Dissonance
The good news is that moribund relics like the WaPo are waking up. Witness today's editorial, Vice President for Torture:
Well and good. But I understood the world in which the MSM just plain ignored the blood on our Administration's hands, and even handed them the soap. What I don't understand is how one can acknowledge such horrors and yet give them the same tsk-tsk weight given to Ted Stevens' Alsaskan bridges to nowhere.
These are war crimes we are talking about. This is the de facto head of state advocating war crimes. Treating this story as politics as usual evidences a pervasive moral rot almost incomprehensible in scale.
I understand denial, however disgusting and dysfunctional. And I'm down with outrage. What I don't understand is bland acknowledgement.
Vice President Cheney is aggressively pursuing an initiative that may be unprecedented for an elected official of the executive branch: He is proposing that Congress legally authorize human rights abuses by Americans. "Cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the United States. The State Department annually issues a report criticizing other governments for violating it. Now Mr. Cheney is asking Congress to approve legal language that would allow the CIA to commit such abuses against foreign prisoners it is holding abroad. In other words, this vice president has become an open advocate of torture.
Well and good. But I understood the world in which the MSM just plain ignored the blood on our Administration's hands, and even handed them the soap. What I don't understand is how one can acknowledge such horrors and yet give them the same tsk-tsk weight given to Ted Stevens' Alsaskan bridges to nowhere.
These are war crimes we are talking about. This is the de facto head of state advocating war crimes. Treating this story as politics as usual evidences a pervasive moral rot almost incomprehensible in scale.
I understand denial, however disgusting and dysfunctional. And I'm down with outrage. What I don't understand is bland acknowledgement.
posted by bluememe at 10/26/2005
1 Comments:
I was surprised that you used the word "outraged:" the last article I read--about someone getting a fund raising letter from Nancy Pelosi: this article's author also used the word "outraged" (in her case about disconnect between dnc and "its base"). I have heard the word used in numerous other articles in varied contexts. Since leaders are clueless, perhaps it is up to the base to articulate a platform (my 2 cents worth: reauthorize or do whatever needs to be done to make the Bill of Rights active again, i.e., universal respect for individual human rights).
Creating a platform would be a different so sort thing than, say, proposing a law: examples of recent ones abound. It seems to me logical that if a local government can take away a citizen's property to serve some "pressing" reason, citizens should have property rights equivalent to that of the government, i.e., citizens, too, can initiate taking away property for some "pressing" reason: my 2cents worth is that the forthcoming round of oil profits are the property and Pakistan, the reason.
I don't know whether this line of thinking would apply to other democracies, but its logic seems unassailable in the context of the U.S.
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