On a related subject, news filtering out about the city of Charlotte’s plans for “crowd control” and “handling” protesters is so worrisome. It looks for all the world like the gearing up of a slow motion train wreck

http://www.wcnc.com/news/local/Charlottes-DNC-ordinances-worry-the-ACLU-136928848.html

The old saw was never truer. Democrats will never win because while Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. We fell in love with OB and now we’re paying for it.

America….oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Maybe no big thang. Was beginning to think it was wasted on us anyway.

For goodness sake, let’s get her elected before we write her off and abandon her. Maybe this will be the one time when someone feels the people so solidly behind her that she’ll be emboldened and show some guts. (And, yes, I know that’s what we thought about “with-friends-like-these-who-needs-enemies” Obama, but Christ what is there left to do.

With numbers like these, look for the gloves to come off the Rethug smear machine and for this to get nasty (and I mean Lee Atwater nasty) real quick. The GOP would be freaking out no matter who was leading their porn boy, but my spidey sense tells me that Warren has cultivated a Clintonian level animosity in the Rethugs. The tipoff was Patrick Henry’s embarrassing and deplorable behavior toward her in the committee hearings. When closeted, toadie little pricks like Henry hear the big boys bad mouth someone in the backrooms they get emboldened to pile on and show their asses like he did.

Has it been determined that Jennifer Matthews, the Khost CIA station chief who died last year in the Camp Chapman suicide bomb blast, was the other Alec Station op (code name “Michael”) who colluded with Tom Wilshire to keep information away from the FBI?

On behalf of rat bastards everywhere, I gotta say that comment really hurt.

Excellent comment, my friend.

If I may turn an old adahge:

“An army marches on its (full) stomach. A revolution marches on an empty one.”

It is easy to condemn and find fault from outside.

No, it is not easy. In an attempt to fulfill our obligations as citizens of a free democracy many of us have tried our my best to learn the truth about some of the things this country has been responsible for in the last decade. We have each drawn our own conclusions about what this knowledge means in terms of the health and legitimacy of our democracy, its future, and our obligations, if any to seek change. Many of us choose to come together at places like Firedoglake as one means for a “average citizen” to hear about and discuss ideas about problems and solutions. I believe none of us do this easily. I can only speak for myself when I say this whole process has been the most gut-wrenching, despairing, and fear-making undertaking of my life.

I can only hope you will believe me when I say my heart, support, and respect are with you and your many colleagues like you. In fact, I find few things more appalling and infuriating than the thought of the extremities to which our government subjected good, decent, patriotic men and women like yourself, Mr. Carle, when, behind a screen of deceit, they took advantage of your loyalty and commitment and compelled you to do certain inhumane and unethical acts. My outrage is equal if not greater at the thought of the similar treatment of our military especially our enlisted men and women.

I do not want you or anyone like you to go to jail, apologize,or even be punished—retribution is NOT the point. We are not so callow as you may think, and many of us are “on your side” more than you realize. I simply believe the goals you say we must necessarily achieve are impossible until all of America is made to see, in horrifying detail and specificity, what was undertaken in the name of “freedom” and the dishonorable and destructive way it was accomplished.

Referring to Carle’s entry #74 from this weekend’s Book Salon discussion, do we know what this ominous thing is that happened to Wazir which Carle cannot discuss?

Also, if we must have a CIA, then I wish to God the agents would be more like Carle in one sense and not like him in another. I wish they all, like Carle, were able actually to look at what they do from a critical, questioning, rational perspective.

For what I wish the CIA WERE NOT, I refer you to the introduction to Carle’s book which reads like the winning entry in a “Worst Ian Fleming Imitation” contest.

I was suave, intellectual, and sophisticated, talking over sparkling glasses in salons with elegant women in low-cut designer dresses, appetizing curves, and high heels, smiling at banalities as we looked past each other.

Carle reveals himself to be totally in the thrall of a mythology in which they are a noble breed of morality-free avenging angels whose destiny is to perpetrate unspeakable acts of inhumanity and perfidy because only by such acts can we be “saved.”

People like Carle, all the Special Forces, and a great number of people at high levels in “the war on terror”, despite all their protestations to the contrary, have given their first and all consuming allegiance not to the nation nor the Constitution but to this mythology.

You say “If the cost (sic) is to let a few evil-doers and corrupters go free (sic), and the benefit is that the likelihood that our society will repudiate these practices more firmly in the future–well, to me that is the goal.” In response I encourage you (all of us) to imagine for a moment that it is twelve years ago and someone attempts, in all seriousness, to demand a national “torture debate”—a discussion of when and if the US should torture people.

So unthinkable, so incompatible with our convictions of basic American honor and decency would such a notion have seemed that a typical American reaction would likely have been something like “What is wrong with you, you filthy, unpatriotic Nazi Klansman piece of filth. Beat it before I kick your ass.”

I, for one, find myself still astonished by what happened. How did we go from there to here? And let me tell you, I find no comfort in Obama’s patronizing cooing about how the nightmare is over and we need not worry about America torturing again…never, ever, ever…I pwomise (sic). All I hear is his assurance that we are right back in 2000 again and that nothing has change to make our reclaimed nobility any less likely to come crashing down under the right circumstances.

I am no more in favor of an Abu Ghraib redux than you are, Mr. Carle. Rather than digging up Torquemada so he can terrorize the rank and file and make them scapegoats, I’d rather do nothing at all. Yet, somehow, some way, we must examine and come to terms with how WE AS A NATION (not just a few of us) went so tragically astray. It will surely mean confronting ghastly and poisonous elements of our society and our system, but the pain we will endure is nothing compared to the folly of refusing to realize that without “truth and reconciliation” we will remain poised to undertake even greater atrocities.

An investigation with the possibility of prosecutions seems to be the only instrument available to us to do what we must do. Not unlike an emetic, it will bring everything up and permit a close look. As flawed as it is, our justice system does provide for what is essential here—a thorough discovery and contemplation of the circumstances of a transgression and a tendency to be moved to mercy by them. Moreover, drawing on my knowledge of some experiences of my father, a clandestine op in Jakarta during the Sukarno years, I suggest an investigation would provide for many of your former colleagues what writing your book gave to you—a chance to confess, be understood, and find some kind of peace.

Oh, my head hurts. Reading the “blather” all I could think of was it sounded like Chip and Dale at an Amish meeting house discussing “Who farted?”

Wow. Obama’s shout out to FDL…must be the first time I got a chubby and a little throw-up in my mouth at the same time.

Sweden actually has a remarkably ethical government built on the respect for human rights. Already looking into it myself.