Pontificating in the U.S. Senate
The posturing of party politics in America is so arduously predictable. It’s not a secret to even the most casual news observer that the two demonic sides of the oligarchy simply reverse roles whenever the Oval Office changes hands. Both sides have a pretty phrase for this alternative positioning too. They call it "public messaging," and the traditional news media just takes it all at face value. Because what else are they going to do, investigate something?The Democrats now argue that the president should be given a wide berth when appointing the members of his own cabinet, but they whistled a very different tune during George Bush Jr.’s eight-year term of executive leadership and public mortification. Remember that there is, theoretically at least, a system of democratic checks and balances built into our political system. Cabinet officials are not elected by-- and therefore not directly accountable to-- the citizenry, so our only say in the appointment process is having our elected representatives interrogate them in a most public setting and then approve or deny their hire. The tragic reality of our past is not that so many of our presidents’ cabinet choices have been prematurely discharged by the legislative branch, but that so many degenerates and miscreants have sailed through without opposition.
John McCain is Shakespearean in his wretched fall from prisoner of war to merchant of war, but it is his job to ask tough questions, however self-serving and delusional they may be. Personally, I think that Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel is President Obama’s most-inspired Cabinet choice ever, but that his nominee for CIA director, John Brennan, should be turned over to an international criminal court for his crimes against humanity.
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The improv players at Saturday Night Live rehearsed a sketch this week (all the way through dress rehearsal) in which Republican Senators attempted to one-up each other during the Hagel hearing over which one loved Israel the most. The sketch never made it to air. Conspiracy theorists, one minute to air.
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Chris Kyle was an action-hungry former Navy SEAL who “liked war,” and described killing in that arena as “fun.” He was a proud, confirmed killer of more than 160 “bad guys” in Iraq, possibly more than 250 souls in total, a man who wrote in his autobiography that he “couldn’t give a flying fuck about Iraqis,” and that he “hated the damned savages” there. He was a man with a “crusader cross” tattooed on his arm, who by his own account, once told a military investigator that he didn’t kill people carrying a Koran, but admitted all the same, “I’d like to, but I don’t.”
Now he’s dead, killed at a firing range in Texas a week ago, fittingly by a fellow ex-army soldier who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. There is no tragedy to see here. Kyle was a proud and contented, government-engineered killing machine. And we were done with him.
posted by CM @ 9:04 PM
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