Final score:

Incremental progress: 1
Headlong dash to the past: 0

Sorry, Mssrs. R, no lovely parting gifts nor a home version for playing.

The Sun is sunnier, the sky bluer, the birds chirpier today.

Because ‘an empty vessel makes the most noise’ is still a truism.

Because the Power Point Presidency has left the building.

Because the attempted hostile takeover of the United States of America has been thwarted.

So the first ‘debate’ has come and gone. Impressions:

Worst thing of the entire program was to witness Jim Lehrer morphing from news media patriarch and éminence grise to Captain Dunsel in the span of the first 15 minutes.

Mr. Obama had a ready, if rote, grasp of facts and figures, but few flickers of fire.

As for Mr. Romney, he gave a creditable audition for the role of hyped-up Harold Hill in The Music Man, but little more.

All three people on the stage essentially were lost in the weeds for the bulk of the time allotted.

Ye olde scribe hereby dubs W. Mitt Romney the Calzone Candidate.

All the meat is hidden by the denseness of the upper crust, which releases hot air.

Should anyone happening upon this post own (or know someone who does) one of those delis which name their sandwiches, might ye olde blogscribe humbly suggest for the menu a $1000 Mitt Romney Grilled Bonanza:

Wagyu beef tongue topped with Ass cheese and gold leaf between slices of the world’s most expensive bread.

Pepto-Bismol , natch, an extra charge.

By broadly asserting corporations as “people,” W.M. Romney has publicly defined his active engagement in one of the lowest, most odious, and most near-universally despicable commerces conceivable.

As head of Bain Capital, an enterprise whose raison d’etre is the buying and selling of corporate entities for profit, W.M. Romney was, by his own words, actively dealing in the buying and selling of people.

Buying and selling people is slave-trading.

Applying his self-expressed parameters, W.M. Romney trafficked in (and profited handsomely from) slavery.

What have we become?

There you have it — indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial.  Source

Congress, then.

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.  Source

Congress, now.  (More)

•  Replace “support” with “subvert”

•  Replace “defend” with “overturn”

•  Amend “against all enemies” to read “regarding enemies (proven, alleged, suspected or arbitrarily designated)”

•  Replace “true” with “fungible”

•  Amend “to the same” to read “to the same when expedient”

•  Replace “freely” with “lightly”

•  Amend “office on which I am about to enter” to read “office on which I am about to enter, unless inconvenient”

Together in peace.

In the late Senator Teddy’s case, with the solace of readily available government-paid end of life aid and assistance.

Edward Kennedy was a Senator who understood and extolled the service part of the phrase public service and who worked to make conspicuous and to never forgo the concept, responsibility and utilization of benevolence in government.

If directly calling for openly flouting and opposing the Constitution is not anti-American, what is?

From the U.S. Constitution, Article VI (emphasis added):

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

One can stare at that as many times as one likes and parse it ’til the cows come home and it still nowhere says “except Oklahoma.”

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets.

[snip]

Falling, who has founded several Christian nonprofits and is a former city councilor, also said the next mayor needs to appoint people to city boards, authorities and commissions who will “honor God.”

[snip]

When asked whether she meant she would recruit Christians to serve the city, Falling said she was talking about “people committed to their churches,” and when asked whether she meant Christian churches, she said, “churches, yes.” Source

Fanaticism is a dish best not served at all.

There is more than ample evidence of the immature kindergarten level* to which political discourse has sunk, but this ludicrous stab mines untapped contemptible depths of sheer stupidity:

Dr. Regina M. Benjamin, Obama’s pick for the next surgeon general, was hailed as a MacArthur Grant genius who had championed the poor at a medical clinic she set up in Katrina-ravaged Alabama.

But the full-figured African-American nominee is also under fire for being overweight in a nation where 34 percent of all Americans aged 20 and over are obese.

Critics and supporters across the blogsphere have commented on photos of Benjamin’s round cheeks, saying she sends the wrong message as the public face of America’s health initiatives. Source

* With apologies to actual kindergarteners, who aren’t old enough yet to know any better.

Liz Cheney (more) — an American iteration of Imee Marcos?

Put as simply (and broadly) as possible, the partisan arguments in Congress regarding emergency funds for the automotive industry boiled down to:

Republicans - The government should maintain a laissez-faire position (while concurrently mandating concessions from labor) and the market should be the determinant of business decisions and viability.

