A Year, A Nutshell

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup for 2014.

On Majority Report, Sam and guest Digby sum up the year-end theme: no consequences to those who abuse authority, whether they ordered torture or fixed a grand jury.

Digby sees release of the torture report as a turning point: "Where it's a debate at all... it's just another issue to be haggled about, like capital gains tax." No matter what happened in practice, the government had never before admitted to torture, and now it's simply accepted policy. Of the White House's refusal to take a position on the report, Sam says, "It was basically a McCulloch: 'we let the grand jury take a look, and there's no point in us weighing in.'"

Digby kept returning to the idea that something very substantial has shifted. That it's no accident Cheney's goal was to restore executive branch power, or that he had the Justice Department issue orders, creating "a new world of 'get out of jail free cards': as long as some lawyer in some department signs a memo that it's legal... There's now a legitimate excuse for anything a member of government does, and there's no end to it." And the sheer incompetence at exercising the power they've seized only earns them promotions and Medals of Freedom. After all, says Digby, "They are patriots doing their best to protect us. If they make us less safe, well we need to thank them for that and move along."

With the new public attention to out of control police behavior, says Digby, the outrageously inappropriate reactions of some spokespeople is also like McCulloch: "Police have a tough job. I put every liar on the stand; let the people decide." Same for CIA threats: "don't criticize us or you'll make us afraid to do our jobs. Nice little country here; be a shame if anything happened to it." Police threatening to withhold protection if criticized use the same tactic. are the same. Digby thinks this is a broad cultural change in acceptance of this authoritarian "we're above criticism; if you criticize us, we'll make you pay."

And so the discussion continued, as we are about to move into the new year with GOP domination of Congress and an Establishment egging on "Bipartisanship" around issues like TPP. As Digby and Sam said, there are good reasons why TPP details are secret; "fast track" is purely a strategy for the Senate to avoid having to defend the indefensible. Sam: "It's another McCulloch moment: 'it's not our business to vote on this.'"

Sadly, "McCulloch moment" has got to be the most apt new usage of 2014.

Opportunity Knocks

The bodies were barely cold before right-wing pundits joined New York's police union head in blaming Mayor de Blasio for the murders of two policemen.

The killer was unbalanced, obsessed with media, and readily violent—he had in fact shot his girlfriend before driving to New York to make a name for himself. It goes without saying that the murderer would be turned into a left-winger spurred on by demonstrations against police violence. Also goes without saying: this is regardless of how non-violent demonstrators have been.

How likely is it that a deranged person in Baltimore would so much as even heard of Bill de Blasio? Silly question: logic is no obstacle to destroying a politician who's dared suggest he's had to have "The Talk" with his own son. Certainly, New York's mayor is Enemy #1 to a segment of the city's police force; for national punditry, blame for the murders also falls on Obama, Eric Holder, and any other useful name.

No one but a handful of New Yorkers might remember that previous mayors have been political targets of police unions. From the New York Observer—

This is a recurring theme," said Kenneth Sherrill, a longtime professor of political science at Hunter College. "Police respond with anger when mayors try to exercise authority over how they relate to the civilian population."

Police in 1992 police actually rioted against David Dinkins, abetted by Rudolph Giuliani's incitement. The Observer again—

On September 16, 1992, thousands of police officers stormed City Hall and stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge to protest Mr. Dinkins' eventually successful attempt to create an all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board, as well as express their general frustration toward his administration. Just as police union leaders and their backers view Mr. de Blasio's desire to address the grievances of minorities who feel unfairly targeted by police as a thinly-disguised pretext to undermine law enforcement, they blamed Mr. Dinkins for undercutting police in an environment plagued with far more crime and unrest.

On the other hand, police reaction is downright soothing when it's demented white avowed right-wingers who kill cops. Digby brings up the murder in June of this year of two off-duty Las Vegas policemen. The killers were a couple drawn to the area to join the Bundy Ranch militia. The authorities verdict then: "Police believe the shootings were an isolated act, not part of a broader conspiracy to target law enforcement..." As in similar events, media reaction was mainly a yawn.

Roy Edroso remembers Team Con's reaction to the shooting of Gabby Giffords As he wrote then—

...once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense.

Now, it's the usual drill—

...some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it.

Charles Pierce, on our recurring national theme: out-of-control authority demanding immunity from so much as criticism—

... If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us. If the NYPD runs a slow-motion coup against the freely elected mayor of New York, then it is running a slow-motion coup against all the people of New York. There is no exemption from this fundamental truth about the way this country and its system is supposed to work. The military -- and its civilian analogues in Langley and in the precinct houses -- always is subordinate to the civil power which, no matter how much it may chafe them, means that they always are subordinate to politicians. If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

But, alas,in the past few weeks, we have shown ourselves to be relatively at peace with that very thing -- as long as the torture is done in the prisons overseas and the judicial killing is done in the streets of the ghetto, and as long as our fear of some omnipotent Other is what drives our politics. In turn, and in its mind, the country has now turned peaceful mass protest into some sort of violent revolution, and it has converted the murderous rage of a criminal lunatic into the ultimate expression of the cries for justice that have been heard in the last month in Ferguson, and Cleveland, and on Staten Island. It is a deeply noxious perversion of reality, and it has been working like a charm. Very soon, the names of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner will be as unknown to our national dialogue again as are the names of those faceless, bartered souls who languished in shackles in Poland and in Thailand. The last thing to go to the waterboard is the tattered remnant of what we thought ourselves to be.

