By Chris Floyd

"Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling."

So says Tony Keller, quite aptly, in his report on one of the great travesties of justice in our time (and that is a long, long list): the outrageous show trial of Omar Khadr, a young Canadian who recently pleaded guilty to various spurious "terrorism" charges after spending eight years in the maw of the American gulag, since his capture in Afghanistan at the age of 15.

While America's attention was diverted by the witless (and war-avoiding) blather of the recent election campaign, the Pentagon prosecutors of the Peace Laureate in the White House were finishing their persecution of the child soldier. Having wrung a false confession to a non-existent charge from him in the early days of his captivity, when he was seriously wounded, they finally hammered a guilty plea out of him in a kangaroo court in which even an acquittal could have seen him incarcerated for the rest of his life. Such is the justice of the Laureate.

As Keller reports:

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom. His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death.

Kentucky's newly minted Senator is not ready to play nice.

Appearing on "This Week" with Christiane Amanpour on Sunday, Paul boasted that the tea partiers have will not be coopted by the Republican Party but vice versa. "The tea party is coopting Washington," he said. "We're proud, we're strong, we're loud, and we're going to coopt. And in fact, I think we're already shaping the debate."

He's shaping it in such an ugly way, too.

Paul says he favors cutting the number of federal employees by 10 percent, and then slashing the salaries of those who remain by 10 percent.

This is economic folly. We're facing a huge gap of purchasing power in the country right now, and he intends to widen that gap by decimating the purchasing power of almost three million people.

He also said he'd raise the retirement age for Social Security for everyone 55 and under.

Hey, I'm 52. What are you doing to me and my friends and the more than 200 million other Americans who will now have to work into our dotage?

Paul and the tea partiers are intent on destroying the very idea of government for the people. They want to throw everyone to the barking dogs of the free market.

And they don't want people to see who will benefit from this.

As Rand Paul said on CNN last week, "There are no rich. There are no middle class. There are no poor."

What a cover, to say there are no classes when everything he proposes would help the rich, and not the middle class, and not the poor.

What a convenient slight of hand to say there are no classes when income inequality has widened to obscene levels. As Timothy Noah notes on Slate.

In 1915, "the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income."

Or as Holly Sklar, the astute progressive economic analyst, put it recently.

"According to the latest IRS data, the 400 richest taxpayers increased their average income by 399 percent, adjusted for inflation, between 1992 and 2007." By contrast, she pointed out, "Average wages are 7 percent lower today, adjusted for inflation, than they were back in 1973." To top it all off, she noted, "The richest 1 percent has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined."

Eight years ago Ben Bernanke, already a governor at the Federal Reserve although not yet chairman, spoke at a conference honoring Milton Friedman. He closed his talk by addressing Friedman's famous claim that the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression, because it failed to do what was necessary to save the economy.

"You're right," said Mr. Bernanke, "we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

Famous last words. For we are, in fact, doing it again.

It's true that things aren't as bad as they were during the worst of the Depression. But that's not saying much. And as in the 1930s, every proposal to do something to improve the situation is met with a firestorm of opposition and criticism. As a result, by the time the actual policy emerges, it's watered down to such an extent that it's almost guaranteed to fail.

We've already seen this happen with fiscal policy: fearing opposition in Congress, the Obama administration offered an inadequate plan, only to see the plan weakened further in the Senate. In the end, the small rise in federal spending was effectively offset by cuts at the state and local level, so that there was no real stimulus to the economy.

Now the same thing is happening to monetary policy.

The case for a more expansionary policy by the Fed is overwhelming. Unemployment is disastrously high, while U.S. inflation data over the past few years almost perfectly match the early stages of Japan's relentless slide into corrosive deflation.

Unfortunately, conventional monetary policy is no longer available: the short-term interest rates the Fed normally targets are already close to zero. So the Fed is shifting from its usual policy of buying only short-term debt, and is now buying long-term debt - a policy generally referred to as "quantitative easing." (Why? Don't ask.)

There's nothing outlandish about this action. As Mr. Bernanke tried to explain Saturday, "This is just monetary policy," adding, "It will work or not work in much the same way that ordinary, more conventional, familiar monetary policy works."

Yet the Pain Caucus - my term for those who have opposed every effort to break out of our economic trap - is going wild.

This time, much of the noise is coming from foreign governments, many of which are complaining vociferously that the Fed's actions have weakened the dollar. All I can say about this line of criticism is that the hypocrisy is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

After all, you have China, which is engaged in currency manipulation on a scale unprecedented in world history - and hurting the rest of the world by doing so - attacking America for trying to put its own house in order. You have Germany, whose economy is kept afloat by a huge trade surplus, criticizing America for running trade deficits - then lashing out at a policy that might, by weakening the dollar, actually do something to reduce those deficits.

As a practical matter, however, this foreign criticism doesn't matter much. The real damage is being done by our domestic inflationistas - the people who have spent every step of our march toward Japan-style deflation warning about runaway inflation just around the corner. They're doing it again - and they may already have succeeded in emasculating the Fed's new policy.