Democrats - Monies for a large and many-tentacled sector of industry as a buffer and stopgap to allow a window of opportunity for major and wrenching labor and management decisions involving a restructured bsuiness model, but avoidance of a direct takeover of operations by the government.

Except for when, in both cases, those loudly proclaimed stances and principles are simultaneously tossed out the window.

A majority of House members have signed onto a bill to reverse the closing of 789 Chrysler dealerships and block General Motors Corp. from closing more than 1,300, while the full House could vote on the bill as early as next week. Source

To paraphrase the anecdote regarding the Model T: You can have a Congress in any color you want, so long as it’s yellow.

Citing a philosophy of conscience based on the foundation of a refrigerator magnet, and a strange, tangled thicket of indistinct language slanted to evince personal victimhood (including mention of the voiced “Yes” vote of a one-year-old), Gov. Sarah Palin today announced that she is going Galt (ref.).

Don’t let the door hit ya in the butt on the way out.

Still far from practicing what we preach.

…”For the DoD to instruct its employees that lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.” Source

With friends like these…

Among the countries congratulating Mr Ahmadinejad on his victory were Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and North Korea. Source

More:

As European capitals appear to weigh their reaction to the Iranian poll against their desire to engage Tehran in constructive talks, most of Iran’s neighboring states have opted for simply congratulating the winner.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai was the first head of state to do so as he called Ahmadinejad on June 14. Karzai’s office said he congratulated the Iranian people “for making a decision about their destiny” and hoped Afghanistan’s ties with Iran would continue to strengthen during Ahmadinejad’s second four-year term in office.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani followed shortly after with a telegram to Ahmadinejad expressing confidence that their two countries “friendly and neighborly relations” will improve in the coming years.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, told Ahmadinejad the victory was “an acknowledgment of your outstanding services.”

[snip]

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa also congratulated Ahmadinejad….Source

Other side of the coin: Unlike major capitals of the EU, Canada voices sharply stated outrage.

Applying law enforcement to criminality as a primary tool. What a concept.

Though the initiative is a work in progress, some senior counter-terrorism officials and administration policy-makers envision it as key to the national security strategy President Obama laid out last week — one that presumes most accused terrorists have the right to contest the charges against them in a “legitimate” setting.

The approach effectively reverses a mainstay of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, in which global counter-terrorism was treated primarily as an intelligence and military problem, not a law enforcement one. That policy led to the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; harsh interrogations; and detentions without trials. Source

Jury is still out on the robustness (if any) of oversight and accountability measures to be included, as well as strictures applied or unapplied to such activities as wiretapping, warrantless searches, etc.

Level-headed layout.

President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers.…

But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues.

Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”… Source

…yet remain too widely unlearned or willfully ignored.

Officials use torture when they have already dehumanized their victims —- a witch is not a normal person, a “terrorist” is a beast —- when a government puts revenge before other goals, and when a sense of helplessness rules.

Promoting fear of the unknown enemy who must be exposed through torture gives officials a great sense of their own importance; and, because they can waterboard a suspect like Abu Zubaydah 83 times, they do have considerable power —- to inflict pain, not to obtain useful information. In the process, the torturers dehumanize themselves.

Leaving all moral qualms aside, are we to learn nothing from the experience of keen observers who have understood torture’s uselessness over the centuries? Source

Why and how is there still any public deliberation deeming any approving torture as a tool of the state even marginally credible?

And for those armchair Torquemadas who would still smugly or vengefully (and absent any record of proof, particularly of any sole or unique and testable, replicable value) tout that “torture worked” — well, slavery worked. Quite efficaciously for many centuries too, but the weight of its innate and central immorality, bigotry and wretched, corruptive maleficence properly cast it into obliteration as accepted practice.

As for Mr. Cheney, ye old scribe turns once more to Churchill:

The dangers and consequences of validating leadership, fomenting policy or upending and twisting universal, civilized illegalities into mandated practice under the banner of fanaticism are historically self-evident.

Update May 21: After listening to both speeches today, some quick thoughts.

Cheney: PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is real, and giving a wide banner labeled ‘credibility’ to an obvious untreated long-term PTSD sufferer to spout rabid, repetitive and one-dimensional points, many spun out of the flimsiest of data(if indeed any at all) does not serve to bolster nor advance any cogent argument. Indoctrination by fear is no less offesnive and repugnant than is indoctrination by force.

