What is a war crime?

More from the Smirking Chimp on Sy Hersh's recent article and the question of war crime charges against the Bush Cabal...

Stupid Fuck...

Matthew Hubbard got me started this morning. I've been spoiling for a hissy-fit against the Christian right and he took all my frustration and weaved a nice rage-on. Extra points for working in "stupid fuck", my personal favorite description of Virgil Goode (R. Va).

I was watching TDS last night and they did a piece on a dispute in Katy, Texas, and I found this piece on MSNBC... to which I respond, "stupid fuck"

America? A Christian Nation?
By Matthew Hubbard
Created Mar 1 2007 - 7:47am

“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
Sir John Harrington 1561-1612

We are told this is a Christian nation. All our founders were Christian, crowing conservatives proclaim, ignoring sectarian differences. Polls show the vast majority of Americans self-identify as Christians, conveniently ignoring different sects and varying levels of commitment.

Let me concede both points; the founders were Christians and so are most of our citizens today.

So riddle me this. If we are so predominantly Christian, why are we so bad at it?

Religious conservatives love to tell us that our values are Judeo-Christian values, that these values are never-changing and they are derived from God’s will for his people. They say this because they expect us to be what most of their followers are.

Rock. Fucking. Stupid.

In the United States, a religious scholar is someone who can name six actors from “The Ten Commandments”. Actually knowing the text of the Bible or the history of the Church is knowledge as rare as steak tartare.

Let’s start with an easy one, shall we? What’s the most important Christian holy day?

If you live in the U.S., the answer is obviously Christmas. If you are a Christian, the answer is obviously Easter.

If you are a Christian, there is no War on Christmas, because there is no “Christmas Season” before December 25. The weeks before Christmas are called Advent. The Christmas Season, such as it is, are the days from Christmas until Epiphany.

What they call "The Christmas Season", the period that now starts at about Halloween and runs non-stop through New Year's, is actually the Money Making Season.

In any nation in Godless Europe, workers get a week off for Easter. In the U.S., once you get out of school, you are lucky to get off Good Friday.

After lunch.

Okay, Americans are a little confused about the relative importance of the two main holidays. That doesn’t make them bad Christians, does it?

If we apply the standards of Christianity in this country a mere 100 years ago, our modern sins are much greater than this. Number Four of the Ten Commandments tells us to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. Back then, this meant studying God’s word, not taking it easy and entertaining ourselves. Most cities in the country banned Sunday baseball, when baseball was the true national pastime. Now, the biggest sport is pro football, and about 90% of pro football games are played on Sundays; more than that, other popular sports make Sunday the most important day in their week as well. Golf tournaments have their final rounds on Sunday. NASCAR, beloved sport of the Bible Belt, has many Sunday races, including their most important race, the Daytona 500.

Who stands in the pulpit or on TV and rails against this defiling of the 4th of God’s laws?

Damned few. And there’s a reason.

They are too busy defiling the 1st of God’s Laws.

Commandment #1, the first thing on the mind of The Big Kahuna when he read Moses the riot act, is this: Thou Shalt Have No Gods Before Me.

And here is the great sin of our so-called Christian nation.

The God of America is Mammon. Every battle between Christ and cash for one hundred years or more has been decided in favor of cash, usually in a rout.

Why is Christmas more important than Easter?

There's money to be made. What sells at Easter? Peeps, baby ducks and nice dresses? Honey cured ham and dye for colored eggs? Please! It pales in comparison to the money to be made around Christmas.

Why not a week off for Easter, to commemorate the greatest miracle in history?

There’s money to be made. Get back to work, you lazy fuck.

Why not keep the Sabbath holy?

What are you, fucking stupid? Drink a beer and eat some nachos, the Colts are going to be on at 1:00.

Why won’t our priests come to the aid of the faithful?

They gave up like pussies, and the Lords of Mammon took pity on them. The Lords showed unto the defeated how to partake of the fat money cake; hell, that‘s how many of them were defeated in the first place. Treason prospered, so none dare call it treason.

Even if they admit what a fucking mess exists, most conservative Christians will say it’s secular liberalism that caused this terrible state.

Did any of them EVER read Ayn Rand?

No more committed anti-Christian lived in the 20th Century than Ayn Rand, and none had her success. She said it loud and clear. “I prefer the dollar sign to the sign of the cross.” She built a cult of information around her, her books sold well and still sell today, and people in her inner circle rose to the highest heights of un-elected power in this country.

