Last week, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate met with the crown prince of Bahrain and "reaffirmed" the United States' "strong commitment" to the regime of unelected autocrats. The Peace Laureate -- who in his acceptance of the Prize wrapped himself in the mantle of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi -- also "expressed strong support" for the regime's "ongoing efforts to initiate national dialogue ... [and] forge a just future for all Bahrainis."

President Obama had dropped in a meeting the prince was having with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who likewise extolled the autocrats for their "national dialogue" and "important work."

There is indeed "important work" going on in Bahrain these days, and the autocratic regime's "ongoing efforts to initiate dialogue" -- the campaign lauded by the Laureate -- are quite vigorous. Here, for example, The Independent details a case study of just how the crown prince and his family's regime is pursuing "national dialogue" in the manner so warmly approved by the presidential peacenik:

Bahraini security forces beat the detained poet Ayat al-Gormezi across the face with electric cable and forced her to clean with her bare hands lavatories just used by police, members of her family said yesterday in a graphic account of the torture and humiliation suffered by those rounded up in the Gulf nation's crackdown on dissent.

The 20-year-old trainee teacher, who spent nine days in a tiny cell with the air conditioning turned to freezing, is due back in court this weekend on charges of inciting hatred, insulting the king and illegal assembly, and her family fear she may suffer further mistreatment in custody amid threats of another round of interrogation.

Masked police arrested Ayat at her home on 30 March for reciting a poem criticising the monarchy during a pro-democracy rally in the capital Manama in February. ... The details of her interrogation and imprisonment are similar to the experiences of other women detained by Bahraini security forces since they launched a full scale repression on 15 March against all those demanding democratic reform in the island kingdom.

Ayat gave herself up to police after they threatened to kill her brothers. She was taken away in a car with two security officials - a man and a woman - both of whom were masked and dressed in civilian clothes. They immediately started to beat her and threaten her, saying she would be raped and sexually assaulted with degrading photographs of her put on the internet.

... While Ayat was meeting her family during the arraignment, a policeman overheard her giving details of her mistreatment. He said that if she continued to do so, she would be returned to the interrogation centre and tortured again.

One wonders sometimes how his head can bear up under those laurels, caked and heavy as they are with dried blood, clots of viscera and vast heavings of hypocrisy.

2.

Of course, the treatment being meted out to 20-year-old unarmed poets by the Obama-lauded, Clinton-approved Bahraini regime is just the tip of the iceberg. The repression is deep, brutal, violent -- and backed up by military forces from that other highly approved autocracy in the region: Saudi Arabia. (Where Hillary Clinton would be put in jail if she dared to drive a car.) As usual, you can find more on Bahrain -- including direct reports from the ground and copious links to media sources (such as that radical journal, The Economist) -- at the site of As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab." He keeps a sharp and scornful eye on the crimes and follies committed on all the sinister operators -- imperial meddlers, local thugs, unctuous collaborationists, repressive sectarians -- in the region. For example, here's a recent post:

Bahraini comrades sent me this: "As you may know the oppressors in Bahrain are targeting professional women arresting from their places of work or study. Many have disappeared into military style prisons and have not had access to lawyers or their families. The few who have been released report sexual attacks, verbal and physical insults and threats and other forms of torture. I attach for your attention a spreadsheet with the names of only 55 of these detainess. You will note that one of those arrested is a pregnant woman who happens to be the wife of an activist. Many others are young women in their early 20's. One of these young ladies is a poet and a student teacher who was arrested after 4 of her brothers were threatened at gunpoint to turn their sister in. No other Arabic regime has used torture and arrest against women to crush protests in this systematic and brutal manner. Yet media outlets in the west and Aljazeera Arabic are largely silent on these abuses in stark and shameful contrast to the coverage given to other protests."

And this:

Jane sent me this (I cite with her permission): "I guess you saw the news that four men have been sentenced to death today by a military court that convicted them of killing two policemen during the uprising. Today Bahrain TV aired a "documentary" that gives full details, including televised "confessions" from several of the men. ..."

As some people have asked, why would defendants who were pleading "not guilty" make confessions on camera? The names of those confessing aren't given, but Chanad, an eagle-eyed blogger/tweep, pointed out that the first man "confessing" (six minutes into the programme) appears to be Ali Isa Saqer. Mr Saqer was one of the people detained in connection with the killings, but he was not sentenced yesterday. That's because he already died in custody in early April. Human Rights Watch, which saw his body, said it bore signs of "horrific abuse". He was buried on April 10th.

