I'd Be Exhausted Too...

On NPR today, speaking of today's news of Alberto Gonzales' resignation, Noel Francesco, Assistant Deputy Attorney General under Bush Sr., said, "I suppose he's exhausted after seven years as White House Counsel and Attorney General."

Yeah, I gotta imagine that if I spent seven years ripping up the Geneva Convention, tearing down prohibitions against torture, stripping Americans of their civil rights, making the President into a king, and shredding the Constitution, I'd be pretty tired too. I mean, destroying a system of checks and balances that has stood (sometimes working better than others) for over two-hundred years isn't an easy task. After all that, who wouldn't need a break?

"Who Wants To Be A Superhero" Meets The Elders of Zion

I'm not quite sure why I'm watching the second season of Who Wants To Be A Superhero? It's not that good, it's quite cheesy, and they've upped the cheese factor bigtime this season. But, somehow, it's still entertaining, especially because there's so much crying. Yep. Every single episode at least one person cries. I think that's pretty funny. Every week I get to shout at the TV, "There's no crying in superheroism!!!"

But this week was really, really unintentionally funny. The bad guy supervillian left our heroes a note in which he implied that one of them was a mole or traitor. It was transparently obvious to me that this was a test, that there wasn't really a mole, and that the point was to see if the heroes would turn on each other. So, you wanna guess what they did?

They immediately suspected... wait for it...

...Mr. Mitzvah, the lone Jewish superhero in the group.

Yep, as soon as there was the slightest whiff that there was a mole in the crowd, the heroes picked out the Jew as the likeliest candidate. Now, to be fair, the reason they did so wasn't really because he was Jewish. He was actually the most circumspect of all the heroes and the least open, because he is (in real life) rich, and he didn't want the others to know, thinking they'd see him as a dilletante and not take him seriously.

But still, I just couldn't believe that no one thought twice about accusing the lone Jew in the group -- who carries a paddle with a Star of David on it as part of his costume -- of being a traitorous mole on national television. I just couldn't stop making jokes about how badly this could look for them if someone spun it the right way: "I don't trust that Mr. Mitzvah. It's like he's part of some shadowy organization trying to take over the world" sort of thing. I mean, you wouldn't have to try very hard to take some of what they said and make it sound very, very anti-Semitic if you really wanted to. Stuff like, "I don't know he just keeps to himself. He acts differently than everyone else," and the like.

I found it quite amusing. Especially since, as I deduced from the start, there wasn't a mole at all. It really was just a test to see if they would turn on each other. I mean, you couldn't set these people up to look like they are latent anti-Semites if you tried.

Not With A Bang, But A Whimper

As I imagine most of you have already heard, Karl Rove is resigning at the end of the month. Supposedly, he's leaving politics, but I have a hard time swallowing that, and I wouldn't trust anything Rove says as far as I can throw him.

I'd like to be happy about Rove being out of the White House soon, but really, it doesn't matter. Rove is walking away because he's pretty much done all the damage he can do and now it's time to sit back and savor the chaos and destruction he's wrought.

Good riddance, certainly, but it's a little late to do any good, unfortunately.

Democrats Decide To Get In On The Act

What act? The act of dismantling the Bill of Rights and letting fear of terrorism turn the US into an Orwellian state. While the Democrats resisted revising FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) to allow the Bush regime to spy on Americans at will back in the Republican-controlled Congress, they have inexplicably given Bush that power now that they are in control.

That's awesome.

Why did the Democrats even bother to get upset or worked up over the abuses of the Bush regime's warantless eavesdropping program if they were just going to turn around and make it legal anyway? Fuck. Are we at the point where there's no one in either party who sees what even cranks like Pat Buchanan can see: that Americans are more at risk from their own government (by several orders of magnitude) than from terrorists?

The government could already spy on people without the people having any legal recourse, owing to a recent ruling that citizens only had standing to sue if they knew they'd been eavesdropped on, which of course is impossible since the government keeps that secret. But now the only check on the government, the FISA court, which is pretty much a rubber stamp anyway, won't have a role, and the only safeguard on abuse of power is for the executive branch to police itself. How wonderful. Hey, can we do that too? Who needs traffic cops? We can all just police ourselves, right? No one ever violates the law when they think no one is looking.

Oh, wait, that's exactly when people break the law.

Civil rights have absolutely no meaning if the government can violate them with impunity, no oversight, and no way for the people to know when and if their rights have been violated. We may as well just throw that anachronistic old Bill of Rights out the window.

Of course, if we do that, then what exactly are we fighting the terrorists for? They don't want democracy or civil rights, and apparently neither do we. Where's the conflict?

Over the past few years, when the Democrats were impotent and the Republicans could do all the evil they want, I think I hated the Republicans so much that I started to really believe that, since they were so evil, the Dems had to be good. Thanks for reminding me that the there's really no one representing me up in Washington, Democrats! Thanks for making me wonder if the people always saying that there's no difference between the parties are right.

Dammit.