No, not George W. Bush. Alan Greenspan.

Before he was an ugly old gnome that the markets treated like the Pope of Money, he was an ugly young gnome in Ayn Rand's twisted entourage of sycophants.

Still think it’s a Christian Nation? Think again.

Our let me use the Latin word for “think again”. Repent.

A long time coming... torture trial in US courts

We saw Pan's Labyrinth this weekend. It was brutal and a bit gory, but sublime in its contrast of children's fairy tales and adult fairy tales. For me, it was the third in a series of movies that seek to change our Disney-polished 20th century retelling of these macabre stories. The first was Sleep Hollow; the second The Brothers Grimm. All of these movies focus on the horror of "Evil" in one way or anther. What makes Pan's Labyrinth different is that it highlights cruelty - not of the fairy world, but of our's. In mythology, from which fairy tales are drawn, nature is neither benevolent or malicious. The wolf in Little Red Ridding Hood is frightening because he is a wolf, and he is hungry, and he is a trickster; he must eat and his skills are suited to that necessity.

Pan's Labyrinth, as well as Sleep Hollow and The Brothers Grimm, maintains a common thread to a magical realm, at once dark and terrifying while alluring and seductive. The "Evil" encountered is magical Evil; opportunities for redemption often exist as do traps for becoming enslaved. These are the paths of Fairy Tales - through dark forests with endless choices and, often, only one safe way home. What makes Pan's Labyrinth different is that it also contains this entirely other story - of adult fairy tales and the cruelty that "purity" engender. The most shocking thing I've seen on film, outside of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, are the scenes in Pan's Labyrinth involving Captain Vidal. And they are horrific on a level that brings me back to Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and Extraordinary Rendition. Jose Padilla is unique - of all those taken by the government since 9/11, he is the only actual U.S. citizen. It is through his case that we will learn what "the good guys" have been up to in our name. This they do to "make us safe". The cruelty that has been used in our names shames us all as we have forgotten the faces of our fathers and the world they fought and died to protect and nourish. This is not what was ever intended.

More on Torture: Clive James on Terry Gilliam's Brazil

I'm starting a roundup on insightful articles on torture... here's a really good one that focuses on Uber director Terry Gilliam:

Clive's lives
Terry Gilliam
What Brazil tells us about torture today.
By Clive James
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, at 2:52 PM ET


"No no no no no no no no … "
—Terry Gilliam, Brazil

Born in Minnesota in 1940, Terry Gilliam, after pioneering his personal graphic style as a resident artist for Harvey Kurtzman's Help magazine, reached international fame by way of Britain, where his visual inventiveness, based mainly on the silent wit of animated collage, was an important part of the "Monty Python" television series. In his subsequent career as a film director, he earned an unjustified reputation for extravagance when his Adventures of Baron Munchausen left its budget behind and sailed off into the unknown, but on the level of cold fact, he has proved, with several Hollywood projects, including the extraordinary Twelve Monkeys, that he knows exactly how to bring in a movie on time and on budget. (These undeniable achievements availed him little, however, when his film version of Don Quixote had to be abandoned. A measure of his idiosyncratic creative energy is that even a documentary about that film's abandonment—Lost in La Mancha—is required viewing.) Really, he doesn't fit the Hollywood frame at all and needs his own country of which to be a representative writer; if he had been born in Montenegro instead of Minneapolis, today there would be an annual Gilliam Festival on the shore of Lake Scutari—although his tendency to giggle at a solemn moment might still queer his pitch. His best work depends on an audience that can see past his laughing facade to the troubled man within.

Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late 20th century. Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone. A meek, distinctly nonglamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what a victim is saying in a torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the ne plus ultra of torture as an everyday activity. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes (still revealing their subtleties on a third and fourth viewing). The suggestion seems to be that a torturer need be no more sinister than your doctor. That's the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?

In modern history, there is plenty of evidence that torturers are people who actually enjoy hurting people. What was true in medieval Munich was true again in the cellars of the Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, and what was true under Ivan the Terrible was true again in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. The frightening thing is that any regime dedicated to ruling by terror so easily finds a sufficient supply of lethal myrmidons. Even Americans, on those occasions when they bizarrely conclude that the third degree might expedite their policies instead of hindering them, never suffer from a shortage of volunteers: At Abu Ghraib, the dingbats were lining up to display their previously neglected talents. On the whole, the man in charge is not a sadist himself, presumably because it would be a diversion from his organizational effectiveness if he were.