For the big concern about quantitative easing isn't that it will do too much; it is that it will accomplish too little. Reasonable estimates suggest that the Fed's new policy is unlikely to reduce interest rates enough to make more than a modest dent in unemployment. The only way the Fed might accomplish more is by changing expectations - specifically, by leading people to believe that we will have somewhat above-normal inflation over the next few years, which would reduce the incentive to sit on cash.

The idea that higher inflation might help isn't outlandish; it has been raised by many economists, some regional Fed presidents and the International Monetary Fund. But in the same remarks in which he defended his new policy, Mr. Bernanke - clearly trying to appease the inflationistas - vowed not to change the Fed's price target: "I have rejected any notion that we are going to try to raise inflation to a super-normal level in order to have effects on the economy."

And there goes the best hope that the Fed's plan might actually work.

Think of it this way: Mr. Bernanke is getting the Obama treatment, and making the Obama response. He's facing intense, knee-jerk opposition to his efforts to rescue the economy. In an effort to mute that criticism, he's scaling back his plans in such a way as to guarantee that they'll fail.

American politics, as the midterm elections demonstrated, have descended into the irrational. On one side stands a corrupt liberal class, bereft of ideas and unable to respond coherently to the collapse of the global economy, the dismantling of our manufacturing sector and the deadly assault on the ecosystem. On the other side stands a mass of increasingly bitter people whose alienation, desperation and rage fuel emotionally driven and incoherent political agendas. It is a recipe for fascism.

More than half of those identified in a poll by the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports as Òmainstream AmericansÓ now view the tea party favorably. The other half, still grounded in a reality-based world, is passive and apathetic. The liberal class wastes its energy imploring Barack Obama and the Democrats to promote sane measures including job creation programs, regulation as well as criminal proceedings against the financial industry, and an end to our permanent war economy. Those who view the tea party favorably want to tear the governmental edifice down, with the odd exception of the military and the security state, accelerating our plunge into a nation of masters and serfs. The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that moneyÑhundreds of billions of dollarsÑis funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. This consistency appears to protect them from the turmoil in which they have been forced to live. The propaganda of a Palin or a Beck may insult common sense, but, for a growing number of Americans, common sense has lost its validity.

The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.

Commerce cannot be the sole guide of human behavior. This utopian fantasy, embraced by the tea party as well as the liberal elite, defies 3,000 years of economic history. It is a chimera. This ideology has been used to justify the disempowerment of the working class, destroy our manufacturing capacity, and ruthlessly gut social programs that once protected and educated the working and middle class. It has obliterated the traditional liberal notion that societies should be configured around the common good. All social and cultural values are now sacrificed before the altar of the marketplace.

The failure to question the utopian assumptions of globalization has left us in an intellectual vacuum. Regulations, which we have dismantled, were the bulwarks that prevented unobstructed brutality and pillaging by the powerful and protected democracy. It was a heavily regulated economy, as well as labor unions and robust liberal institutions, which made the American working class the envy of the industrialized world. And it was the loss of those unions, along with a failure to protect our manufacturing, which transformed this working class into a permanent underclass clinging to part-time or poorly paid jobs without protection or benefits.

The ÒinevitabilityÓ of globalization has permitted huge pockets of the country to be abandoned economically. It has left tens of millions of Americans in economic ruin. Private charity is now supposed to feed and house the newly minted poor, a job that once, the old liberal class argued, belonged to the government. As John Ralston Saul in ÒThe Collapse of GlobalizationÓ points out, Òthe role of charity should be to fill the cracks of society, the imaginative edges, to go where the public good hasnÕt yet focused or canÕt. Dealing with poverty is the basic responsibility of the state.Ó But the state no longer has the interest or the resources to protect us. And the next target slated for elimination is Social Security.

That human society has an ethical foundation that must be maintained by citizens and the state is an anathema to utopian ideologues of all shades. They always demand that we sacrifice human beings for a distant goal. The propagandists of globalizationÑfrom Lawrence Summers to Francis Fukuyama to Thomas FriedmanÑdo for globalization and the free market what Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky did for Marxism. They sell us a dream. These elite interpreters of globalism are the vanguard, the elect, the prophets, who alone grasp a great absolute truth and have the right to impose this truth on a captive people no matter what the cost. Human suffering is dismissed as the price to be paid for the coming paradise. The response of these propagandists to the death rattles around them is to continue to speak in globalizationÕs empty rhetoric and use state resources to service a dead system. They lack the vision to offer any alternative. They can function only as systems managers. They will hollow out the state to sustain a casino capitalism that is doomed to fail. And what they offer as a solution is as irrational as the visions of a Christian America harbored by many within the tea party.

We are ruled by huge corporate monopolies that replicate the political and economic power, on a vastly expanded scale, of the old trading companies of the 17th and 18th centuries. Wal-MartÕs gross annual revenues of $250 billion are greater than those of most small nation-states. The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them. The tea party rabble, to placate their anger, will also be encouraged by their puppet masters to attack helpless minorities, from immigrants to Muslims to homosexuals. All these political courtiers, however, serve the interests of the corporate state and the utopian ideology of globalism. Our social and political ethic can be summed up in the mantra let the market decide. Greed is good.