"Accused of trying to run over a policeman during a protest, Ali Isa al-Saqer had handed himself over to police after his family say they were threatened. Six days later he died in their custody, the authorities say he fought his jailers. His family, seeing his battered body for the first time since his arrest, collapsed in howls of grief; his wounds were quite simply horrific.

Beaten black and blue, his lacerated back resembled a bloody zebra; he appeared to have been whipped with heavy cables, his ankles and wrists manacled.

I brought up his case with the health minister, Dr Fatima al-Beloushi, who is also minister for human rights. At first she said that the opposition had altered the images to invent the lacerations. But when I replied that we had been to the funeral and seen them ourselves she immediately promised a full investigation."

Again, I say what I have said here over and over (and will keep on saying): This is what you are supporting, enabling and continuing when you support the Obama Administration. Whether that support is wholehearted -- if you, like Kevin Drum, proudly shut down you own brain and defer supinely to Obama's superior wisdom -- or whether it is reluctant, defensive, "to keep the other guys out" because you desperately hope the Democrats might possibly be marginally better, the results are still the same: murder, brutality, violence, corruption, chaos and suffering.

Late last month, poet, musician, and self-termed "bluesologist," Gil Scott-Heron exited the hologram and returned to the source…to begin chanting, eternity will not be televised.

In an earlier era, Stephen Spender feted the following tribute to those who fell resisting Francisco Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. His lines of verse serve as an apt epitaph to all those souls who devoted their art and labor to the ceaseless struggle against the perennially risen, death-besotted forces of coercive power:

"The names of those who in their lives fought for life,/Who wore at their hearts the fire's center./Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,/And left the vivid air signed with their honor."

At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman's undergarments and the concomitant, predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.

By finger wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.

To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals...true, but only their own problems.

How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that "the issue of character" should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.

Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy. Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such propitious misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.

A more profound "character issue" here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular -- their greed for ratings. And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories -- their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry -- but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence?

Although, it is futile to struggle against the symptoms not the source. As banal as the dreams of witless bullies, the architecture and artifice of U.S. militarist/corporate imperium not only surrounds us but has colonized our thoughts and desires. Ergo, the elite of the corporate media and the U.S. public remain untroubled by Bradley Manning's forced nudity, yet a couple a snaps of a congressmen's crotch sends their imagination reeling.

Since U.S. Empire is maintained by militarism -- a de facto strong-arm racket shaking down the people of the world to sustain the endless cupidity of its elite and proffer just enough bribes to keep its populace overweight, arrogant, and oblivious -- what "character issues" come into play involving an individual's complicity in the maintenance of blood-fueled imperium? Perhaps as a reminder, fleets of U.S. aircraft carriers should be christened with names such as, the USS Entitlement, the USS Displaced Resentment and the USS Willful Ignorance -- all armed and ready to patrol the oceans of the world, poised to attack and subdue those who would deny us our birthright to consume the world like a bag of Cheetos.

Because facing folly is difficult, both powerful and pawn have embraced the most airless of aspirations…that greed run riot is a viable means to move in the world, even the sole means of establishing a social order.

As was the case with any imperium throughout history, the present order is maintained by state-sanctified homicide. To exist in empire, one is induced to deaden ones heart. The act of having internalized (albeit inadvertently) the propaganda of the militaristic/corporate state and thereby cling to its provisional comforts…is to clutch a handful of dust. And what is the mode of being to which so many cling:

Shuffling the floors of some suburban turdbox…within a gated "community" where one rarely sees, much less speaks to one's neighbors; spending hours at a time, anxious and irritated (if not outright enraged) in soul-grinding commuter traffic, listening to the observations and pronouncements of inspired souls such as Morning Zoo Crews and deep thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio, hate merchants; then languishing all day in a cubicle...just to turn around and do it all again.

Is it any wonder so many in the U.S. consider "our way of life" non-negotiable? What kind of a miserable, bitter malcontent would wish to challenge and change such a life-enhancing, soul-vivifying mode of being? There is just no pleasing some people.

A loss of empathetic imagination is endemic to the consumerist mindset of the mechanized era. This form of pathology began, years ago, when our ancestors offered up their life's blood to the early corporatists of the Industrial Age.

