“…if you believe that al-Qaeda and Bin Laden didn’t attack us on 9/11 for their perverted opinions of our Country and ideals. Then please tell me why did they attack us in the first place?”

Leaving aside for the moment bin Laden’s quite legitimate desire to see the United States stop occupying and supporting the occupation of Muslim countries and the oppression and massacre of Muslims, bin Laden made his opinion of our ideals pretty clear. His “perverted opinions” of our ideals were that they were mostly convenient rhetorical standards that we held others to but seldom applied to ourselves.

It took only bin Laden’s diabolical provocation, neoconservative control of government, the subsequent cover-up by a new Democratic administration committed to “transparency and the rule of law” and the defense of government criminality by establishment media elites like Joe Klein (not to mention a tragically misled public at large) to prove that he knew more about us than we are willing to face about ourselves.

Chris Matthews \'Slams\' Republican on New Torture Information

Abu Ghraib’s unsupervised “amateurs” are the problem – translation: everyone’s seen the pictures – but systematic torture by “professionals” using the exact same methods and motives, following the exact same orders from George Bush and Dick Cheney, is OK because the professional torturers tortured under “carefully-controlled circumstances”.

The thing to remember is this: all torture happens in your brain, whether the sensation of having water start to fill your lungs or the thought that you will never see your family and friends again in your life, or both at the same time. The critical difference for waterboarding done for training, demonstration or entertainment purposes is knowing that the torture will stop and that you won’t be killed. Conversely, the terror of uncertainty is exactly the torture the Bush/Cheney/SERE program – the forced nudity, the dogs, the blindfolds, the isolation, waterboarding, all of it – was designed to inflict. No one much cares whether they’re being terrorized by “amateurs” or “professionals”. Anyone who believes that our “high-value” terror suspects (as well as thousands of others, most of whom were probably innocent of anything) weren’t “tortured” nearly every second we held them captive is a psychological cretin.

First off, I’ll let Paul Begala (courtesy of John Cole) drive a stake in the right-wing meme that releasing the memos was Obama’s choice:

“…the president was compelled to release them by a lawsuit, a lawsuit that his lawyers, the Justice Department and the White House counsel, decided they could not successfully defend.

We have a Freedom of Information Act. I know it’s—it’s an adjustment, but we now have a White House that lives under the rule of law and obeys the laws. So, he released them because he was compelled to release them.

This is very different from the Bush administration, which selectively leaked national security information, top-secret information, in order to build what I think the record shows was a dishonest case for war, or, in the case of Valerie Wilson, to destroy the career of a covert CIA agent.

That’s the politicization of intelligence information and—and top-secret information. This was the president obeying the law.”

But what is fascinating is watching these guys actually seek to protect the tiny parts of clandestine service that illegally spied on American citizens and tortured captives in violation of their sworn oaths, the clear letter of the law, and basically every tenet of civilized behavior. Certainly they consider themselves to be ethical and moral men, small “d” democrats, perhaps even liberals. So how do you say you believe in moral behavior, the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States and fret about the practical costs of enforcing those ideals on a tiny minority of people who actually failed their duty by following their orders?

Actually, it’s not difficult for authoritarian followers to hold an ideal in their heads while, at the same time, violate that ideal in the act of following authority. It’s actually a feature, not a bug (see: Republicans). Even people who don’t see themselves as embracing right-wing ideology can find themselves in stark violation of liberal ideals, as long as that is what is required by their particular authority figures. The rank-and-file CIA employees who were obviously thrilled to see Obama turn over the rock they’ve been living under are not part of the power-elite that Klein and Ignatius worship. Those people at least partially represent the smaller group of clandestine officers who were willing to follow their orders no matter how lawless, pointless and sadistic. Get the picture?

Edward Perkovic said Poplawski, his best friend, feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said Poplawski feared that President Barack Obama was going to take away his rights…”

Barack Obama Campaign statement:

Barack Obama believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms. He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns.

FactCheck.org:

A National Rifle Association advertising campaign distorts Obama’s position on gun control beyond recognition.

The NRA is circulating printed material and running TV ads making unsubstantiated claims that Obama plans to ban use of firearms for home defense, ban possession and manufacture of handguns, close 90 percent of gun shops and ban hunting ammunition.

The NRA announced it will spend $40 million during this year’s elections, including $15 million to portray Sen. Barack Obama as a threat to gun rights. The NRA has been circulating fliers and mailers that claim to be “Barack Obama’s 10-Point Plan to ‘Change’ the Second Amendment.” And on Sept. 22 reports surfaced that the NRA had launched TV ads in several key states, also attacking Obama. They are false portrayals.

“We’re comfortable with what we put on there,” [Andrew] Arulanandam [the NRA's director of public affairs] said. “We believe our facts.”

Apparently, so did Richard Poplawski.

UPDATE: Charles Blow: “But, it’s not all just harmless talk. For some, their disaffection has hardened into something more dark and dangerous. They’re talking about a revolution.

The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did.

Guess what, Jeff, 70% of Americans weren’t led to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 by “a general”. You own that as much as anyone in American, except perhaps the original liars, Dick Cheney and George Bush, whom you broadcast with abandon and without any real reporting.

And I’ve been curious about this for some time, how come we had a certifiable psychopath and ignoramus as president for eight years, along with his megalomaniacal sidekick, and no one at NBC seemed to notice? Probably not your fault, though, in spite of your primary importance at the top of our watchdog TV press and the keen, vigilant eye of crack journalists like Brian Williams and David Gregory. Keep up the great work.

