Big Brother George and the Cheny Waterworks

George Bush's Orwellian administration continues to demonstrate its total disreguard for the Constitution of the United States of America and the basic human values that should be a part of how we conduct ourselves, whether at war of at peace. Tony Snow assures everyone that the Vice President, Dick Cheny, was not referring to waterboarding when he talked about dunking detainees to extract information. Is the administration afraid to let the VP speak for himself? As the fictional lawyer, Perry Mason, might have said, "This is not best evidence. Unless Tony Snow is a mind reader, he cannot know what the VP meant or didn't mean."

So if it's not waterboarding they're talking about, what kind of dunking did they mean? I don't think anyone actually believes that the person being interrogated would be placed in a dunk tank(the kind found at fairs and other events) and that if he refused to talk the interrogator would throw baseballs at the target until a lucky hit plunged the victim into the water.

So now we have the spectacle of Big Brother George saying that we don't condone torture or use it, but we will use it if we think that we need to ( signing statement). Doublespeak, doublethink, and total incompetence while life imitates art.

Grover Norquist, Spider

Grover Norquist appears to be a bloated spider at the center of a web of interconnected organizations and individuals whose aim seems to be the complete destruction of the U.S. government. Of course they are not trying to bring it down by armed rebellion, because that would be immediately recogmized by almost everyone as treason. So they seem to be relying on economic tools to do the job. It’s a simple two-step operation: 1) eliminate taxes, 2) bankrupt the government. When a government is bankrupt, it dissappears.

What this is supposed to accomplish isn’t clear. "My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything," he said . Except he would need government to protect him from all the other self-employed, home-schooled guys carrying concealed weapons. And as a Harvard educated MBA he is surely aware that IRAs don’t exist independently of governments, and money dosen’t exist independantly of governments. So without government he would be free to raise his kids in ignorance while locked inside his fortress home trying to figure out what he can barter for the next month’s supply of food.