The old leftÑthe Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The MassesÑwould have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I. This was the time when socialism was not a dirty word in America but a promise embraced by millions who hoped to create a world where everyone would have a chance. The steady destruction of the movements of the left was carefully orchestrated. They fell victim to a mixture of sophisticated forms of government and corporate propaganda, especially during the witch hunts for communists, and overt repression. Their disappearance means we lack the vocabulary of class warfare and the militant organizations, including an independent press, with which to fight back.

I guess if you're gonna go down, you might as well do it with style.

And I guess if you can't do it with style, you might as well do it with irony.

Even if it is of the comedic sort. And even if the joke's on you.

This country is imploding. It has been for thirty years, if not fifty. What happened Tuesday was egregious in every respect, but at the end of the day represents little more than just another data point on a secular trend line. Putting the tea party freaks in control of the world's only superpower is hardly distinguishable, really, from giving those same governmental car keys to Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or George W. Bush. For that matter, it bears all too uncomfortable resemblance to having Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama president (though at least in those latter cases, we mostly didn't know beforehand what they'd turn out to be).

I want to say, before wallowing too much deeper into the despairing swamps of comedic irony, that there is some hope out there, at least in the longer term. Put bluntly, this country's main problem is old white guys. If we can find a way to neutralize their destructive impact, there is a new generation of un-crazy people waiting to take control of the country, stop it from digging deeper down in the hole its in, and begin the repair process. The next generation is liberal, and will become even more liberal when it realizes the degree to which the state is necessary to solve problems and protect citizens from predatory actors (most of which are far more likely to be dressed in shiny business suits than Taliban get-ups). It is a generation that finds prejudice based on race, sex and sexual orientation not only stupid and repugnant, but something far better - just plain dismissively irrelevant. It is a generation willing to take the outrageous step of protecting the only planet we happen to have (what a concept!). It's a generation that is largely unmoved by the institutionalized societal idiocy of organized religion. It is a generation that will be a lot more diverse than the regressive good ol' white boy dinosaurs from the 1930s and 1940s still lumbering about the country, waiting for "Father Knows Best" to stage a resurgence.

So, in the long term, we may be okay. Nature and demographics are pulling for the home team here. If we can last long enough, it's just possible that the suicidal empire will find a way to rescue itself from its self-imposed death spiral of inanity we've locked into these last decades.

But it's the getting there that will be tricky. And it's the question of what will be left of the country when we arrive that is crucial.

In the meantime, we are a country that continues to manifest remarkable levels of foolishness in our politics, for which Tuesday's election represents merely an italicized exclamation point on a very long sentence. Some days I wonder if I missed something along the way. Did somebody challenge the US to a Stupidity Smackdown contest thirty years ago, and we in our vanity, arrogance and pride accepted the dare? Did we agree to enter our country into an international demolition derby, and then marshal all our prodigious resources toward winning? Are we locked in some sort of perennial James Dean movie, where our jacket sleeve keeps getting caught on the door handle as the Chevy hurtles toward the cliff?

I dunno. But what I do know is that the ironies of Election 2010 are enough to knock me to the floor.

Start with the fact that this is by far the richest country in the world. That doesn't mean, of course, that we shouldn't identify our problems and try to solve them. We definitely should. But I can't help being struck at the sheer whininess of it all. I mean, here we sit, in our opulence and abundance and decadent materialism, and we're just absolutely beside ourselves. We are the richest people ever to exist on the planet, and we five percent swim in our thick lumpy gravy while 25 percent of humanity - close to two billion people - live in conditions of extreme poverty. Rather ironic, I have to say.

So is the fact that, amongst us, the angriest folks are the very most privileged. They are the white, male seniors who came out in droves for the freak show calling itself the tea party. We know empirically from polling data that these folks are the very definition of demographic privilege. They're wealthier than the rest of us. They're in the majority and dominant race. They are the dominant, catered to and most privileged sex. They have been benefitting from all the goodies that liberalism has provided them for all their lives, most especially now as they bask in their Social Security and Medicare payouts. Oh, and one other thing. They're furious. Furious at the injustices of the world, furious at the idea of sharing the fat bonanza they lucked into in the lottery of life, furious at a society that might have the audacity of compassion for this or that group that it has spent centuries, if not millennia, pummeling. That fury. The ironic fury of the hurl-inducing uber-selfish.

And what they do with that fury is equally ironic. Imagine how puzzled a visiting alien would be if you were forced to explain the election of 2010 to him. See in your mind's eye his antennae twisting themselves into slimy little pretzels as he attempts to apply logic - alien, Martian, human, twisted, any kind - to your explanation of what happened. "You see, little green dude, we were extremely unhappy with the state of our country, so what we did was to grab as many of the people as we could find who had just put us in that condition, and we put them back in power. Get it?" "No", he's thinking, "I don't". "But you're about to, as we vaporize your pathetic planet into a gazillion sub-atomic particles. Oh, and don't think the Universe will care, either, Mr. Supremely Illogical Humanoid Life Form. Everyone knows that you biped wankers are the least developed, most arrogant, and most buffoonish species in the entire Quadrant. You barely-down-from-the-trees hominids make the dwarf methane sloths of the Ursa Major Cluster seem like Galactic Wisdom Prize laureates by comparison!"