In his huge and definitive political biography of Juan Peron, the esteemed Argentine historian Felix Luna gives us a once-and-for-all illustration of how the author of a state that rules by terror can detach himself from the brute facts. Luna takes the view that the torturers were just doing their job. He calls them tecnicos and describes the subtleties of the technique, which on the torturers' part did indeed require a certain lack of passion if the victim was to survive for long. If Luna gets you wondering how he knew so much about it, your questions are answered a few pages later, where he records a conversation he had with Peron in 1969. "But in your time," said Luna, "people were tortured." Peron said, "Who was tortured?" Luna said, "Plenty of people. Me, for example." Peron said, "When?" With due allowance for Luna's emphasis on their clinical indifference, the maniacs who do the work seem mainly to come from the unfortunately plentiful supply of those who do enjoy inflicting pain for its own sake. "In what pubs are they welcome?" Auden asked rhetorically. "What girls marry them?" It is a nice question how large the supply would be if circumstances did not create it. Alas, the circumstances seem often to be there. Many of the Nazi torturers enjoyed their omnipotence on the strict understanding that without their place in the regime they would have been nothing: hence the tendency to go on tormenting their prisoners even after Himmler called a halt. They faced going back to where they started, which was nowhere.

Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the security "organs," under whatever set of initials they flaunted at the time, were always, at the brute force level, staffed by otherwise unemployable dimwits. The opportunity to inflict torment gives absolute power to the otherwise powerless, and must be a heady compensation for those with a history of being the family dolt. In the Italian transit camp of Fossoli during the Republic of Salo (the last stage of Mussolini's Fascist regime, with the fanatics well in charge), there was a female officer who indulged herself in the Dantesque experiment of packing a cell with victims and keeping them without nourishment of any kind until they ate each other. Many of her victims were women. She seems to have had a social problem: She was cutting prettier, wealthier women down to size. In Latin America, the torturers were all men, but even the qualified medical practitioners among them seem to have been motivated by a similar urge to assure their victims that the boot was now on the other foot.

On the disheartening subject of how sadism and sexuality might be connected, Argentina has the dubious privilege of having produced a key document. In a short story called "Simetrias"—a creative work that unfortunately has ample documentation in fact—Luisa Valenzuela tells us how some of the male torturers would take out their victims for an evening in a cafe or a nightclub. The wounds caused by the electrodes would be covered with makeup. (The story appears in Cuentos de Historia Argentina, a collection published in Buenos Aires in 1998.) In Brazil, after that country's nightmare was over—it took place roughly at the same time as Argentina's—a book came out called Shut Your Mouth, Journalist! (1987). The book enshrines the testimony of journalists who had the sad privilege of seeing the big story from close range: too close. Survivors recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the cold barrel of a .45 automatic applied to the nose, as a preliminary to a long encounter with the electrodes. There were journalists who never came back to say anything. Unsurprisingly, silence soon reigned.

In the years since the silence broke, documentation has piled up. Too many of the most terrifying pages reveal that the torments were an end in themselves. Torture, especially when the victim was a woman, went on far beyond any use it might have had as a means of extracting information, and even beyond what was needed to create a universal atmosphere of abject terror. Films like Kiss of the Spider Woman and Death and the Maiden have done their best to face what happened in Latin America, but finally, if we can bear to look at what is happening on-screen, we have been spared the worst. The general picture in Latin America squared up badly with the picture of torture evoked in an impeccably realistic film like Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, in which the decent young paratroopers did not really want to be doing that kind of thing. (Alain Resnais' Muriel, without showing the horrors, made the same point by implication.) In Latin America the torturers did want to be doing that kind of thing. Which brings us back to Brazil, and hence to Brazil. Were they ever the same place?

