It’s Thursday Threatcon, your intelligence briefing on right wing activity. Below are the best reports, investigations, exposées, and debunkery of the wingnutosphere this week. Due to the release of the Senate torture report, our Threatcon Color Code is RECTAL FEEDING BROWN
- Dick Cheney is still torturing the truth
- Why is torture so popular with some conservatives? Most excuses center on ‘terrorism’ as if it is a magic word that can be waved over someone to render them non-human. That’s exactly the kind of magical thinking that has led to an uptick in anti-Muslim violence in the US
- A Texas man was arrested in Israel Tuesday for plotting to attack Muslim holy sites
- Tortured narratives: Rep. Cynthia Lumis (R-WI), one of the richest people in Congress, is trying to blame her husband’s death on Obamacare
- Torture the sick: here’s why the King v Burwell challenge to the ACA stands to destroy state exchanges and kill lots of Americans who don’t have Lumis’s millions
- Torturing retirees: Wall Street is looting public pension funds
- Torturing Indians: US Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) thinks it’s okay to steal land from Native Americans because they’re “wards of the federal government,” i.e. ‘moochers’
- Torturing gays: Pastor Steven Anderson of Tempe, AZ, who recently called for a genocide against gay people, has ordained Donnie Romero to spread his message of hate in Fort Worth, TX
- Torturing equal protection: voters in Fayetteville, Arkansas have made it legal to fire, deny housing, and refuse restaurant service to gay people. This is the latest example of the emerging strategy on the right to carve out a ‘freedom to discriminate‘ in law
- Torturing mother nature: Democratic staffers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee count more than 550 anti-environment votes by John Boehner’s caucus in the last four years
- Tortured history: Sen. Carl Levin says the CIA is still holding out on the false intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq
- Tortured reality: creationist Ken Ham just lost access to $18 million in Kentucky state tax incentives for his ‘Ark Encounter’ theme park by trying to discriminate in hiring
- As I’ve been telling you all along, resegregation is erasing any ‘postracial society’ we once enjoyed. Are lynching and torture far behind?
- Tortured logic: legendary numbskull TX Governor Rick Perry says he doesn’t need to be smart to be president
- Torturing the homeless: Dallas, TX has stopped trying to fight charities that feed people living on the street after wasting eight years and $250,000
- Do evangelical obsessions with ‘end times’ get in the way of progressive public policy advances? Washington State University professor Matthew Avery Sutton has a new book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, that says the answer is yes. Note that Christians worship the image of a god being tortured to death
- How to torture children: Disney and Koch Industries are using Luxembourg to avoid hundreds of millions in US taxes. In related news, a third of American children live in poverty
- The slow strangulation of liberalism: the lesson liberal donors need to learn from the New Republic debacle is that they are still about two decades behind the right in terms of supporting their intellectual infrastructure with nonprofit systems and competent managers. Robert Kuttner at the American Prospect comes closest to acknowledging this. There is no ‘free market business model’ for opinion media, and angel investors are a recipe for creeping Third-way corporate values
- Budget torture: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is leading the charge against provisions in the must-pass Congressional spending package that would reverse part of the Frank-Dodd legislation and further increase the influence of ‘dark money’ donors
- Tortured reproduction: less well-known, but just as telling, are a failed ‘cromnibus’ provision that would let your boss decide on your birth control and one still in the legislation that would give states millions of taxpayer dollars to harm the minds of children with ineffective, unscientific ‘abstinence education‘
- Tortured denial: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus wants to drape his party’s opposition to marriage equality “in the concepts of grace, love and respect.” That must be why he is partnering with two of the most vicious anti-gay hate groups in America to send RNC members to Israel
- Tortured definitions: by the standards of conservative economic and fiscal rhetoric, Ronald Reagan’s legacy is a complete failure
- Tortured heritage: a new study by respected sociologists confirms that the Ku Klux Klan has played a significant role in shifting party allegiances in the South
- Tortured motivations: the Eagle Forum was instrumental in killing the Equal Rights Amendment; now the founder’s son is emerging from the white supremacist closet
- Recruiting for torture: Klan flyers keep showing up on people’s lawns in Indiana
- As we’ve warned you, ammosexuals are planning a
massivelargesignificantrally at the Washington state capital on Saturday to protest the torture of their guns. Lunatic ex-sheriff Richard Mack, welfare rancher Cliven Bundy’s son, and ‘Fast & Furious’ fabricator Mike Vanderboegh are all scheduled to attend - Tortured fashion: the Montana state legislature’s new dress code is insulting to women
- A federal appeals court has ruled that anti-gay pastor Scott Lively can be sued for crimes against humanity such as encouraging Uganda to torture gay activists
- Rate torture: the election of unqualified utility industry hacks to the Alabama Public Service Commission has unsurprisingly led to a large rate increase
- Rape torture: the Koch brothers have a foundation that defends people accused of sex crimes on campus. All the right wing attention to problems in Rolling Stone‘s reporting of a college rape story points to just how important this kind of denialism is to conservative politics today
So why won’t this administration prosecute the war criminals? I know the answer. Do you?