I mean, really. Is this supposed to be some sort of joke? Not even two years after they crashed the country economically, diplomatically, environmentally, fiscally, politically and morally, we've now turned to an even crazier lot of Republicans and put those monsters in charge? People (allegedly, anyhow) who think that unmarried women who are sexually active should not be allowed to teach in public schools? People who think that we should have weaker anti-pedophilia laws so that we don't impinge on business profitability? People who think it's okay to put "Whites Only" signs back in the windows of restaurants and hotels? People who think that 12 year-old girls impregnated by their uncles should have to bring the fetus to term? People who want to close down all public schools? People who dress up as Nazi SS officers? People who think George W. Bush was a pretty great president, after all, and got a raw deal from the American public? Those are the folks to whom we've handed the keys to the government now? I don't think the word irony is sufficient to touch that one.

But while we're at it, let's add in the fact that these same people who brought us disaster in every form have also pledged to bring us once again precisely the same policies that created that outcome. Without question what the country needs right now is more tax cuts for the wealthy, more deregulation of Wall Street and other corporate predators like BP, more use of fossil fuels to wreck the environment, more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, more religion in government, more Constitution-slashing destruction of the Bill of Rights, more intrusion into people's personal and sexual lives, more gay and Hispanic and Muslim bashing, and more destruction of the meager social safety net that we have, just at the time it is needed most. Right? How's that for ironic?

Here's a another one for you. What the public really wants right now are solutions to the problems that beset them. And rightly so. The goons of the right (you know, the ones always talking about Ôpersonal responsibility' - OMG, the ironies are starting to reproduce!) have made a right proper hash of things. They've wrecked just about everything, and the rest they just didn't get to yet. But what the American public just voted for was something very different indeed from rule by the GOP. We just voted for divided government. We just created the precise prescription for gridlock. We just picked the very people who - even apart from the fact that their entire platform consists of undoing existing policies - will make sure that the government fails to act in response to any of the crises facing us. Brilliant.

And just as brilliant as throwing in the bad folks was the throwing out of the good. Admittedly, there are damn few of the latter, which offers a silver lining of sorts by mitigating the potential damage. But I will say that losing the likes of Alan Grayson and, especially, Russ Feingold really hurts, and it really hurts the people who are the most furious, even if they're far to stupid and fearful (which are more or less the same thing these days) to realize it. I was really pained in particular to see Feingold go down, especially because it was for no remotely sensible reason, and especially because he lost to a creep like Ron Johnson. In a city just brimming over with whores, Feingold was one of the true stand-up characters still remaining. Whatever one might say about his politics, which were generally liberal but ultimately quite iconoclastic, he was a senator with that rarest of attributes: integrity. Shame on Wisconsin and shame on America for rejecting him in favor of an army of corporate corporals. Shame on us, especially, for taking out the cleanest clean government guy in the whole city, in the name of attacking waste in Washington. The size of the drunken bacchanal they're throwing on K Street to celebrate Feingold's political demise is precisely the measure of his lonely public interest spirit. But since we're talking ironies here, maybe we'll get lucky and there'll be one other. Maybe Feingold will stand for president in 2012, running unabashedly against the plutocratic prostitution of both Obama and the Republicans. That's a message that could actually win for once.

Another astonishing irony of this election was the sight of Democrats running against themselves. I guess we finally have an answer to the question of what happens when you take cowardly fecklessness to its absolute logical extreme. I know of no Democrats who were running in this cycle on what appear on the surface to have been substantial, even monumental, legislative achievements. Many even ran against those, foolishly thinking that voters might separate them from their party identification on the ballot. And several even ran explicitly against their own leadership, trashing Obama and Pelosi like any tea bag lunatics might have. Unreal. These days you sometimes have to lean your head over sideways and shake it a few times to check for any loose parts rattling around. That's how absurdly unimaginable it is that one of the two actually electable parties in the world's sole superpower might have come to the conclusion that running against their own record could be a winning strategy.

But, of course, Democrats will top themselves yet again by going with the exact same leadership for another round. How about those inspirational leaders, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, eh? Don't they just deserve plaudits for how they led their party successfully into battle this week? Shouldn't we reward them with more terms at the party helm over the next two, four and six years? That would be a real masterstroke. Not.

Speaking of whom, my personal nominee for the most outrageous performance in the category of American irony has to go to Barack Obama for the jaw-dropping performance he gave at his post-"shellacking" press conference this week. I recently compared this president to Ricky Ray Rector, the mentally impaired condemned man who asked to have his pecan pie saved for "later" as he was about to be executed by the State of Arkansas. Before that I described the president as the pass-around rag doll for the fellas of Cell Block D. I can now see that in both cases I was far too generous.

After two years of the rabid right saying anything imaginable about him - down to questioning his citizenship and religion - and after a series of Republican leaders publicly announcing that they would not be compromising with the president and that their goal was to remove him from office - after all this, there was Mr. Happy Face once more talking about how he was hopeful that the two sides could come together in the spirit of public service and reach agreements with each other in the name of the public's demand for bipartisan efforts to solve pressing problems. They are running scorched earth white phosphorous bombing raids on this guy, and he continues to respond with "Thank you sir, may I have another?".

