The Good Life

Life is so much sweeter under Obama. The evil perpetrated by the Bush administration was done so by an inarticulate idiot; with Obama, the same evil goes down so much easier because it is perpetrated by a smiling and articulate young man who seems to be much too nice to be associated with such nastiness.

He promised us change, and change we are getting. His Justice Department invokes the “State Secrets” doctrine to prevent lawsuits by former detainees who were tortured because, under Obama, they really mean it, whereas Bush invoked the same doctrine simply to hide his administration’s dirty laundry. Obama’s administration was very courteous when it threatened to withhold valuable intelligence from Great Britain if it allowed a suit by a former detainee to go forward, whereas the Bush administration would have been very rude about it.

Now Obama is bringing back military commission to try terrorists who are not accused terrorists because the very fact that they are at Gitmo is prima facie evidence that they are guilty of something.

The fact that he campaigned against these commissions will not stop him from doing his duty as dictated to him by a by the Beltway’s bureaucratic blob that slimes along under the unstoppable force of its own momentum.

It is a comfort to all red-blooded Americans to know that Bush’s eternal war of the empty policy will continue uninterrupted. However, being the good marketer that he is, Obama did go to the trouble to rebrand it.

The only difference between 9/11 and the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center is that 9/11 succeeded in bringing the towers down. That was the intent of the ’93 bombing. The terrorists parked their van in the South Tower with the expectation that the blast would cause the South Tower to collapse and take the North Tower with it.

What is interesting about the ’93 blast is that without torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition or black holes, all the conspirators were found guilty in a court of law that observed all of the niceties of rules of evidence and defendant rights. Yet, even with torture, a Patriot Act, a Military Commissions Act, rendition and black holes, the 9/11 conspirators are still at large.

(Correction! I think they did catch one, but he was so tortured that he not only confessed to 9/11, but he also confessed to plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty and to blowing up the USS Maine in Havana harbor.)

Things will improve under Obama. We’ll feel so much better about ourselves as we continue to do the same things over and over again. Our security depends on our ability to produce more terrorists so we can justify the boated defense budget that is necessary to keep us safe because we keep on doing things that produce more terrorists thus necessitating an even bigger defense budget...

This is our vision thing.

--Case Wagenvoord