Warner moderated a short segment about the Taliban in Pakistan. She interviewed Wendy Chamberlain, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Husain Haqqani, the current Pakstani ambassador in Washington.

Ms. Chamberlain was a career foreign service officer who now heads the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to teach America about the Middle East and vice versa. Neither she nor her organization seems partial to hysterical rants, but her description of the Taliban in Pakistan is frightening: “Their goal is to topple the democratic government of Pakistan and they have a strategy that’s proved to be working, a strategy where they go into a district, go into a town, terrorize the local authorities, the civil society, the aid workers, women, barbers, and impose their law …”

To read the transcript of the NewsHour segment, go here.

A shameful passage

The United States Supreme Court illegitimately installed George W. Bush as president of the United States after the 2000 elections. Boy George was going to while away his time in office, rewarding friends in politics and the oil and defense industries with rich contracts.

That was why Dick Cheney held those meetings with energy interests behind closed doors. It was as evil a cabal as you could get. They were corrupt and lazy, to boot.

Then, history intervened.

Whatever you believed about the origins and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States, the events propelled our nation on a path that altered the course of our history. Every step along the way, when our nation’s leaders had opportunities to chose paths that would strengthen or imperil our nation, they chose wrong.

They chose torture, rather than follow the rule of law. They belittled and denigrated international laws and institutions, rather than harness the goodwill of the community of nations.

The new administration, a legitimately elected president, Barack Obama, bearing a mandate from the people of this country, has begun trying to repair the damage wrought by the last administration. They won’t always make the right decisions. Their steps might be, at times, unsure. But they have one thing George W. Bush never had. Legitimacy.

UPDATE: A special prosecutor should decide the fates of John Yoo, Jay C. Bybee and other memo writers. They should suffer the consequences for violations of international laws that their memos aided and abetted.

All lower level soldiers punished for following orders should have their punishment reduced (because we now know they did not torture on a whim but were, in fact, following orders).

Gen. Geoffrey Miller should be tried for War Crimes.

A Truth & Reconciliation Commission (senior members of the judiciary and the U.S. Congress; governed by strictures of Congressional testimony) should get sworn testimonies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, and Colin Powell. Their testimonies will be immunized if they tell the truth. Liars should be prosecuted for the wholesale violations of international laws (conventions against torture and the Geneva conventions) that occurred.

All will be consigned to history’s judgment.

The Incomparable Ms. Simone

Musings, strange

Langston Hughes

A Facebook friend, John Burroughs, posted this searing Langston Hughes poem today:

Song for a Dark Girl

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.

Way Down South in Dixie
(Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.

Which brings to mind Billie Holiday’s hearbreaking song:

Billie Holiday, 1949

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I would put a Youtube video of the song up except those links, over time, are not that reliable.

UPDATE: Alright, here’s the Youtube video. If it doesn’t play, doubleclick on the video to go to Youtube, then refresh until it plays:

The Gitmos before Gitmo

Zina Saunders‘ illustration for “Guantanamo at Home” in The Nation magazine in which Jeanne Theoharis, with the proposed closing of Guantanamo, takes a hard look at the harsh treatment of terror suspects in prisons on American soil.

Read the article here.

Men’s laws for women’s bodies

Zina Saunders did this piece to accompany an article in The Nation magazine. Ordinarily, it would carry her byline but I do not want attribute to her my own thoughts on this issue. My thoughts, such as they are, are unformed and unsophisticated, incoherent even. Try this:

Isn’t it time we men stop manifesting our anxieties about our mothers’, daughters’, wives’, and sisters’ sexuality by passing laws to govern what they can and cannot do with their own bodies, their own lives?

I don’t have an answer. I just know that man’s laws and decrees, especially when they try to govern what women do with their bodies, wreck lives instead.

Rush Limbaugh for The Progressive

This is an illustration for an article in this month’s Progressive, Conservatives in Crisis by Ruth Conniff, about how conservatives are facing an ideological crisis after eight years of Bush and their trouncing in the election.

From the article:

“While Obama is declaring the argument between big-government liberals  and free-market-fundamentalist conservatives over, Rush Limbaugh is  keeping up the fight: ‘The battle’s never going to be over, the war is  never going to be over because battles are going to be fought  continually over and over again, because this is who these people  are,’ he says. And then he recites the rightwing bromide that FDR  ‘prolonged’ the Great Depression with his New Deal programs.”

After reading the article, I knew right off the bat that I wanted to picture Limbaugh as a human cannonball: a sham display of Big Top bravado.