Obama: Quicker and more sure-footed progress is always made when standing on solid ground than when balancing on a high wire. The latter position is where he chose to perch too frequently. Splitting the difference on inalienable human rights affords no rights at all, merely a facade of same. Compromise on basic tenets of justice gives succor and viability to the unjustified.

Top-notch critique of today’s “let’s slap a coat of paint on and maybe it’ll sell” announcement and backpedaling regarding military commissions:

Let’s concede that if the U.S. is going to continue to try accused terrorists in newly-created military commissions — rather than under our normal, long-standing system of justice — then it is better to have more safeguards than fewer. That’s just true by definition. Let’s further concede that many of the past criticisms voiced about Bush’s military commissions, including some of Obama’s criticisms, focused on the specific rules of those commissions, some of which (though far from all) are addressed by Obama’s modifications, including the most important change that coerced statements are no longer admissible. Nonetheless, the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves. The controversy — one of the most intense of the Bush era — was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.

[snip]

…if the state is willing to accord due process only when it is guaranteed that it can win, but then creates a new system of diminished due process whenever it believes it cannot win, the guarantee of due process, for rather obvious reasons, becomes completely illusory (”we’ll give due process as long as we’re sure we can win, and if we can’t, we’ll give you something less”). Source

Painting broadly now, but consider this:

Iraq, a country under martial occupation, while an economic and societal basket case, while riven by ongoing and constant political, partisan and sectarian chaos, allowed Saddam Hussein trial in a newly nascent and still unsteady judicial system under a fledgling, subservient government barely operational and in crisis, mostly in public proceedings and venue.

Can the U.S., a country of relative plenty, a country of social and civil calm, under no immediate widespread lethal or destructive threat and suffering no ongoing programs of internal violence, do no less than channel a few handfuls of alleged criminals through its own longstanding, primarily respected and proven, long evolved, publicly accountable judicial branch — as established by its founding document — for trial?

And under circumstances of justice and of incarceration which do not deliberately institute and replicate individually a curriculum of some of the most brutal and repugnant tactics of repressive power and abuse of authority often ascribed to regimes incontrovertibly engaged in and sutained by thuggery, barbarity and fear.

Wanting to portray ourselves as a collective portrait of liberty and to be held up as a standard of freedom requires much, much more than just talking the talk.

The high ground holds no place, no corner, no nook or cranny, no refuge for the dark side.

Thank you, Mr. Sorenson. Thank you.

“Intellectually and morally dishonest lawyers (in the Department of Justice) disgraced not only their country but their profession” in claiming that waterboarding and other forms of torture were legal, he said.

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

[snip]

“…the moral authority of the United States, its traditional ability to occupy the moral high ground in an international conflict, is an important part of our security,” he said.

“More important than the worthless statements extracted from torture’s victims who will cry out anything to halt it.” Source

A bit more:

Virtually every lawyer worth his diploma knows that the United States is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions on War Crimes and the 1984 Convention Against Torture; that waterboarding is torture and that torture is illegal, regardless of pieces of paper from Justice Department lawyers who disgraced not only their country but their profession, a fact of which their respective Bar Associations should take note. Those lawyers apparently thought in 2003-04 that their client was the President and later his Attorney General. Wrong. Their client was the American people who had a right to expect that their lawyers would know the law and uphold it, not attempt to redefine it or interpret it away… Source

Not yet.

As the castiagting and purging of Republican party members for ‘purity’ advances, mayhaps we can expect a 3-way cage match of Sarah Palin, Samuel Wurzelbacher, Karl Rove and Glenn Beck as the last act in attempting to ideologically reach that ever elusive 99 and 44/100 per cent level (ref.).

Needless to say, substitute your own more contemporary (say, from Ronald Reagan onward) bits for the lyrics in this nevertheless relevant ditty from 1962 on the aciduous diminishment accompanying a hellbent for leather run via culling to some unattainable idealized endzone of party purity:

As for Sen. Specter, he’s spent a Congressional career talking out of both sides of his mouth as a matter of course (from among an virtual encyclopedia of examples, a topically relevant one here), so there are virtually no expectations from ye old scribe of his demonstrating anything approaching a stiff backbone or core stances in any case. His announced party switch today is just the other bookend to the one made of convenience and expediency when he first successfully ran for an office back in 1965 (ref.).