Empire of Horror

The never-ending hypocrisy of the US government:

Guess who turned out to be the biggest asshole in the world? Your boyfriend, Barack Obama. The latest outrage in the Bradley Manning situation involves Obama’s direct involvement in the firing of State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley — because Crowley committed the sin of condemning the torture and abuse of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning, who has been held in increasingly Soviet-esque solitary confinement since his arrest for giving WikiLeaks the diplomatic data that has so far helped topple two Arab dictatorships and launched democratic revolutions in another half-dozen Muslim nations. Anyway, Crowley’s semi-public remarks led to a reporter finally asking Obama about Manning’s awful treatment at Quantico, and Obama sneered and said the insane abuse of this American citizen is “appropriate.” And then Crowley was fired.

Remember, if you just “opt out” of the 2012 presidential election — and by “you,” we mean “all Democrats” — some awful Republican will become president and then none of us will have to “feel bad” about full-scale labor wars and nationwide shutdowns and the complete collapse of the American police state/kleptocracy. Let it collapse! It’s not like your 401k is ever going to hit 2007 levels again, no matter how much of your stretched salary goes into that black hole, year after year. It’s not like there’s a point to any of this!

(snip)

Remember how we all howled with laughter/disgust when Bush said, “We don’t torture”? Because of course the United States had turned into a Stalin-style Empire of Horror and we had taxpayer-supported horror prisons all over the world and the stacks of naked Iraqis and raped little children and people getting their fingernails pulled out and waterboarded and all that. Well now we have an administration that not only continues such evil as official U.S. policy, but is now actually torturing American citizens and standing up for it, right there from the presidential podium in the White House.

Chris Floyd also has some choice words for this madness:

To be sure, Crowley hastened to assure his audience -- an MIT seminar -- that he thought Manning belonged behind bars for throwing some light on the violent, witless and criminal grindings of the American war machine. But his remarks did drag the Obama Administration's torture regimen into the light of day. Even the sainted Nobel Peace Prize Laureate his own self was forced to address the issue when he was asked in a press conference about Crowley's statement. Obama then issued his now-notorious defense of his torture of Manning, say that he had checked with the people who were torturing Manning and they said that their torture of Manning was OK. And that, said the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, was good enough for him.

After this, it was obvious that Crowley's days were numbered -- or rather, his hours were numbered, for he scarcely lasted more than a day before the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate forced him from office for the high crime of causing the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to face the momentary discomfort of having to publicly address his torture of an Amerian soldier.

To his credit, Crowley did not go quietly, saying that he stood by his criticism of Manning's treatment -- which includes forced, public nakedness -- and adding that his MIT remarks "were intended to highlight the broader, even strategic impact of discreet actions undertaken by national security agencies every day and their impact on our global standing and leadership."

Of course, one should not now turn Crowley into some kind of moral exemplar. For the fact remains that he has faithfully and willingly served the Obama Administration as it has perpetrated a series of war crimes, eviscerations of constitutional liberties and abuses of human rights at home and around the world -- while protecting its predecessor from the slightest hint of investigation or prosecution for doing the same.

Crowley was proud to serve in an administration that is brazenly carrying out an illegal war of "extrajudicial killing" in the non-belligerent state of Pakistan -- a brutal blunderbuss of a campaign that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians.

Crowley was proud to serve a president who sent his own national security honcho to Congress to affirm, under oath, that the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has the power -- and the right -- to kill any human being on earth, at home or abroad, if he arbitrarily declares that his target is a "terrorist threat."

Crowley was proud to serve as a top spokesman for a government which has now far outstripped all of its predecessors as a money-grubbing merchant of death to some of the most odious regimes on the planet.