Asylum for the Cheneys

Is there a banana republic somewhere that can be offered a bribe sufficient to take the Cheneys off our hands? Not just Dick, but the whole lying, dissembling, weasel-faced, treasonous bunch -- Lynne, Liz and Mary too as a package deal? I’d gladly kick in additional tax dollars to bankroll a pseudo-ranch house, complete with Western figurines, plaster cattle skulls and boldly striped polyester serapes draped artfully over low-slung Naugahyde sofas.

We should make Dick an offer he can’t refuse – a Ponderosa-themed compound (location to be determined) or a one-way ticket to The Hague. Go quietly, or you are going down, Beelzebubba.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more disgraceful, scare-mongering, lie-studded performance by a political figure in my entire life. And I am old enough to remember being pissed off when the Watergate hearings pre-empted Scooby Doo.

Preventive Detention

If Bob Somerby were an actual progressive media watchdog instead of the web’s leading purveyor of sour grapes (outside the pumatic fringe, of course), he’d have to grudgingly admit that Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow asked an important question last night: To wit, what the figgety fuck is up with this “prolonged detention” business?

Maddow and assorted civil libertarians are saying that Obama’s vaguely outlined plan to detain al Qaeda suspects who cannot be tried for various reasons is as bad or worse than the Bush-Cheney gulag system. They’ve got a point.

On the other hand, what can you do with known baddies the Bush-Cheney Keystone Kops waterboarded past all hope of legal prosecution but who are nonetheless more dangerous than a pack of rabid porcupines with anthrax-atomizing projectile quills of death? I’m not going to pretend that’s an easy question. Here’s my answer: Fuck if I know.

But there's got to be an answer that respects civil liberties and public safety, one that doesn't immediately assume that values and ideals are expendable in dangerous times and that only Big Daddy Dick can keep us safe. I think Obama is trying to find that answer. But the details are important. Maybe that's why truly progressive congresscritters rejected the initial Gitmo closure funding proposal. It may have actually been the responsible thing to do.

Cox Gets Results!

Or at least, she makes Robert Gibbs squirm on the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell issue. Despite being derided as a Beavis and Butthead-like, pee-pee-double-entendre-name-having joke by media critics who don’t actually get results despite self-aggrandizing claims to the contrary, Ana Marie Cox brings up an important issue. And in the White House briefing room, not from beneath a Slanket in front of a Commodore 64.

I leave it to you fair people to judge whose work is more important.

[Cross-posted at Rumproast]