In the film called Brazil, Michael Palin is the torturer as the civil servant who might conceivably have been doing something else, such as selling life insurance. In the country called Brazil, the same role was usually played by a psychopath. (The key document proving this is Brazil: Never Again published in 1985. By the time I bought my copy in 1988, it had gone through 20 printings.) We know from the fascinating long interview published as Gilliam on Gilliam that the Palin character in the movie was slow to take shape. The first three drafts of the script were written by Tom Stoppard. Finally Stoppard and Gilliam parted company because of disagreements over some of the characters. One of the characters in question was the torturer. The way Stoppard wrote the part, Michael Palin would have had the opportunity to play against type: He would have embodied evil. Palin is a very accomplished actor and could undoubtedly have done it. But Gilliam insisted on Palin's full, natural, nonacting measure of bland benevolence.

On the set, Gilliam gave Palin mechanical things to do while acting—eat, for example—so that Palin would be distracted from developing any nuances on top of his natural projection as Mr. Nice Guy. It is a moot point which of them was right, Stoppard or Gilliam. In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities.

White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: We could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread and could even be there within ourselves. In that respect, the film Three Kings was a rare feat for the American cinema. Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot's Cambodia. Of 17,000 people who were interrogated in the S-21 camp in Phnom Penh, 16,994 died in agony. The half dozen people who survived were questioned again, by journalists, but they had been too badly injured to say much. The writing on the wall probably says all that we need to hear. The Khmer Rouge torturers were not an example of a system of thought decayed into a perversion: They were prethought, and thus had a kind of childish purity.

Unfortunately for our hopes of innate human goodness, all the evidence suggests that the torturers were keen to get on with the job even if it was meaningless. All the evidence was still there afterward, including photographs taken at every stage of the torment. Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it. Kafka guessed it would happen, as he guessed everything that would happen. In his Strafkolonie, the tormented prisoner has to work out for himself what crime he has committed and is finally told that it is being written on his body by the instrument of torture into which he has been inescapably locked. Kafka was there first, but he wasn't alone for long, and now we must all live in a modern world where the words "No no no no no no no no" can be recorded with perfect fidelity for their sound, yet go unheeded for what they mean.
Clive James, the author of numerous books of criticism, autobiography, and poetry, writes for the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. He lives in London.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2159927/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Iran attack pretenses heating up.... those So, So bastards

Cenk Uygur has a nice reminder piece on what the Iraq study group said about the funding source for Sunni insurgents. As the administration starts rolling out physical "evidence" of Iran's involvement in Iraq violence, they continue to turn a blind eye on the Saudi's, the Bush families most important friends. We are headed down the road to attacking Iran at the same time Bush is claiming a Taliban revival in Afghanistan this spring. With all due respect, this surpasses idiotic. It's like they want to provoke the end of the world...

Enemy of the State, summary executions and Teddy's thoughts on political criticism

It strikes me that, at some point, there will have to be a reckoning. The methods and means of the "Ultra-Patriots" in the US, which provide international terrorists with their most potent recruiting tools, are the greatest threat has faced since the Red Scare. Comments like those of the ever wacky Frank Gaffney, who recently called for the execution of members of Congress that debate the future course of foreign policy in Iraq, reminds me of the comments of social conservatives that led to the murder and attempted murder of several abortion clinic employees in the mid-nineties. I particularly enjoyed the T. Roosevelt quote on what patriotism means, and the fact that the UP's always like to cut to the chase on punishment (and never mention pesky trials, evidence, judges or juries...)


Glenn Greenwald - http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/02/14/neoconservatism/index.html

Neoconservatives hate liberty as much as they love war
While neoconservatism is most frequently criticized for its militaristic foreign policies, it embraces with equal fervor serious abridgments of political liberty.
Feb. 14, 2007 | (Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

Frank Gaffney, one of the country's most influential and well-connected neoconservatives, has a column in today's Washington Times in which he argues that the debate taking place in Congress over the war in Iraq constitutes treason. Gaffney specifically argues that the condemnations of Douglas Feith from Sen. Rockefeller Levin "really should be a hanging offense."

Gaffney begins his column by purporting to quote Abraham Lincoln. Gaffney claims that Lincoln said:
Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.
This quote has become a favorite weapon for those who want to criminalize criticism of the Leader and the War. Jack Murtha's opponent in the last election, Diana Irey, cited this quote while discussing Murtha's opposition to the war.