This behavior started out as mystifying, became anger-inducing, transcended into the pathological, and now has become truly, eye-avertingly, just embarrassing and sad. I don't think we can avoid saying this anymore: Our president is mentally unwell. In the same way that we don't let our children walk the streets on their own until they know that moving cars are a threat to their safety when crossing the road, this man who cannot properly identify a vicious enemy of his (and ours), even when it announces itself on national television, should not be anywhere near government, let alone in the Oval Office. It may be safe for him to go back to being a law professor, but he should no more be allowed to deal with Republicans and CEOs than drunken frat boys should be permitted to drive a Caterpillar earthmover through a suburban neighborhood at two o'clock in the morning.

Undoubtedly the greatest irony of the lot, however, is that this country's problems are of its own making, and that the solutions to these threats are so transparent - chiefly because they used to be public policy. We had most of this stuff figured out once, but then we got greedy and stupid and pissed it all away. We knew after the experience of 1929 that Wall Street had to be regulated, and so we did. And it worked, until we decided to try the old way again, with the same consequences. We learned after Vietnam not to follow lying presidents into destructive wars that suited their personal ambitions. And it worked, until we forgot the lesson and were doomed to repeat the consequences. We learned from Reagan that tax cuts unmatched by spending cuts would drive a Mack truck through the budget, but then Cheney said "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", so we did it again, and now we're doing it a third time. And so on, and so on. I tell ya, I'd feel a lot better about our predicament if someone else was the cause of it. Some evil, external, bad guy. But surely, Shirley, the dumbest people on Earth are the ones who shoot themselves in the foot. Dumbest, that is, except for the ones who reload and do it again to the other foot.

Things may get better in this country, but not before they get worse, I can tell you that. And possibly not before they get really worse. The next two years are going to bring loads more nightmare our way. The scary moment comes when the doubling-down on regressivism produces the predictable outcome of more national disaster. Think of the present moment, cranked out on irradiated steroids. Just as has been the case lately, many will argue that we need to double down on these malignant ideas, and that anyone saying otherwise is a threat to society who should be treated accordingly. That's called fascism.

And that's the beauty of conservatism. Each time it fails, there are plenty among us for whom that failure represents a reason to do even more of the same.

If you're not depressed enough this week already, consider this: Next time around we might just quadruple-down on stupidity.

* * * * *

This is my absolute last week to finish my book and posting will therefore be light and erratic -- though not non-existent -- until next Monday.

For now, one other event worth noting: Lindsey Graham became the latest leading American official to prove that Iran is ruled by extremist, crazed and bellicose leaders who threaten other nations with aggression when he suggested that the U.S. would and should attack Iran "not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime." Aren't those mullahs totally unstable and radical? Interestingly, though, while Graham "predicted Republican support for more aggressive U.S. involvement in the world," he also "acknowledged that some new members of Congress, particularly those elected under the tea party banner, are likely to have different foreign policy views. . . . The Republican Party is going to have two wings . . . .The isolationist wing, and the wing led by [Sen. John] McCain [Ariz.], Graham and [Sen. Jeff] Sessions [Ala.] that says you'd better stay involved in the world because if you do disengage, you'll regret it."

But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve any useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.

Beyond Nuremberg

Sadly, it is now clear that U.S. officials do not believe they should be held to that universal standard, and that the Nuremberg principles and other international laws need not apply to decisions emanating from the White House.

Rather than facing a stern judgment for his criminal actions, including approving torture and authorizing aggressive war against Iraq, George Bush is about to be lionized in Dallas over his presidential library, in bookstores for his memoir, and in the FCM. Two articles in the New York Times' "Week in Review" section on Sunday cited Bush's memoir as a possible turning point for Americans viewing the ex-President more favorably. Neither article made any mention of Bush's "Damn right" admission of ordering torture.

Reporter Peter Baker wrote, "Perhaps it is time to think about whether America has begun to reconsider its 43rd president." Columnist Maureen Dowd faulted "W's decision-making" but said "his story-telling is good."

In his memoir, Bush exudes confidence that he can achieve the resurrection of his popularity even as he boasts about his role on torture. It was a mark of almost inconceivable hubris that he would callously admit, this time in writing, his authorization of waterboarding.

But he did make that admission, which lobs the ball into our court as American citizens. It is indeed time for the kind of judgment Justice Jackson envisioned, not a celebratory book tour. Nor is it time for breaking ground on a new presidential library to further cover up crimes and falsehoods under a veneer of neo-con "scholarship." (Progressives in Dallas have taken to calling Bush's new structure a "lie-bury.")

Bush's confidence - or arrogance - can be traced, in part, to the power and tenacity of his acolytes, especially the neocons who remain very influential in Washington.

But blame also must fall on cynical politicians, especially in the House of Representatives, who thought they could maximize Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 by ignoring their solemn oath to honor the Constitution of the United States. Forget the Founders, who took great pains to incorporate in the Constitution an orderly process for impeaching and removing senior officials guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, foreseeing a time when that might be required.

