Know Your Enemy

Green Day has a new album and single:

Do you know the enemy?
Do you know your enemy?
Well, gotta know the enemy

Overthrow the effigy
The vast majority
Burning down the foreman of control

Silence is the enemy
Against your urgency
So rally up the demons of your soul

I'm with Jane Smiley on Dick Cheney. He's an American citizen so he has the right to speak freely, but I don't have to listen him, just as I wouldn't listen to a crazy person in the street. And with his speech filled with wall-to-wall lies, straw men, false analogies, history bending and general fear-mongering, I advise others to stop listening as well.

If he hadn't been quasi-Commander-in-Chief upending a reporting system that was working, opening us up to the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history under his watch; if he hadn't instituted a torture program for the first time in the history of our Federal government and had it debunked to the point that the elected President stopped it in 2004; if he hadn't masterminded the outing of a CIA agent because her husband spoke out against the disastrous Iraq War he was ginning up; if he hadn't tortured in vain to get the missing justification for the war, I might listen to him.

But Cheney is the Axis of Brutal America, that weak-minded, rigidly Manichean, easily swayed aspect of America that believes might makes right and trumps values. And that it is somehow a posture towards the world that will somehow allow the Republic to last forever. Right.

The President of the United States of America laid out his plan for handling terrorists in great rationality and detail today. This is policy, explained to us as it never was in the previous eight-year Administration, and it is true to the values about America I was taught as a kid. Not soft, strong and legal.

Then there was this crazy man who is not in power. Maybe he's pointing the way for his party: reclaim that fear mantle! It will certainly sway the weaker minds. It always does. It's not rational, it's based on the emotion of fear. It is the past in endless loop, while our elected President is trying to move us in the the future by embracing what has traditionally, throughout our history, made America great:

For seven years, President George W. Bush tried to frighten the American public — and successfully cowed Congress — with bullying and disinformation. On Thursday, President Obama told the truth. It was a moment of political courage that will make this country safer.

Mr. Obama was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values. By denying those values, the Bush team fed the furies of anti-Americanism, strengthened our enemies and made the nation more vulnerable.

It is an uphill battle. His party controls Congress and they are not yet willing to fund his Guantanamo plan, although a change in that may be the result of his landmark speech today. And the GOP seem to have cowed the Dems with their "Don't incarcerate them here!" meme, as if America can't keep however many terrorist clowns on Guantanamo safely locked up as long as they live in the continental United States, as we've doing with other terrorists -- still in prison until they die.

My take on the "detainees" and eventual convicted terrorists: Bring them here.

I say, frak them, no one is going to cow us on that one, least of all ourselves.

Compare and contrast:



And just remember this: whenever Dick Cheney uses the phrase "enhanced techniques" the word is actual "torture." And that's his gift to America, the World and History.

Do we all really want to be down with that?