"I attack all those persons/ who know nothing of the other half,/ the half who cannot be saved,/ who raise their cement mountains/ in which the hearts of the small/ animals no ones thinks of are beating." -- Federico García Lorca, excerpt: New York (Office and Attack)

Henry Ford and the rest of the Industrial Age's klavern of gray ghouls measured our flesh, muscle and bone with a productivity-measuring stopwatch. Cunning practitioners of the dark art of convincing human beings they were mere cogs in a soulless machine, it was only a short trudge from that blood-bartering viewpoint of existence through history's slaughterhouse to Adolf Eichmann's cold, corpse-rendering, mathematical constructs.

Insulated, as he was, within his fortified tower of mortared casuistry, Eichmann proved adept at emotionally shielding himself from the horrific implications of the system of mechanized extermination he helped devised. From individual alienation to planet-wide ecocide, Hannah Arendt's insights, regarding Eichmann's psyche in her seminal work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, applies to our present condition: "The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else."

Accordingly, to lose the green fuse of transformation, implicit in interpersonal relationships, is to be driven by dehumanizing engines of annihilation.

In regard to the consumerist-colonized psyches of the populace of the U.S., an inner architecture is in place -- an internalized shopping mall (complete with sub-cretinous security crews trained to shut down political speechifying and pamphleteering -- but who seem unwilling or unable to subdue the impulse to buy, on credit, unnecessary items).

Conversely, for a culture to thrive, a vital agora and public square is required. Given the agora has been replaced by mall and social media's weightless pixels of narrowed apprehension (an almost all-encompassing, amateur improvisational theatre for those with short attentions spans) can there be any chance of an awaking, even an uprising, against such life-negating forces?

Using any metric, the present system, based upon a zombie-like proliferation of exponential growth is unsustainable. By the destruction leveled on nature and public space, in combination with, the usurpation of time and identity (individual and collective) -- the very structure of the present system creates alienation and anomie.

Moreover, the root of Puritan panic (including the constant upwelling of sexually related scandal) is caused by its compulsion to winnow down the human psyche and its attendant drives, actions, and enterprises to only what is deemed pure and practical; hence, panic ensues when the musk and fury of the larger world (even one's own thoughts and desires) rudely breaches the life-denuded contours of its cordon sanitaire.

The anecdote: Don't tiptoe through your life like a ninny nor become a finger-wagging scold, so mortified by your appetites and desires you would scour the messiness of the world into a sterile prison of self-deprivation. Like Emerson, we must insist: we have a life to live -- not a perpetual apology.

Poetry and music can awaken imagination and induce empathy, therefore are potent provisions that sustain one while carrying the darkness. However, first one must engage the struggle, to face the everyday monster whose name is, "That is just the way it is and must remain" -- even to risk having one's concept of self devoured by the task. To paraphrase Lorca: to know oneself by drawing near to the beating heart of the monster of the world.

"But the Duende--where is the Duende? Through the empty arch enters a mental air blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, seeking new landscapes and unfamiliar accents; an air bearing the odor of child's spittle, crushed grass, and the veil of Medusa announcing the unending baptism of all newly-created things." --Federico García Lorca, excerpt: The Duende: Theory and Divertissement (1930)

One cannot kill nor banish personal demons but one can give them supervised work to do (that way one can keep an eye on them).

(Knowing one's demons also provides insight when dealing with adversaries and can prevent one from being drawn into the self-serving ploys of mass media vampires of mind and spirit who retail sexually related scandals that bring glee to the bloodless.)

Personally, it could trouble me less if the sky shook, thick as seething locust, with a pixel-borne pestilence of suggestive photos of political sorts. Funny, the same crowd of fundamentalist, petty moralists who believe that global warming is the result of natural forces insist the heat of human libido is what will bring on man's doom i.e., greenhouse gasses aren't melting the polar regions; instead, Climate Change is caused by the hot breath of Satan himself tweeting pictures of his lust-scorched undergarments.

In times such as these, one is advised to embrace both mystery and logic -- both élan vital and logos. Be both apprehensive and comforted by the unknowable, ineffable quality of existence; thereby, one comes to be moved by a poetic approach to mystery, and the realization arrives…that one is vividly alive even amid dismal, alienating circumstance, and, as a result, that the ennui engendered by the illusion of atomization is, to a degree, mitigated.