Maybe because they’d rather pass health insurance reform than suck all the oxygen out of Washington?
I would say that it’s professional courtesy. This administration doesn’t prosecute the last for war crimes and the next one won’t prosecute this one for murdering american citizens without due process with drones. I wonder what the next administration will get away with?
Logically, “professional courtesy” would involve making the torture report disappear. Are you really weeping for al-Awlaki, a man who actively organized to kill Americans?
I’m weeping for his innocent 16 year old son.
His innocent 16 year old son went to a war zone to be with his dad, who was an enemy of the United States actively aiding and abetting the murder of Americans. He was killed in company with armed militants who were presumably targeted by the aircraft flown out of Saudi Arabia. His death is a tragedy that could have been easily prevented by his not hanging out with America’s enemies in what was already a lawless, fighting-filled tribal area.
Sucks to be in a bad neighborhood, huh?
You think killing Al-Awlaki without due process, without him having ever been indicted for any crime was ok? Just because the government said he was not on “our side” he deserved to die?
No, it’s not. Routine torture of those who have been held without due process is wrong. How can we sit on our high horse and condemn other countries for doing what we’re doing?
We can’t. And it’s not really about the double standard. It’s about crimes being committed and criminals being allowed to roam free. Every single one of them, from Bush down to a soldier standing guard outside a door while it took place, should stand trial for war crimes.
Here’s the thing: Al Qaeda said they were not on our side. Awlaki said he was not on our side. (That’s the thing about making videos that exhort jihad, is that you get seen calling for the deaths of Americans.) He was an enemy of the United States actively encouraging, aiding, and abetting people who actively worked to harm Americans. He got snuffed out by a missile and I just don’t feel bad about that.
FTR, I’ve been in favor of droning AQ since 1996. That was the year I lost a friend at Khobar Towers and also read Stars & Stripes’s reporting on the “hot new job” in the Army: drone operator.
Interestingly, President Obama keeps trying to move the drone program out of the CIA, but the war party in Congress keeps shutting that door. It’s exactly like Camp X-Ray, which he keeps trying to close and Congress keeps open.
As far as due process goes: there was no due process at Shiloh, either, but neoconfederates often seem to think every southerner killed by union fire was an unjustifiable homicide. I also note that my enlistment oath swore me to defend the United States “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Interestingly, the Law of Land Warfare allows for the potential of civilian casualties. It does not allow for torture, however, and that is because captives are a very different proposition from armed, hostile enemies.
Earlier you said that professional courtesy would have involved burying the torture reports. The Dems dont like the republicans. Just because they don’t want to prosecute them doesn’t mean they don’t want them to look like the evil sons of bitches they are. They’re more than happy to rain a bit of bad publicity down on them.
Did your oath swear you to defend the constitution?
I guess one of the differences between you and I is that you look to what’s legal. I look to what’s right.
Like knowing what the Law of Land Warfare says, which I do. You’re the one who seems to think there’s an unwritten law somewhere against drone strikes.
You are putting words in my mouth. I said, there is a law against the government executing american citizens without due process. It’s part of the constitution you took an oath to defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Other than that, I only said that when It comes to killing civilians with drone strikes, I expect my government to do the right thing rather than whatever they can get away with legally. You seem not to care about a few thousand dead women and children. I’m not sure how someone gets to that point, but at least you have no problem admitting it. Possibly you also believe any male between 15 and 65 is an enemy combatant. I think that that would be a naïve view, but hey, that’s what the CIA told you to believe so I totally understand.
I think we are leaving out something that has been forgotten. The US was a part of training dictators and their police with torture tactics way back in the 70’s. Does anyone remember The School of The Americas?
http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98
All caught up as we are in this latest scandal, we too soon forget that SOA was in the torture business much longer than just recently. I suggest someone do an article about it before the competition suddenly realizes that torture training by the US has been an ongoing affair for much longer than we can remember.
I need to archive this article to see the spin when Obamas droning is nitpicked in 10 years. “We killed women and children to be safe”. Nice spin, as if not one leftist hack didn’t approve this crap.