1115.org

I don’t usually throw around four letter words in my posts. (Maybe in the comments sometimes, but usually not in the posts). However, what the Senate has wrought yesterday has lathered me up into such a state of white-hot outrage that the English language gives me no words to express my feelings other than four letter words.

With self-control I didn’t even know I possessed, I managed to get through (most of) one post without letting a four-letter word through. But now that the dam has burst, I’m just going to vent and hopefully get it out of my system.

Here’s WaPo, discussing Arlen Specter’s amendment to what they’re apparently calling the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the amendment which sought to give those detained under the Act as “unlawful enemy combatants” the right of habeas corpus (In its coverage, WaPo, like all the other pillars of the fourth estate, carefully allows equal time to both sides of the argument, carefully presents both sides as equally deserving of consideration. With the executive branch intent on sharpening long knives and, as Jon Stewart put it, “applying the electrodes of freedom to the testicles of terror”, with the legislative branch licking the hands – and other body parts – of the executive branch, with the fourth estate in abdication mode, all we have standing between us and who knows what fate is the judiciary now. I take back every single lawyer joke I’ve ever told or laughed at.):

Opponents of the amendment argued that the United States is under no obligation to allow enemy combatants access to federal courts in a time of war and that doing so would harm the military’s effort to wage the war on terrorism.

Then how come the freaking military is not lobbying for it?

And we are under some obligation to torture? To detain without bringing charges? To detain without legal recourse?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) denounced Hastert’s “false and inflammatory rhetoric” and said Democrats opposed the bill because it could endanger U.S. troops, exposing them to similar treatment by enemy captors, and because it was likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Why the flying f*** don’t these so-called bloody leaders have the sense and the balls to say we oppose the bill because it is an outrage, because it is just plain f***ing wrong, because it is more evil than Dick Cheney and Karl Rove combined? We oppose the bill because it is thoroughly un-American, because it betrays all our bedrock values.

Why can’t these cretins understand it doesn’t bloody matter if Bush and the Republicans call them “soft on terrorism”? America isn’t buying that sh** any more.

And, besides, as everybody and his brother has pointed out ad infinitum, how does it help politically to vote for this bill, or to allow it to pass by not mounting a filibuster? After the bill passes, Democrats will be attacked for being soft on terrorism, for wanting to coddle the terrorists, exactly as they would have been if the bill had been successfully opposed.

There is only one word for what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid agreed to do. And that word, unfortunately, is appeasement.

All that the Democrats have achieved by acting the way they did is to demonstrate (once again) that they are incapable of taking a stand on principle, not even when a majority of the country supports that principle and approves of the stand. Can there possibly be a sorrier indictment of a political party?

No doubt the polls will let us know in due course how much the political cowardice of the Democrats will cost them in terms of voter turnout. (A la John Oliver of The Daily Show, I’m talking of the most reliable poll, the only one that matters, the one where you sample the entire voting population.)

If the Democratic Party had fought this tyranny-and-torture bill all the way, right down to a filibuster, they probably wouldn’t have won. But just fighting the good fight, and calling a spade a f***ing spade, would have energized voters, as well as the volunteers who ultimately make or break turn-out-the-vote efforts.

But not to even fight? Not to even be willing to denounce the bill for what it is? The Democratic Party bloody well deserves to lose this November.

Unfortunately, the American people don’t deserve two more years of being comprehensively gang-raped by George ruddy Bush and a Republican-controlled House and a Republican-controlled Senate.

And so, people like me will keep on hoping that the American people get what they deserve rather than the Democratic Party. But that hardly translates into peak motivation at election time in a crucially important election.