Although one's suffering is uniquely one's own, one remains part and parcel of the implicate order of a living planet. This is how Wallace Stevens delivers, in verse, the case for acquiring and maintaining a view of the world by means of empathetic imagination (that can serve as a panacea to the preening narcissism inherit in toxic innocence). I'll give him the final word:

We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
~~~ Excerpt: Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour ~~~

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that's so bad, so wrongheaded, that you're almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.

And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman's proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn't actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn't be to "save Medicare," whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

And here's what you need to know: Medicare actually saves money - a lot of money - compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.

The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn't Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.

But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it's true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we'll be forcing them to get private insurance - if they can - that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.

By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

And then there's the international evidence. The United States has the most privatized health care system in the advanced world; it also has, by far, the most expensive care, without gaining any clear advantage in quality for all that spending. Health is one area in which the public sector consistently does a better job than the private sector at controlling costs.

Indeed, as the economist (and former Reagan adviser) Bruce Bartlett points out, high U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden. So where's the gain from pushing seniors out of an admittedly expensive system, Medicare, into even more expensive private health insurance?

Wait, it gets worse. Not every 65- or 66-year-old denied Medicare would be able to get private coverage — in fact, many would find themselves uninsured. So what would these seniors do?

Well, as the health economists Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll document, right now Americans in their early 60s without health insurance routinely delay needed care, only to become very expensive Medicare recipients once they reach 65. This pattern would be even stronger and more destructive if Medicare eligibility were delayed. As a result, Mr. Frakt and Mr. Carroll suggest, Medicare spending might actually go up, not down, under Mr. Lieberman's proposal.

O.K., the obvious question: If Medicare is so much better than private insurance, why didn't the Affordable Care Act simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, was interest-group politics: realistically, given the insurance industry's power, Medicare for all wasn't going to pass, so advocates of universal coverage, myself included, were willing to settle for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed politically necessary to accept a second-best solution for younger Americans is no reason to start dismantling the superior system we already have for those 65 and over.

Now, none of what I have said should be taken as a reason to be complacent about rising health care costs. Both Medicare and private insurance will be unsustainable unless there are major cost-control efforts - the kinds of efforts that are actually in the Affordable Care Act, and which Republicans demagogued with cries of "death panels."

In Franz Kafka's short story "Before the Law" a tireless supplicant spends his life praying for admittance into the courts of justice. He sits outside the law court for days, months and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted. He sacrifices everything he owns to sway or bribe the stern doorkeeper. He ages, grows feeble and finally childish. He is told as he nears death that the entrance was constructed solely for him and it will now be closed.

Justice has become as unattainable for Muslim activists in the United States as it was for Kafka's frustrated petitioner. The draconian legal mechanisms that condemn Muslim Americans who speak out publicly about the outrages we commit in the Middle East have left many, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, wasting away in supermax prisons. These citizens posed no security threat. But they dared to speak a truth about the sordid conduct of our nation that the state found unpalatable. And in the bipartisan war on terror, waged by Republicans and Democrats, this ugly truth in America is branded seditious.

The best the U.S. government could offer as evidence of Fahad's crimes was that an acquaintance who stayed in his apartment with him while he was a graduate student in London had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in luggage at the apartment and that the acquaintance eventually delivered these to al-Qaida. But I doubt the government is overly concerned with a suitcase full of waterproof socks taken to Pakistan. The reason Fahad Hasmi was targeted was because, like the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, he was fearless and zealous in his defense of those being bombed, shot, terrorized and killed throughout the Muslim world while he was a student at Brooklyn College. Fahad was deeply religious, and some of his views, including his praise of the Afghan resistance, were to me unpalatable, but he had a right to express these sentiments. More important, he had a right to expect freedom from persecution and imprisonment because of his opinions. Facing the possibility of a 70-year sentence in prison and having already spent four years in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, he accepted a plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism.