Breaking A Few Eggs

Charles Pierce here, on police unions following the usual right-wing M.O.: screaming loudly enough to block all other sound. He compares police PR to that of interested parties during two other "obvious public policy disasters," supposedly powerful enough to present the country with "Teachable Moments."

Example One: the NRA's Sandy Hook massacre response, so successful by this week's two-year anniversary date, "there are now places where you can carry your AR-15 to the pharmacy to pick up your anti-anxiety meds."

Example Two: CIA actions and public willingness to accept torture. Of this, Pierce writes, "What we did was justified, but don't tell us about it because it will disturb the Exceptionalist diorama that we have built in our heads."

Which leads Pierce to conclude—

If the public has demonstrated its willingness to eat the omelettes without learning how the eggs were broken on these two obvious public policy disasters -- and that is being incredibly kind to their architects -- why wouldn't they Support Their Local Police in these times of trouble and woe and obvious danger? The unions have every right to feel confident that the public, eventually, and not necessarily slowly, will come around to their way of thinking. One of the chief ingredients that are crucial to the narcotic concoction that is American Exceptionalism is the idea that everything the country does is for the purposes of moving it toward...something, some hazy Utopia in The West where all will be forgiven and all will be justified by their faith in the fable alone. Therefore, any of the episodes of the country's basic brutality-- slavery, the genocide of the Indians, Jim Crow, the bloody reaction to the Civil Rights movement, the killing of a 12-year old boy by a cop who wouldn't have passed the competency test to be a crossing guard -- are seen as hurdles to be overcome on the golden road to some vague land of redemption, and not as demonstrations of a fundamental moral deficiency in the entire experiment that desperately needs to be examined before the country can move forward at all. We love the Teachable Moments as long as we don't have to learn anything from them.

Second Trumps First

Free Speech—in the intimidating form of a T-shirt—outranked by the usual.

An impressive response—

"I was taught that justice is a right that every American should have. Also justice should be the goal of every American. I think that's what makes this country. To me, justice means the innocent should be found innocent. It means that those who do wrong should get their due punishment. Ultimately, it means fair treatment. So a call for justice shouldn't offend or disrespect anybody. A call for justice shouldn't warrant an apology."

The common element in the recent killings attracting notice: there's no "drop the gun" warning by the police—who also are not necessarily bothering to determine if a suspect is even armed, or a child. These police incidents are matters of shoot to kill, and later... well, questions can always be shut up later.

Though it is impressive how police are the soul of discretion when facing armed right-wing whites.

Tag Team

Of course "Meet the Press" would be given over to Cheney on Sunday, but Steve M noticed another public appearance that day—

THIS IS HOW GEORGE W. BUSH SENT THE MESSAGE "9/11 MEANT TORTURE WAS OK"...

Bush "just happened to show up" at the 9-11 Museum in NYC on Sunday.

Oh yeah -- it's so obvious that it wasn't a photo op. (Here's a local news slideshow of the visit.)

And why does Bush always talk about 9/11 as his presidency's defining moment? Why, for Bush, is 9/11 all about him? Why is it all about how 9/11 shaped his write-up in the history books?

...

...the museum opened in May; the memorial on the grounds opened in 2011. What took him so long? It's not as if he has a job.

No, he wanted to wait until now because of the torture report. Oh, and because he hopes it will occur to some people that his new book about his father would make an excellent Christmas gift. Oh, and Jeb's clearly running for president -- gotta polish up the Bush brand on his behalf.

We Resume Our Regular Programming

Pierce on this Congress' last favor to the oligarchs.

Barry Friedman, in comments—

Clearly the GOP listened to the voters: Last month, throughout the land, we heard that it was time that arbitrage and derivative specialists were released from the shackles of their private hell, that truckers had it too easy, and that there wasn't enough money in politics.

Why, if Democrats listened to their constituents--wait, that's class warfare.

Now we can get back to anticipating the next media cycle. Though we already know who will be in charge of history cleansing.

Brainchildren

Tom Sullivan on details emerging about our torture regime, including how Camp Bucca prison in Iraq  became the incubator for ISIS.

So much of the post-9-11 operation so ludicrous, "it would be funny except for the torture part"...

Pro-torture's Exhibit A.

Too bad for Jose Padilla that he wasn't the only one to take seriously The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

Expect No Less Than Impunity

Steve M. compares "CIA Fifth Columnists" to "defiant, petulant cops."

