Bad American

I don’t know whether to believe Mayhill Flower’s post in Huffpo but if the direct quote is true, Obama may have given himself a fatal wound. You can bet the right wing talkers will jump all over this on Monday and understandably so. Talk about having a field day with a political quote! This is how Obama described Pennsylvanians to rich Californians:

These qualities of hospitality, patriotism and endurance are exactly what Californians need to hear about Pennsylvanians. And when he spoke to a group of his wealthier Golden State backers at a San Francisco fund-raiser last Sunday, Barack Obama took a shot at explaining the yawning cultural gap that separates a Turkeyfoot from a Marin County.

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama made a problematic judgment call in trying to explain working class culture to a much wealthier audience. He described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of creamy Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia.

Oh yeah. I bet all of us in ‘flyover country’ must appear the same way to the wine and brie crowd in Marin County. I own a gun because the economy sucks. Right. You know what Barack? My family were hunters and gun owners even when it was flush. And we have them not only because some of us still like hunting but for our own personal protection. I know that makes you kinda nervous but then again, you have a small army of SS to protect you so what do you care?

The religion thing. Brilliant. After making one of the best political speeches in decades after the Rev. Wright flap, now you say people are clinging to religion because the times are hard. What an insult. Yes, in many cases people DO look to their faiths when times are tough but that also includes PERSONAL times - not just economic times. People lose loved ones and suffer other problems not connected to personal income.

And the anti-immigrant and anti-trade stuff. Right. You know, you might just want to climb off that Ivy league perch of yours and see just how it is out here in the rust belt. Where real people live and have dreams not connected to pricey law firms and real estate wheeling and dealing. And when they see, as in my small town, a procession of illegal immigrants taking jobs that should be held by own kids as summer jobs, what are we supposed to think? God bless the USA - ain’t capitalism great?

Yes Barack, its all because we’ve been so screwed over by capitalism out here that we’re bitter. And you know what? Why not? We’ve got a right to be angry. We’ve got people who played the game their entire life - worked hard, obeyed the law, provided for their families - and are now being thrown on the scrap heap in their 50s or even earlier - sacrificed on the altar of ‘globalism.’ You know Barack, we aren’t all cut out to be attorneys or Harvard MBAs. But dammit, we do work out here and all we ask of our government, our elected representatives, is that they pass laws and policies that help us not hurt us. But when you’re part of the best Congress money can buy, what do you care about us out here? We’re just the punch line for a cocktail party in Marin County.

I am hoping against hope that this quote is wrong and this did not happen. If it did, I have no one to vote for in November. Maybe that’s the whole point.

Lovely to see a bunch of Judeo-Christians sitting around the table discussing the ways to inflict pain on fellow human beings who may or may not be guilty of anything. Trials are so boring and so 20th century! Let’s bring out the rack and thumbscrews!

ABC News

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

And of course, like cockroaches scurrying from the light:

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”

Real cowards.

More:

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

“These discussions weren’t adding value,” a source said. “Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it’s legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it.”

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

“Going beyond what you used to do?” Hell, we’ve been torturing people unofficially since the country was founded. Now, the only difference is its all legal-like now.

And how that Great Christian Ashcroft? The tactics are OK, he just doesn’t want his day sullied by hearing flowery descriptions of how to inflict bodily injury. You can bet someone like J. Edgar Hoover wouldn’t have had any qualms - hell, he probably would have made a great number of suggestions.

I mean can you imagine the senior officials of the United States Government sitting around the table discussion torture techniques? What, have we suddenly decided to ape the government of Columbia, or Saudi Arabia or Indonesia? I guess we no longer have any moral standing to lecture the rest of the world on morals (as if we ever really did).

But again, there’s undoubtedly a lot of ‘Murkans who will have no problem with torturing people who pray to the wrong god or look different than us. In fact, if the government were to advertise for the job of Torturer GS-666-5/7/9 (pay grades) and Supervisory Torturer GS-666-11/12 there probably would be a double line around the block at GSA of people willing to apply. Stanley Milgram is nodding somewhere in agreement.

In answer to the question posed to Good Christians by headline, perhaps the Lord would have said:

“Verily I say unto you: you shall not spare the rod, the whip, the nettles, the rack, the thumbscrews, the water board, nor any other device of cunning cruelty upon thine enemies. You shall torture thine enemies as thou torture thine own prisoners and slaves of times past. For the Lord has delivered them unto you and have found their souls to be black as the Evil one. Verily, thou art doing the Lord’s work when thou are applying the pain of righteousness to them. “