It has been a year since his 15-year sentence was pronounced in a New York courtroom. He is now held in Guantanamo-like conditions in the supermax ADX [Administrative Maximum] facility in Florence, Colo. He is isolated in a small cell for 22 to 23 hours a day. He has only extremely limited contact with his mother, father and brother, often going weeks without any communication. Between his transfer to Florence last August and this March he was permitted only one phone call. The rule of law in America, especially if you are Muslim, fits Kafka's grim parody. The tyranny we impose on those held in Guantanamo, Bagram and the secret CIA "black sites" we impose on ourselves. This is and always has been the disease of empire. Empire imports the crude and brutal tools of control and violence back to the homeland. It creates internal as well as external colonies.

We no longer have freedom; there is only the appearance of freedom. We are consumed by an endless and vague war on terror in which the perfidiousness of our enemy, whose number, location and nature are never clearly defined, justifies the shredding of constitutional rights, torture, kidnapping, detentions without charges or trials and an occult-like battle against an absolute evil. And if you think the state intends to limit itself to the persecution of Muslims, especially once there is an increase in domestic unrest and instability, you know little about human history.

I spoke Saturday night to Fahad Hashmi's father, Syed Anwar Hashmi. The elder Hashmi came to the United States from Pakistan when Fahad was 3 and his other son, Faisal, was 4. He worked for more than two decades as an accountant for the city of New York. He came, as most immigrants have, for his children. He believed in America, in its fairness, its chances for opportunity, its freedoms. And then it all crumbled when the state proved as capricious and cruel as the Pakistani dictatorship he had left behind. On the day of his son's arrest, he says, "my American dream became an American nightmare."

Three law enforcement officials appeared at his home in Flushing, Queens, on June 6, 2006, to inform him that Fahad, who had been in London completing a master's degree in international relations, had been arrested at Heathrow Airport on terrorism charges. Fahad, after fighting the order for 11 months, was the first American citizen extradited under the post-9/11 laws. He was taken in May 2007 to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan and placed in solitary confinement.

"I came to this country from Pakistan nearly 30 years ago, in 1982 with my wife and two young boys," Fahad's father said. "Coming from a Third World country, we were full of hope and looked towards America for liberty and opportunity. I had an American dream to work hard and give my sons good educations. I worked as an assistant accountant for the city of New York, six days a week, nine hours a day, including overtime, to support my family and to send both my kids through college. We all became U.S. citizens, and my sons fulfilled my dreams by completing their undergraduate and postgraduate education. I was very proud of them."

"In high school and then as a student at Brooklyn College, Fahad became a political activist, concerned about the plight of Muslims around the world and the civil liberties of Muslims in America," he went on. "Growing up here in America, Fahad did not fear expressing his views. But I was scared for him and urged him not to speak out. He would remind me that everything he did was under the law. But having grown up in a Third World country, I had seen that it did not always work this way, and so I worried. He was monitored by law enforcement and quoted in Time magazine. But he kept speaking out. And then, with his arrest, my fears came true."

Judge Loretta Preska denied Fahad bail partly on the grounds that he had no ties to family and community. His family and friends, who sat crowded together in the courtroom, listened in stunned silence. And then, after five months, Hashmi, already isolated in solitary confinement, was suddenly put under "special administrative measures," known as SAMs. SAMs are the legal weapon of choice used by the state when it seeks to isolate and break prisoners. They were bequeathed to us by the Clinton administration, which justified SAMs as a way to prevent Mafia or other gang leaders from ordering hits from inside prison. The use of SAMs expanded widely after the attacks of 2001. They are frequently used to isolate terrorism case detainees before trial. SAMs, which were renewed by Barack Obama in October, severely restrict a prisoner's communication with the outside world. They end calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. Fahad, once in this legal straitjacket, was not permitted to see much of the evidence against him under a legal provision called the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA. CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from those being prosecuted.

The weekly visits Hashmi's family made to the jail in Manhattan were canceled. A single family member was permitted to visit only once every two weeks, and on a number of occasions the family member was inexplicably denied admittance. During the last five months of the trial Hashmi's family was barred from visiting him. Anyone who has contact with a prisoner under SAMs is prohibited by law from disclosing any information learned from the detainee. This requirement, in a twist Kafka would have relished, makes it illegal for those who have contact with an inmate under SAMs—including attorneys—to speak about his or her physical and psychological condition.

Once the SAMs were imposed, "He wrote us occasionally—one letter on no more than three pages at a time—but he was allowed no correspondence or contact with anyone else," his father said of his son. "In addition, because of Fahad's SAMs, we were not allowed to discuss anything we heard from him, including his health or any details of his detention or what he was experiencing, with anyone else. It was like being suffocated."