The timid, calculating Democratic leadership wimped out when it had the chance - actually, when it had a Constitutional as well as moral obligation - to investigate, to build public support for action, and to hold Bush accountable.

Misguided Appeasement

Now, with the Republicans "shellacking" the Democrats on Nov. 2 and returning to power in the House, here's a question for the outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her main malleable man, Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers: How's all that appeasement workin' for ya?

Shame, as well, on the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) for joining Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in stoking the hysteria that set the stage for the torture and then for caving in to White House pressure to avoid calling torture torture.

Last but hardly least, shame on Bush's timid successor. Every time I hear that Obama is a former professor of Constitutional law I find myself muttering, "And that would be the constitution of which country?" The President's soaring rhetoric falls flat fast the moment you stop to ponder how he has betrayed his oath to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed - in this case, by holding self-confessed torturers accountable.

Shame, too, on those of us who decide to remain silent as Bush openly brags about how he personally approved the use of controlled-drowning for interrogation. The Spanish Inquisitors who applied for the first patent on waterboarding had no qualms calling it what it is - tortura de agua.

"Unequivocally torture" is how U.S. Brigadier General David Irvine described waterboarding, after teaching POW interrogation and military law for 18 years.

Signs of the Times

Before some of the revelations of the Bush book hit the media last week, I had been wondering how much light, if any, the memoir would shed on what Bush euphemistically labeled an "alternative set of procedures for interrogation."

Call me naive, but I had found it too much of a stretch to visualize a former president of the United States admitting in writing to having ordered waterboarding, the same technique for which Japanese and American soldiers have been tried, convicted and punished.

I am now trying to come to grips with the notion that I have been living in the past, the kind of past that Bush lawyer Alberto Gonzales would call "quaint" and "obsolete" (adjectives he applied to the Geneva Conventions), a past inspired by the Nuremberg principles, where there was at least a modicum of respect for the law and such a thing a shame.

For over five months now, I have been unable to get out of my head the photo of a relaxed, tuxedo-clad George W. Bush in an arm-chair being interviewed after a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on June 2. He says nonchalantly:

Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I'd do it again to save lives. [But waterboarding doesn't save lives, just the opposite; see below.]

Since I had not been able to shake that insipid image of the cavalier torturer in the armchair, there is little excuse for my being surprised at what Bush writes in his memoir about his role in ordering torture and the pride he takes in having done so.

I should have been fully prepared for Decision Points, in which the counterfeit cowboy assumes the very same posture of in-your-face-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it-when-even-the-wimps-sworn-to-enforce-the-law-are-too-timid-to-do-so.

I have seen much change in the body politic since I arrived in Washington, DC, almost 48 years ago. There is one change, however, that dwarfs all others in significance. It is that the country no longer has, in any real sense, a free media. Read Jefferson and Madison on the importance of a free media to preserving a democracy and you will be reminded of how very BIG this change really is.

Don't believe me? This coming week, watch how the media gives George W. Bush a stay-out-of-jail pass as he starts to peddle his lie-infested memoir on TV and in bookstores. Watch how the moneyed interests he served lionize him at the groundbreaking for Bush's "Presidential Center" in Dallas on Nov. 16.

The accomplices of the FCM can be counted on to suppress the truth about Bush and about their own complicity in cheerleading for war, torture and the rest. As is well known, cheerleading is a team effort demanding equal enthusiasm by all.

Maybe this is the real reason why NBC chose this particular time to put Keith Olbermann on leave without pay. Olbermann would never quite "get with the program."

Unlike most of his pundit colleagues, he was uncomfortable buying into the wisdom of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who famously said:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

How does the Big Lie technique translate to today? Simple. We will be getting a steady diet of this kind of punditry: waterboarding is merely something that a bunch of liberals associate with torture. And, besides, we waterboarded some of our own servicemen to show them what it was like (as if no one has the mental capacity to distinguish between a demonstration and the real thing). And, Bush's confidence was bolstered by the results of his painstaking efforts to acquire guidance from both the legal and the medical profession. Right?

And most of the lawyers and doctors of this great country will keep silent - even in the face of that kind of provocation.

Media Attention

With the book not yet formally released, it has been easier for the FCM to give Bush's bragging on waterboarding relatively little attention.

Last Thursday, after Bush's comment on torture hit the news, the Washington Post, to its credit, ran on page two a report by staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith titled "Bush says in memoir he approved waterboarding." Smith even noted in his first paragraph that "simulated drownings [are] a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture." Smith highlights Bush's admission that he answered, "Damn right," when CIA thugs asked permission to waterboard "9/11 mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the first of 183 times, and indicates that Bush repeated the mantra that he would decide the same way again Òto save lives.Ó

That was Thursday. On Sunday the Post hastened to inject the customary "balance" with a long panegyric defending George W. Bush from "Five Myths" spread by "liberals" and other recalcitrants unwilling to give him his due.

Did you know, for example, that Bush was "personally invested in compassionate conservatism?" And that his "experience as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals' personal struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life?" So writes Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton, whom the Post apparently paid bucks for "balance."

