Friday, May 04, 2012

'Toontime: Mission Accomplished, Redux

[credit: Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle]
Wackydoodle sez, "I got me some parts too I can show y'all!"
One of the least attractive characteristics of American democracy, as such, is: politicians pandering to the lowest common instincts of the masses. There is an unfortunate strain of perverse exhibitionism in the American character and apparently our "warrior" President is not an exception. The head on the wall belonged to a frustrated, isolated and increasingly irrelevant leader of international jihad, but has cost America dearly to put it there.
[credit: Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune]
In case you have buried your head in your television set or other distraction, it is the "Land of the Free" that now has a President who claims doit du roi to kill his subjects suspected of terrorism without due process of any kind; allows Wall Street malfeasance that endangers the national economy to go unpunished while thousands of fraudulently induced home mortgages are foreclosed without debtor relief; authorizes surveillance of law-abiding citizens to an extent that rivals the security apparatus of Cold War Germany (East and West); accepts the policy of New York City police to stop and search without probable cause (600,000 stops last year of mostly Blacks and Latinos); obtains 1,745 secret warrants in 2011 for wiretaps and searches from the secret "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" which did not reject any of the requests, an increase over requests in 2010 of 1,579; and permits the use of excessive force on citizens naive enough to take their grievances against the proto-facist state into the street as they were lead to believe they had a constitutional right to do. News item: A San Diego college student was detained and forgotten in a DEA cell for four days without food, water or toilet. To prevent dehydration he was forced to drink his own urine. Daniel Chong was not charged with any crime. Yes, it's a brave new Amerika, and it is not a beautiful.