In a pretrial motion, Hashmi's lawyer presented the extensive medical and scholarly research that demonstrates the severe impact solitary confinement has on human beings, often leaving them incapable of defending themselves during their trial. It did not sway the judge. Fahad lived in a universe, before ever being sentenced, where he had no fresh air and was subjected to 23-hour lockdown and constant electronic surveillance including when he showered or relieved himself. He was barred from group prayer. He exercised alone in a solitary cage. He was denied access to television or a radio. His newspapers were cut up by censors. And this was all before trial.>{?>I? "These years have brought deep disillusionment for my family in the American justice system," his father said. "Fahad was restricted in reviewing much of the evidence against him, and even his attorney could not discuss much of the evidence with him. Secret evidence is something we knew from back home. The judge accepted the prosecutor's motion to introduce Fahad's political activities and speeches into the trial to demonstrate his mind-set. Where was the First Amendment to protect Fahad's speech? Two days before the trial was set to begin, Judge Preska agreed to the prosecutor's motion to keep the jury anonymous and kept under extra security—even though this could have frightened the jury and affected how they viewed Fahad."

"On the day before trial, nearly four years since he had been arrested, I had just returned from dropping off clothes for Fahad to wear to court when I received a call from my attorney," Fahad's father said. "The government had offered a deal to drop three of the four charges against Fahad, if he accepted one charge which carried a 15-year sentence and Fahad had agreed to this plea bargain. I was shocked by my son's decision on the eve of his trial, but after I thought more, I wondered how anyone could have decided differently in his situation. Fahad had been in solitary confinement, under SAMs, for nearly three years. The judge had in every instance sided with the government in pretrial motions. If convicted, Fahad faced a possible 70-year sentence. Under those circumstances, Fahad's decision to accept one charge was no longer surprising. He has been in for five years this June."

"The U.S. government is concerned about human rights in China and Iran," he went on. "I wonder about Fahad's rights, and how they have been blatantly violated in this great land. It seems like ‘innocent until proven guilty' is only a saying. My son was treated as guilty until proven innocent."

"The Muslim community supported my son by offering prayers, particularly in the month of Ramadan," he said. "But they were initially afraid to raise their voices against injustice. This reminds me of the fear the Chinese have under Communist rule, or Iranians under Ahmadinejad. As a citizen, I now have developed fear of my own government."

"For one charge for luggage storing socks, ponchos and raincoats in his apartment, he is serving a 15-year sentence in the harshest federal prison in the country, still in solitary confinement, still under SAMs," his father said. "The cooperating witness in the case, the one who brought and delivered the luggage, is now free and able to enjoy his life and family."

The state, by making us afraid, is able to justify the disease of permanent war and the silencing of those who dare to dissent. The terrible suffering we have unleashed throughout the Middle East is rendered invisible if there is no one to decry it and document it. Communities and families, not only in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but at home, have been plunged into needless grief and suffering because of the atrocities committed in our name. The despair and bewilderment of Fahad's father are a reflection of the wider despair and bewilderment that have gripped the lives of hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have been forced to confront the dark heart of empire. In their pain we stand condemned.

I hope I never write another piece on Sarah Palin again.

The woman is a disease, and I choose my words carefully there. She is everything that is wrong with America, and indeed, that is the only reason I'm writing this at all. This essay is altogether far more a commentary on Governor Quit's America than it is on the woman herself. Our national problem is Palinosis far more than it is Palin.

There have always been people like Sarah Palin, and presumably there always will be. The two real questions are why anyone cares about them and, most astonishingly, why anyone would seriously contemplate putting them in charge of a country of 300 million people.

Palin the person is back in the news again right now (and notice that she makes sure never to really be absent) for two reasons. First, because she's launched this wild bus tour which reminds one of those nested Russian dolls where you open each one up and there's another inside. This tour is a ‘family vacation', inside of which is Palin's public service mission of educating the rest of us about American history, inside of which is a faux flirtation with presidential politics, inside of which is a relentless, endless series of publicity stunts masquerading as a human being, inside of which is an utterly shameless money-grubbing cash cow, inside of which is a frightened little girl whose insecurities could make George W. Bush look like a paragon of self-confidence in comparison. At the end of the day, she has become essentially the Paris Hilton of politics. She is famous for being famous, and she's masterful at that one thing and that one thing only.