Will Bunch on the likeness of torture to unaccountable police killings.

Not New News

Some specifics are new, thanks to the newly public portion (small) of a report (voluminous). But among those details that are new, the most lurid and sexually sadistic ones merely confirm what was clear all along.

That's to say, what would be clear, if we bothered remembering... We've already seen such evidence as the pictures from Abu Ghraib, which showed sexual humiliation of prisoners was all in a days' work for guards.

The same goes for "rendition" routines, as described years ago by Jane Mayer.

The current report—and CIA response—are in a familiar mode. And newly released details of "'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without medical necessity"—complete with "lunch tray" menu—those details are unsurprising after Mayer's 2007 reporting. Her work revealed procedures of "takeouts": the snatching of targets for transport to "black site" prisons—

... A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the "takeout" of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to "sodomy." He said, "It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone's sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation." The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, "because it's demoralizing." The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.'s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

Back in 2007, Mayer's reporting exposed how post-Korean War torture resistance training of military personnel ("SERE") was reverse-engineered after 9-11—

The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.'s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. "They were very arrogant, and pro-torture," a European official knowledgeable about the program said. "They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences."

Just for the record, here's Charles Pierce on CIA torture report release day, in three parts: "What It Says"; "What It Means"; "What Will Happen Now."

Action on "What Will Happen" was immediate and decisive. Throughout the Liberal Media, the pundits' verdict was duly endorsed: A Partisan Report.

Ooga Booga Men

Steve M. makes some connections between police fears of black men and how well the right uses the myth of the "evil black superman"—not only to race bait, but also to turn all political opponents into demons—

I've long felt that, since the days of Reagan, conservatives have thrived by modifying the "Southern strategy" demonization of blacks -- the demons now include Democrats, liberals, college professors, Hollywood stars, feminists, gay people, immigrants, and other groups. The rhetoric frequently circles back to race, of course -- especially, needless to say, while we have a black president -- but the same basic anger is stoked when the top Democrat is Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.

Cutting Off Oxygen

The death of Eric Garner was caught on video, for anyone to see; the coroner's finding was homicide, yet the prosecutor wouldn't lead a grand jury to indict the cop responsible.

Garner's death, writes Digby, "wasn't the first time we've been able to hear someone begging for his life, unable to breathe, as police killed them on camera." It happened to a white homeless man, whose vicious beating by Fullerton, CA police was recorded on surveillance film. The police responsible were later indicted, but not convicted.

Charles Pierce on legal "justification" for chokeholds. Also on an old quote—

When police Chief Daryl Gates was asked why almost all of these fatal chokeholds involved African Americans, Gates replied that the "veins or arteries of blacks do not open up as fast as they do in normal people."

Pierce adds, "And they look like demons, too."

Response to public notice of police lawlessness: "Shut up." Victimization plays so well when it comes from the same right-wingers who are forever shrieking about "political correctness," so police have plenty of precedent to follow. Among the results, such fine displays as this and this.

And the team's pundits are always available for turning up the volume.

All Buttons Pushed

Inciting racial fear has been the right's most useful and open tactic throughout Obama's tenure. As national media continue reporting police killings of unarmed black youths, the noise machine follows by turning the victims into thugs who had it coming.

The 1990 murder of Carol DiMaiti Stuart represents, in Charles Pierce's view, a particular turning point, when—

...her husband, Charles, the murderer threw out a fairy tale about a black perpetrator that sent the Boston police on an absolute rampage through the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. It didn't stop until Stuart confessed by throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge.

Racial fear-mongering in the post-Reagan 1990s was marketed through such tropes as a supposedly new, horrifying, and academically-endorsed phenomenon: young ghetto "superpredators," more deadly than any criminals ever known before. And around this time "Cops" on Fox preceded the network's marketing of "News" to a credulous audience.

So here we are, all these decades later, as the "thugs" theme gets a bigger, brighter spotlight.

Confucius Say

Recycled script this morning: "Storytelling: workplaces have heroes and legends… What are yours?..."

Followed by precisely the same examples as last time: "Maybe it was the time we processed a record number of patients in one night"; [something about starting recalcitrant machinery]; "The co-worker who wore that Halloween costume..."

Here's an outfit selling a version of this.

Your employees will love their job and their workplace.

Every great organization has its own heroes. These heroes become company legends. These heroes build great cultures.

Your organization's legend may be a support associate who set her alarm for 2 a.m. so she could respond to a client only available in the wee hours of the morning, or it may be the cutomer service agent who drove accross town to deliver a replacement part after 9 p.m. on a Thursday night.

What photo pick could better represent corporate greatness?

At least it's not this one.

This company claims some big corporate players as clients. Perhaps low-budget cheesy sites filled with misspellings are a sign of outsourcing Mission Accomplished.

It certainly suits the quality of the ideas, that they are represented by fine clip art like this.

Translated from a Chinese manuscript of the 6th or 5th century B.C., no less.... Those ancient sages sure had their greeting card sentiments down pat.