The Post must have given Zelizer an advance copy of Decision Points, since his 1,250-word essay dominating page three of Sunday's Washington Post Outlook section was occasioned by the soon-to-be-unveiled memoir and shows he has read it carefully. Zelizer does not mention Bush's comments on authorizing waterboarding - presumably because that can no longer be dismissed as a "myth."

As for the bit about Bush being a born-again Christian, this reminded me of another Bush admirer, his father, telling the media shortly after 9/11 that his son George had read straight through the Bible - twice!

Yep; two times! But did he miss, twice, "Thou Shalt Not Kill?" Or Jesus's instructions to his followers to love your enemy and to treat others as you yourself would want to be treated? Does he need an exegete to unpack those pronouncements?

Favorite Bumper Sticker

To assist with his continuing theological education and help him keep in mind a key passage, I shall try to give the former president my favorite bumper sticker when I see him at the groundbreaking in Dallas. It reads:

"When Jesus said Love Your Enemies I think he probably meant not to kill them."

Or torture them.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to steer well clear of any such suggestion that waterboarding might be torture. That it had had ample opportunity to read and digest an advance copy of the book was clear on Nov. 4 when it published a 1,700-word article by star reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.

Kakutani was super-careful. Her only allusion to what Bush wrote on waterboarding is buried in one sentence sandwiched into dead center between the revelation that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had access to "an Arabic translation of 'Harry Potter'" and vapid comments on the economic meltdown. There she inserted Bush's claim that there would have been "a greater risk that the country would be attacked," had he not authorized waterboarding.

As for George W. Bush's faith, Kakutani gives pride of place to Bush's agonizing choice between religion and alcohol, quoting from the memoir: "Could I continue to grow closer to the Almighty or was alcohol becoming my god?"

(With all due respect, had I known earlier what direct instructions Bush would later claim he got from being close to the "Almighty," I would have sent him a monthly carton of whatever whiskey they drink down there in Texas.)

In Sunday's Times, Peter Baker's article offers a generally flattering portrayal of Bush and his book; Baker also neglects to mention Bush's "Damn Right" approval of waterboarding. Instead, he notes plaintively that "a good portion" of Americans "still revile him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects and presiding over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."

Picky, picky, that portion of Americans!

"And yet" are the familiar words Baker, and Professor Zelizer, use to start their various exculpatory paragraphs. No one should be surprised to see the "and yet's" dominate media coverage this week, when major promotion of the book gets under way. (That's assuming anyone is so impolite as to ask about waterboarding/torture.)

Baker finishes his article with a familiar sentiment from Bush: "Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I'm comfortable with the fact that I won't be around to hear it." At least the man is consistent. Interviewing Bush for his panegyric, Bush at War, Bob Woodward asked then-President Bush what he anticipated with respect to his place in history. "History, we'll all be dead," was Bush's reaction.

Caring Less

I'd like to ask Peter Baker why he decided to tuck that particular quote onto the end of his Times article on Sunday. Does he perhaps think it cute to have had a President who couldn't care less? Or what?

As for Bush himself, I suppose he does not feel there is much danger from the possibility that some writer might prepare an objective, truthful portrayal of his tenure in office any time soon. No doubt he takes reassurance from the virtual certainty that the FCM would drown any such author in decibels. And should someone suggest Bush be prosecuted for war crimes, as he should be, that person would likely be sent off to do penance with Keith Olbermann. (So glad I do not have to depend on the FCM to earn a living.)

...and Making Stuff Up

As for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to Reuters, Bush claims KSM was "difficult to break" but that waterboarding did the trick. "He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax among other breakthroughs," writes Bush.

There he goes again, making stuff up. There is nothing to support that claim, and lots to refute it. For example, David Rose, a serious investigative journalist writing two years ago for Vanity Fair, conveyed the appraisal of a former senior CIA officer who read all the reports on Mohammed's interrogation.

His verdict? "Ninety percent of it was total "bullshit." In addition, a former Pentagon analyst told Rose that the interrogation of Mohammed produced no actionable intelligence.

KSM himself has boasted derisively about sending CIA and FBI agents scurrying around the world on wild-goose chases, following up on the "leads" he gave them. I imagine that, by his 183rd waterboarding session, KSM may have identified terrorists he claimed were responsible for global warming.

Other of the Bush's claims are demonstrably false - contradicted by the FBI, for example. Bush repeats the old saw about KSM yielding information leading to the capture of one of his top aides, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. But that information came from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional, legal methods.

The So-What Yawns

By and large, the "so-what" yawns that have greeted the initial reporting on torture is further testimony to the sorry fact that raw fear can lead to the forfeiture of the ability of Americans to distinguish between right and wrong - even regarding heinous offenses like torture. Sadly, this is made all the easier by the craven silence of the institutional churches and synagogues which, with very few exceptions, cannot find their voice - just as the Catholic and Lutheran churches could not find theirs during the Thirties in Germany.

Behind the stained glass, the end can now be subtly seen to justify the means, if that's what it takes to head off contentiousness in the church community and keep pews and collection plates full. Anything goes; whatever is necessary to "keep us safe" is the mantra.