"I'm publicizing Americana and our foundation and how important it is that we learn about our past and our challenges and victories throughout American history, so that we can successfully proceed forward," Palin informed the ridiculously obsessed press following her everywhere on her national wild goose chase. "It's not a campaign tour." Right. That's why it's in a big, painted bus, and she has the media scurrying after her. Every family vacation's that way, isn't it? And, by the way, even if by some bizarre random quirk of stochastic physics she was actually being honest about her motivations, isn't more ill-informed self-reverential adoration of our national wonderfulness just what America needs right now, as the country is imploding in every way imaginable? And who is more perfectly poised to provide that lesson than the esteemed Professor Palin, so erudite and multifarious is her skills that she can simultaneously use mangled syntax, by which to display her emotional neediness, in the form of distorted history lessons? How many of us can claim such abilities?

The half-term governor knew that if she loaded up a busload of family members and painted the bus with patriotic pictures and slogans a few microns deep, and that if she ran around at the same time (and even the same place) that other Republicans were announcing their campaigns, she could generate a boatload of media attention to come in her direction. This is a good time for it, too. Since she will not actually be running for president herself (the money's no good, and it seems like an awful lot of work!), she no doubt realizes that her celebrity shelf-life is about to go south in a hurry. Once Republicans pick a nominee (likely Romney, and likely quickly), she will be of a lot less interest than she is now. Peripheral Palin's remaining cards to play at that moment will essentially include criticizing the GOP nominee and criticizing the Democratic nominee. The former will not be welcome by regressives during a presidential campaign for obvious reasons, and the latter will actually not either, because Palin only cheapens any Republican candidate's message to independents with her idiotic comments about Obama. She is the best thing that could happen to the president, even if she isn't on the ticket.

I think she well understands that her relevancy meter is fast running down, and she is about to become some tawdry, laughable Dan Quayle-type thing, a creature that even (or especially) regressives wish in retrospect they could forget about. Indeed, I think Palin is probably secretly still in drop-jaw astonishment herself that she ever got any of the attention she's managed to garner so far. So she is milking every remaining drop of it that she can grab before she's sent to the remainders bin. When asked if she was leaning toward or against running, she replied as only she can, "Still right there in the middle." Oh, god. I need to hurl. I don't know who is worse, Palin uttering such dribble or the media for sucking it up like it remotely matters. Nor could she help turning the knife she had miraculously been able to slip into Mitt Romney - despite there being nothing there of substance to stab - by stomping all over his presidential candidacy announcement extravaganza. She then added a bit of her own special brand of catty mockery to the mix: "I apologize if I stepped on any, any of that PR that Mitt Romney needed or wanted that day. I do sincerely apologize. I didn't mean to step on anybody's toes."

All of this would be truly ugly, except that it's both entertaining and cosmically righteous to see regressives clobbering each other. Couldn't happen to a nicer lot. And the other good news is that it seems many Americans have finally figured out most of what needs to be understood about this abomination in a skirt.

Which also explains another way in which Palin made the headlines last week, this time by making clear, yet again, how utterly and astonishingly vacuous she is. She proved it again by flunking American History 101, laughably flubbing a question most second-graders could readily handle. Knowing who Paul Revere was is like knowing who Santa is. Not for Savvy Sarah, though, who responded thusly: "He who warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms by ringing those bells, and makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."

Okay, leave aside the rambling incoherence of her remarks. Sometimes spontaneous, on-the-spot answers to press questions can legitimately have that quality (which - hello, regressives! - might explain why Barack Obama (and lots of other politicians) use a teleprompter when they speak. She obviously wasn't expecting the question, though she can just as obviously be seen in the above passage to be scrambling to think of an answer, and doing her ‘thinking' out loud. And leave aside, as well, the mysterious "He who..." construction I've heard her use before. There's definitely some twisted pathology loaded up in that phrasing, but I'm not psycho-linguistically astute enough to take it apart. All that aside, what remains is the breathtaking absence of basic historical knowledge on the part of this frequent public scold on matters of American patriotism (as she defines them).

So egregious was Palin's boner that even Pox Snooze, which happens to be a relentless promoter of bother Palin and Palinism, not to mention her employer, was forced to come to grips with it. "Anchor" Chris Wallace asked her, "You realize that you messed up about Paul Revere, don't you?" Well, no, actually, she doesn't: "I didn't mess up about Paul Revere. Part of his ride was to warn the British that were already there. That, hey, you're not going to succeed. You're not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have. He did warn the British. I know my American history."

Maybe she does, and maybe I'm the Queen of England. But it seems more likely that she doesn't (and I'm definitely not). In the same way she didn't quite seem to know what journals she reads, when the question was innocuously asked by Katie Couric. Or that she seemed to think that she was an experienced hand at foreign policy because the state she governed (until she quit, to accept the much better paying Paris Hilton gig) was sorta close to Vladimir Putin's Russia. And you know how threatening those Ruskies are, always rattling their sabers in our direction... Well, back in the Fifties, anyhow.... You know, when the Founders were fighting the Revolutionary War... Against the French... Hence, the need to warn the British... Er, sumptin' like that.