But this quote is completely invented. Lincoln never said it. This "quote" was first attributed to Lincoln by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine, in a 2003 article revealingly entitled: Democrats Usher in an Age of Treason. But as Waller himself now admits, the quote attributed to Lincoln is completely fraudulent. Waller wrote in an e-mail to FactCheck.org (h/t William Wolfrum):
The supposed quote in question is not a quote at all, and I never intended it to be construed as one. It was my lead sentence in the article that a copy editor mistakenly turned into a quote by incorrectly inserting quotation marks.
It was Waller, in The Washington Times' Insight Magazine, urging that anti-war Congressmen be hanged -- not Abraham Lincoln. But to justify their plainly un-American assault on our most basic constitutional liberties, neoconservatives like Gaffney simply invent quotes, attribute them to Abraham Lincoln, and continue to use them long after they have been debunked. Gaffney continues:
It is, of course, unimaginable that the penalties proposed by one of our most admired presidents for the crime of dividing America in the face of the enemy would be contemplated -- let alone applied -- today.

Still, as the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate engage in interminable debate about resolutions whose effects can only be to "damage morale and undermine the military" while emboldening our enemies, it is time to reflect on what constitutes inappropriate behavior in time of war. . . .

The Journal has properly warned that Senator Ahab's [the Wall St. Journal's name for Sen. Rockefeller Levin] misbehavior is likely to have implications far beyond the immediate disservice it does to Mr. Feith and those who labored so ably under him. It will likely also have a severely chilling effect on the willingness of policymakers rigorously to challenge, and thereby to improve, the quality of the intelligence they are getting about tomorrow's threats.

If there's one thing that really should be a hanging offense, it is behavior that results in our being even less equipped to deal with such threats than we were before this phase of the War for the Free World began on September 11, 2001.
None of that is meant figuratively. Gaffney is really arguing that Senators who speak out against the President and the war are committing treason and that -- just as Lincoln "argued" -- those who are particularly obstructionist of the Leader's efforts to protect us, such as Sen. Rockefeller Levin, by virtue of his criticism of Gaffney's "old friend," Doug Feith, all should be hanged.

Shouldn't it be considered more notable when such a well-connected figure as Gaffney -- with close relations to some of the administration's most powerful figures -- expressly accuses Senators of treason and calls their criticism a "hanging offense"? Why does advocacy of ideas this extreme provoke so little reaction, and why are advocates of such measures treated as serious and respectable political figures?

And none of this is new. This is what the neoconservative New York Sun editorialized about pre-war opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and specifically the dispute over whether war protesters should be allowed to march through Manhattan to protest the war:
So long as the protesters are invoking the Constitution, they might have a look at Article III. That says, "Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies,giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."

There can be no question at this point that Saddam Hussein is an enemy of America. . . . And there is no reason to doubt that the "anti-war" protesters -- we prefer to call them protesters against freeing Iraq -- are giving, at the very least, comfort to Saddam Hussein. . .

So the New York City police could do worse, in the end, than to allow the protest and send two witnesses along for each participant, with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution. Thus fully respecting not just some, but all of the constitutional principles at stake.
The idea that war opponents were committing treason by virtue of marching against the invasion of Iraq -- or that Senators who currently criticize the war should be treated as traitors -- is as repugnant to our political values and as radical and dangerous as anything which, say, the widely discredited Joe McCarthy ever urged. Yet the individuals who have argued, and continue to argue, for such un-American abridgements of basic liberties are not castigated or scorned at all, but instead continue to occupy perfectly respectable positions in what is deemed to be the mainstream.

Not only is none of this new for neoconservatives and the hardest-core Bush supporters, it is not isolated either. Countless other examples of similarly radical and freedom-hating incidents have passed more or less unnoticed.

After Howard Dean, in November, 2005, pointed out the obvious -- that the U.S. would not be able to "win" in Iraq (a fact which William Buckley, among others, repeated a few months later) -- Ronald Reagan's son and frequent Fox News guest host Michael Reagan said this: "Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!"

Ben Shapiro, writing on Townhall, urged that Dean, Al Gore and John Kerry -- just as a start -- be criminally prosecuted for sedition. And none of this should be the slightest bit surprising since the "Father of Neoconservatism," Irving Kristol, has long expressed disdain for America's most basic freedoms, as illustrated by this belief: "I don't think the advocacy of homosexuality really falls under the First Amendment any more than the advocacy or publication of pornography does."