Can you imagine a better way to undercut public support for fiscal stimulus and deficit spending than to report out an omnibus spending bill with nearly 9,000 earmarks totaling $8 billion?

Yes, I can. You could rail about it in a syndicated business column running in one of the country’s major dailies, without pointing out that it’s 1.5% of the entire federal operating budget for the rest of the year.

But, of course, that is just what the Democratic Congress has done. Americans don’t need to be lectured by the House speaker and the Senate majority leader on the spending prerogatives of Congress. What they need are leaders who can demonstrate, in ways symbolic as well as substantive, that they know the difference between spending that is crucial to the country in times of crisis and spending that is not.

And there’s one more thing that proves how supremely unqualified you are for that very job: government spending isn’t a zero sum game, as long as it’s stimulative (basically, it creates jobs) and as long as you still need to do more stimulus (by all rational accounts, we do). The more spending, the more bang you get in the form of employment and economic growth. There is no, “spending that is crucial to the country in times of crisis and spending that is not,” every dime spent stimulating the economy in any way is important based on its stimulative effect, not whether it comes from an earmark. Another concrete lesson, as if we needed any, that those whom we entrusted to inform and lead us, were never even half up to the job.

“…to be a constant damper on undue liberaloptimism about the perfectability of the human condition…”

First off, I actually believe in the usefulness of an honest conservative opposition to liberal government. But we are so far from either honest conservatism or liberal government, it’s pathetically naïve (or deluded) to make that your vision for the near future.

Klein’s little jab at “liberaloptimism” also made me laugh and not just because it doesn’t in any way resemble any of the liberals with whom I’m familiar - quite the opposite, really.

It also reminded me of this guy and the present near final demise of the domestic auto industry. In a nutshell, in post WWII, the Japanese and US auto industries took fundamentally different approaches to quality control. US manufacturers decided that they had reached an “acceptable rate” of product defect (if I recall, somewhere between 3-6%) for their cars. Meanwhile, the Japanese manufacturers decided to set a target defect rate of zero defects on theirs (they knew that would never be achieved but had to be the ambition of a manufacturer to build the most competitive product). 60 years later, the Japanese makers are still eating our lunch on product quality and reliability, even using US labor in US plants. I hope you get the analogy.

And it is “conservatives” who have a fatally distorted view of human psychology and sociology, tending to fully recognize the qualities of the id and not much else (other than that provided by a higher power). Liberals are better able to see the full nature of the human equation. For one thing, they know that even liberals can be indoctrinated in an anti-liberal mythology and bias that’s hard to unlearn, especially from a high perch in the corporatist press.

I sure hope that all this “what did he get out of it” rhetoric is about keeping the leftward pressure on Obama and not because they really don’t understand why he’s done what he’s done or what he’s gotten from it. It is simply implausible to me that anyone as smart and politically savvy as Obama, ever thought that Republicans would partner with a Democrat to improve government. Obviously, Obama made a big point of reaching out to Republicans and “centrists” (and avoided overtly liberal policies) to write a non-partisan, non-liberal narrative inside the beltway, where the “centrist” epithets partisan and liberal will kill a politician and his agenda faster than getting caught tapping your foot in a men’s room stall.

Now he has free reign from Villagers like Joe Klein to tell the Republicans to go Cheney themselves. You can ask yourself whether he had to go so far (see: FISA, Gregg, state secrets) but, considering he’s still being called a partisan liberal by the right who are still getting some traction in the press and public with the charge, it’s hard to second-guess him. In the end, this has forced “conservatives” to admit that they want Obama (and the economic policies of the United States) to fail, rail against the corporatist press and generally go to crazy town to explain their opposition to Obama, further marginalizing them on the fringe of the political process.

Obama has given himself room in the arena of public opinion to enact a progressive agenda. Now let’s see if he’ll fight for it.

The other key into the current debate is that the Republican position is ominously similar to their position on global warming or, for that matter, evolution. The discussion of what to do on the Democratic side tracks more or less with textbook macroeconomics, while Republican argument track either with tax cut monomania or rhetorical claptrap intended to confuse. It’s true that macro-economics doesn’t make controlled experiments possible. And economists can’t speak to these issues with certainty. But in most areas of our lives, when faced with dire potential consequences, we put our stock with scientific or professional consensus where it exists, as it does here. Only in cases where it goes against Republican political interests or economic interests of money-backers do we prefer the schemes of yahoos and cranks to people who study the stuff for a living.

Obviously, the problem Josh is getting to is that the corporate press, from the NY Times and Washington Post to Chris Matthews and Brian Williams, treats both Democratic rationality and Republican insanity with exactly equal credulity (actually, one could make the case that they give greater credulity to the insanity by volume). The (possibly intended) upshot is that the ignorant public doesn’t know whom or, therefore, what they should believe.

Clearly, the press has to cover the two political parties we have, rather than the ones we might want. But it’s their job to report both the truth and the lies, the pragmatism and the insanity, that each of them convey. The current bi-polar disease is killing us.

2. For every policy position taken by a public official, a contrary position must be presented.

3. The corporatist media’s direct effect on public opinion, elections and public policy shall not be discussed.

4. Unflattering facts about political and media personalities and institutions shall not be revealed to the public.

5. The admission of factual errors shall be avoided if possible.

6. The corporatist media shall decide the range of politically acceptable discussion.

7. The view of the left of the public political spectrum shall be suppressed in the examination of public policy issues to the degree possible.