Like I said, there will always be Sarah Palins in this world. The real questions are why they gather the attention they do, and why we would ever dream of making them our national leaders. There is a related flip-side to that question, as well, which goes to why Barack Obama - who is the personal, but definitely not political, antithesis of a Sarah Palin - is so reviled in these same quarters, and why so much effort is made to diminish him, by questioning his citizenship authenticity, his college grades, his religion, his intelligence and his use of teleprompters in making speeches.

As it happens, I loathe Barack Obama as well. But differently, and definitely for different reasons. I despise him because he in fact actually has nearly the same politics of the folks on the right who hate him so viscerally. You could never possibly convince them of that, of course, but it is a simple fact. If you just look dispassionately at his policies - ranging from wars with Muslim countries, to global warming, to taxes, to civil liberties, and even to civil rights and health care - the real truth is that there's hardly any difference between Obama and, say, Bush/Cheney. Indeed, in many respects - Afghanistan, civil liberties, immigration roundups, Guantánamo - Obama is even worse than Bush/Cheney.

Which makes it so remarkable that folks on the right hate him so. They're far too scared-stupid to realize it, of course, but this guy is not even a liberal, let alone a socialist. His politics are largely their politics. So what gives? Why the hatred toward Obama by the same people who adore Palin?

Fundamentally, I suspect it has to do with the implicit condemnation his character puts on their recklessness and greed. When the Bush/Cheney Cowboy Show was in town, all your worst tendencies could be expressed and not only was it not frowned upon, hell, it was national policy. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Oil, money, food, money, war, money, booze, money, tax cuts, money, debt, money, environmental destruction, money, Humvees, money, bigotry, money, Wall Street, money, civil liberties slashing, money, Abu Ghraib, money, and so on. Did I mention money? The funny thing (hah-freakin'-hah) is that Obama's policies are nearly identical in all these respects, however, he doesn't say so (in order to keep his stupid base on his side), and he carries himself in a much more adult, rational, responsible and confident manner. And that really flames people who are none of those things.

I think they especially hate Obama not so much because he's black or he's a Northerner or a Democrat or young. It's all those things, to be sure. But I think what really drives the Palinista right crazy when it comes to Obama is ultimately the air of responsibility he projects. And unlike Bush or Palin, Obama is not afraid of getting caught being intelligent in public. I think that alone incenses people on the right, but mostly it's that they want to live recklessly and greedily, and therefore they despise anyone, or anything, or any action or words, that remotely remind them of their recklessness and greed. Say whatever you want about Obama - and I have, and will continue to - he is clearly very intelligent, very thoughtful, highly disciplined and ridiculously measured. I think that alone drives people on the lazy, greedy right absolutely ape-shit in response, because it sorta shoves in their faces their own gross irresponsibility, and nobody likes being reminded of the harm they've caused to others (not to mention that such avoidance is, itself, a powerful form of laziness and greed).

Put it all together and ours is the strangest political moment, perhaps in human history. I say that not only because the tropes in our public discourse are so bizarre, but because, above all, the stakes are now so high. We live at a time when those who are the most angry and agitated in their politics are the very ones who have driven the country (and, in many respects, the world) off the cliff. And yet they endlessly preach to us about responsibility and morality.

There are no depths to the levels of duplicity and hypocrisy plumbed here, and there is no limit to the destruction being contemplated. Think about the damage that already litters the landscape, and the lies necessary to wipe away the fingerprints upon it.

What's worse than dictating to everyone else what their sexual practices must be, while simultaneously engaging in every manner of debauchery themselves?

Perhaps it would be ranting endlessly about the virtues of the "free market" while constantly shilling for all forms of corporate welfare and bleeding the country dry.

Or perhaps it is selling massive tax cuts for the wealthy on the premise that such giveaways would provide us a great economy, and then delivering the Great Recession instead.

Or maybe it's exploding the national debt to pay for wars and tax cuts and corporate welfare and a giant ‘defense' establishment against no real enemy, and then demanding that seniors and the poor and the middle class be kicked to the gutter because there is no money left to pay for social programs.

Or perhaps instead it would be plunging the country into a war that claimed as many as a million lives, all on the basis of lies.

Or maybe lying about and ignoring global warming, the planet's greatest threat ever, in order to protect the short-term profits of a handful of oil and coal tycoons.

These are among the worst gifts of regressivism, whose greatest exemplar in our time is Sarah Palin. She is the ultimate nothingburger, herself. History will regard her as a cheap and rather harmless latter day Joe McCarthy.

But her politics are our national disease - Palinosis - and we have a lethal dose.

It is the politics of insecurity.

It's the politics of hate.

It's the politics of deceit.

It's the politics of hypocrisy.

It's the politics of laziness.

It's the politics of irresponsibility.

It's the politics of ignorance.

It's the politics of destruction.