It is true that neoconservatism poses a grave danger to the U.S. as a result of its insatiable quest for more and more war in the Middle East. But inextricably linked to that foreign militarism is a boundless hostility to the liberties and political values that have defined this country since its founding. All of the liberty-infringing radicalism of this administration -- its radical lawbreaking theories, its lawless and indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and "alien unlawful combatants," its use of torture both directly and via rendition, its secret and illegal surveillance programs -- all stem from the same neoconservative mindset which fuels its endless pursuit of wars. The latter is used as the pretext to justify the former.

This is yet further evidence of the corruption which lies at the heart of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Its wars cannot possibly lead to the spreading of freedom and democracy because the people who advocate these wars, and who are implementing them, are about as hostile to those values as one can be.

UPDATE : Attaturk makes the excellent point that the inconsequential use of vulgar words or "offensive" comments about religion from bloggers will provoke all sorts of hand-wringing and media attention. But truly indecent and dangerous ideas flowing from some of the country's most influential political figures in mainstream media outlets -- justified by fabricated quotes -- are treated with respect, and trigger almost no controversy and never any consequences for their advocates.

As Attaturk correctly notes, while low-level bloggers for the Edwards campaign were recently forced from their jobs, "Frank Gaffney will suffer no ill affects of this incredible wank-a-riffic behavior as he goes on FoxNews and fill-in-the-blank right-wing radio bloviators and as he continues to get his paycheck from some ironically named 'think-tank'."

Nonetheless, you can demand that the Washington Times retract its falsified Lincoln here.

UPDATE II: While Gaffney and his liberty-hating comrades are forced to rely upon fabricated quotes from former Presidents, there is a real quote from a former President highly relevant to our current political landscape. The following observation is from Theodore Roosevelt, written in the middle of World War I, as part of a 1918 Op-Ed for The Kansas City Star. It couldn't be more applicable to the Bush movement and to the accompanying neonconservative belief that anti-war sentiments constitute treason:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
Base. Servile. Unpatriotic. Morally treasonable. That about covers Gaffney and his fellow anti-liberty crusaders who seek to stifle criticism of the Leader by equating the most fundamental and defining American freedoms with "treason."

UPDATE III: It is notable that the Gaffney Op-Ed still remains unchanged, with no retraction or acknowledgment of error. It seems highly likely (though admittedly not definite) that The Washington Times is now aware of the fictitious nature of the Lincoln quote. Multiple readers here have indicated that they sent e-mails to the Times. I also called the Times and left a voice mail message (a couple of hours ago) for Commentary Page Editor Mary Lou Forbes, detailing the error and directing her to this post as well other sources for finding the proof that the quote is fake. And yet, the quote remains.

UPDATE IV: I spoke with Mary Lou Forbes, the Commentary Page Editor of the Times, who said that she contacted Gaffney about the e-mails she received and that he has now confirmed that the quote is fictitious. Forbes said Gaffney intends to "run a correction at the bottom of his next column."

When I pointed out that this did not really seem to be a sufficient correction, and suggested that they ought at least to append a correction to the top of the online version, she said that she had not thought of that -- pointing out that she was "an old print journalist" -- but said that perhaps it was a good idea and that they might do that.

I had intended to ask her whether they had any position on Gaffney's call for Jay Rockefeller Carl Levin to be hanged and whether that was the type of column their newspaper thought it appropriate to publish, but, to be perfectly honest, after chatting for a couple of minutes with the very amiable if slightly confused Forbes, it seemed clear that that line of inquiry was going to be futile.

-- Glenn Greenwald

I fear that we will be judged cowards...

and worse, I think that we will deserve it. Gitmo is a national disgrace that Stalin would have greatly approved of. "Extraordinary rendition" is the most freakish euphemism I've heard this side of Goebbels - so we snatch up folks to have them interrogated in countries that sanction and specialize in torture. The military reaches out to the producers of "24" to ask them to tone down the torture.

I would concede that I too am part of the cowardly party that allows this Orwellian nightmare to continue. I have many excuses to offer; all rational and completely understandable and all equally shameful in the face of the power of brutality and outright dishonesty of my government. I think, and am curious, about the power of this shame. Is it an accident or is it a layer of a larger impetus, created long ago by men like Machiavelli and his spiritual descendants Pareto and Bumham, to pay me off for my silence and acquiescence? I was educated as a historian and I think it is past time for me to re-employ those skills.