I feel as if I have stepped into the pages of Great Expectations and everyone has become Magwitch, transported to Australia in shackles aboard some vessel designed for the purpose of housing and transporting criminals at sea. But of course that was the 19th Century...and earlier. That's not now. Right? And then, along comes today's Guardian report. And I am left with one reaction:
We have bloody prison ships? Prison ships?
Ask, the diarist who broke this story here, wondered if we should be surprised. The bulk of this diary was constructed as a response to Ask's query. I wanted to move it to a diary of its own because...well, because I tend to write gentle, thoughtful, peaceful, poignant diaries, and every once in a while it just feels good to let out some of the emotion that eight years of these evil jackasses has welled up in me.
Actually, the truth--the very, very sad truth, is this: I am not at all surprised.
Nothing that W and his Constitution-shredding cronies could do or conceive of doing would surprise me. This is a man whose Presidency began with a concerted vote-stealing effort orchestrated by his brother and ratified by the allegedly apolitical Supreme Court.
It is a man who coldly and callously used bigotry and hate in a successful tactic to mobilize Christian Right voters after the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision authorizing gay marriage in 2004. BTW: Have you noticed how the institution of marriage in that state has completely broken down?
It is a man who, halfway through his first term of office, bought the 2004 electoral votes of the state of Ohio through his connections to Diebold Corporation, whose CEO pledged to do whatever it took to get him re-elected and then managed to get his paperless machines installed in key precincts throughout a key state.
It is a man who, having utterly wasted his first nine months in office (most people seem to forget that he had already been consigned to the historical scrap-heap by pundits after his--what? five hundred or so?--excessive vacations that year), ignored the direct warnings of his intelligence community that (what was that memo called again, Secretary Rice?) Osama Bin Laden was planning to attack inside the US and then, after he did so, managed to squander worldwide sympathy for our country in an amazingly short period of time.
It is a man whose response to such a catastrophe as 9/11 was to become emboldened to break down Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and international accords.
It is a man whose appointees to important positions have been almost uniformly incompetent or just plain bad, starting with his string of "Bush first, country and law a distant second" Attorney General appointees. (And the image of Ashcroft covering up that pornographic Lady Liberty remains one of the distilling images of the Bush years in my mind.)
It is a man whose first actions in office were to allow his Vice-President to hold secret meetings with oil executives to set energy policies, policies that have worked so well for America that gas prices have tripled at the pump since he took office while oil company profits have soared.
It is a man who has ordered his cronies to ignore direct subpoenaes from Congress.
It is a man...
Oh I'm making myself ill.
G. W. Bush is a man guilty of criminal activity, large and small, national and international, from staging two non-violent coups to take over and retain the Presidency of the US to the absolutely impeachable offenses that led us into Iraq, which had done nothing to us, while ignoring the enemy who bombed our country.
No, I am not surprised at prison ships. I would not be surprised if he had secret prisons on the moon, built and maintained by Haliburton.
I am all in favor of trying to reconcile the political enmity that has permeated American culture for the last two decades, but I pray that President Obama finds a way to bring this treasonous and vulgar man and all of his cronies to justice for what they have done to our country and to the world for the last eight years.
Whew.
Sorry. Next time I won't hold back so much. :-)
Update [2008-6-2 1:24:28 by sunspark says]: Reader MajorFlaw saw a...well...major flaw in my poll. My intention, which almost everyone recognized and honored, was to allow a bit of venting for the readers after my own rant was through. I tried to use humor, ranging from the silly (Cheney's evil melting ice caps, the moon) to the more pointed (reminders of W's Nero-like dancing while the world burns) as well as some reflections of his own legacy: Guantanamo, Iraq, prison ships. I had thought it a minor diversion. One commenter, though, chose to go rather overboard with his own "humorous" response, and evoked Saddam on the gallows. Never mind that I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty (even for Saddam and Osama); that particular brand of "gallows humor" does seem beyond the pale. MajorFlaw requested that I remove what he (she?) refers to as an "inflammatory" poll. I would be loath to do so because of one commenter's reaction or one poorly chosen alleged joke, though I'd be very open to doing so if I thought more people were offended...if I could. But there does not appear to be a way to remove polls or even edit them once they are up. Does anyone know about this?