If a rare (prophetic) voice does enter the dialogue with a reminder that many of the prophets, including Jesus of Nazareth, were tortured to death, that voice is quickly silenced. Can't you see? This is different; the terrorists hate us and are out to kill the lot of us.

What rankles most is the success Bush and Cheney have had, with the corporate media support on which they depend, in stoking Americans' fear to the point where waterboarding and other forms of torture have become widely accepted as necessary to "keep us safe."

Hidden is the supreme irony that torture has been doing just the opposite. In fact, it has proven the most powerful fillip to violence against us. Now who should find that surprising? Bush's policy on interrogation has been directly linked by U.S. interrogators to the killing of American troops - in Iraq, for example.

The senior U.S. Air Force interrogation specialist who uses the name Matthew Alexander and who conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised over 1,000 more lamented those additional killings, "It's a hard pill to swallow, but true." Alexander, a Bronze Star awardee, says that as many as 90 percent of the foreign fighters captured in Iraq said they joined the fight against the U.S. because of the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Former General Counsel to the Navy Alberto Mora made the same point in testimony before Congress:

There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq - as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat - are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

It is a given, then, that the Bush torture policy made Americans less - not more Ñ safe.

Getting Desired Answers

Are waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques "highly effective," as Bush reportedly claims in his memoir? The short answer is No.

On Sept. 6, 2006, the very day Bush first bragged publicly about his "alternative set of procedures for interrogation" and appealed for legislation allowing the CIA to continue using them, the then head of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, took a very different tack.

Conducting a Pentagon briefing shortly before the President gave his own speech on the other side of the Potomac, Kimmons underscored the fact that the revised Army manual for interrogation is in sync with the Geneva treaties.

Then, conceding past "transgressions and mistakes," Kimmons updated something I learned 48 years ago as a second lieutenant in Army infantry/intelligence:

No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.

Grabbing the headlines the following day was BushÕs admission that the CIA has taken "high-value" captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using "tough" techniques prohibited by the revised Army field manual - and by Geneva, for that matter. Gen. Kimmons displayed uncommon courage in facing into that wind. Too bad our political leaders are afraid to follow his example.

Question: If Bush's "alternative set of procedures for interrogation" adds to the queuing in front of terrorist centers, so to speak, and if they don't yield good intelligence, why use them? Former FBI Special Agent/Attorney Coleen Rowley and I have co-authored articles for Consortiumnews.com, which address this very understandable question. Let me refer you especially to "'Justifying' Torture: Two Big Lies."

Briefly, if your aim is to extract untruthful information (like "intelligence" on those non-existent but close ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, remember?), nothing works better than torture. If you want to intimidate real or imagined troublemakers, torture is a natural for proving that what Lord Acton said about absolute power is horribly real.

And, if you have a streak of sadism, harsh interrogation techniques can give grand release.

Bush's certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers.

His comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular with reporters when talking about American casualties in Iraq. Instead of seeing a president in anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans died.

Patchwork Of False Beliefs

The following excerpt is from a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memorandum of July 27, 2007, which included some additional observations with regard to how Bush looks at truth, as suggested by Dr. Frank: "Dangers of a Cornered Bush":

His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth... he lies not just to us, but to himself as well...What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him.... So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.

A useful reminder as Bush comes back into public view in the coming weeks.

Torture is not wrong just because there are laws against it. There are laws against it because it is wrong. Intrinsically wrong; always wrong - like genocide, rape, slavery. And as one scholar put it, "to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east."

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have each said that waterboarding is torture. But, sadly, neither has the guts to look in the rear-view mirror and do what the Constitution and common decency require.

In the wake of World War II, civilized nations came to a general consensus on all this, and the ensuing laws and international conventions reflected that consensus. George Bush is simply the most visible leader to employ lawyers and doctors - and even a stray theologian here and there - to help him carve out exceptions to that consensus.

True, on occasion a moral theologian will summon the courage to speak out. Professor William Schweiker of the Chicago Divinity School, for example, has heaped scorn on the familiar scenario of the lone knower of the facts whose torture is thought to be able to save millions of lives. He notes that such is "the stuff of bad spy movies and bad exam questions in ethics courses."

With specific reference to waterboarding, Schweiker admonishes Christians, in particular:

Not to fall prey to fear and questionable reasoning and thus continue to support an unjust and vile practice that demeans the nationÕs highest political and moral ideals, even as it desecrates one of the most important practices and symbols (Baptism) of the Christian faith.

From the Professional Military

Interrogator Matthew Alexander reports, "I have been contacted by World War II veterans who were outraged that the Bush administration so easily dismissed the American principles that millions of veterans gave their lives to defend. They pointed out what I have said all along: we cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him."

World War II General George C. Marshall warned, "Once an Army is involved in war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains. ... A good officer must learn early on how to keep the beast under control both in his men and in himself."

And in 1775, as the birth of America hung in the balance, General George Washington said, "Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any prisoner... by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." With George W. Bush's "Damn right" permission to waterboard - and the FCM's flaccid response - America has certainly come a long way. Again, I believe we are all complicit and that would be doubly so, if we emulate the passive stance of the "good Germans" of the Thirties.