I was watching a hearing of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security when I saw the chairman, Christopher Shays (CT-04), say something interesting. He said that here he was lecturing the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shi’ites because they don’t seem to be able to get along, while he couldn’t get along with the ranking member of his own subcommittee. He went on to say that America, just as much as Iraq, needs to come together to solve our common problems. I thought to myself that Mr. Shays had made a profound point in an interesting way. And then I thought that it would be nice if we could get along with the GOP but that that was impossible as long as the administration is trying to legalize torture, defy the Supreme Court on the treatment of ‘enemy combatants’ and normalize and legalize warrantless domestic surveillance.
But, reading Andrew Sullivan, I got a glimmer of hope for the future. The hope can be seen in his opening statement.
By chance I bumped into Senator John Warner last night at the fifth anniversary party for the Chris Matthews Show. I was able to go up and shake him warmly by the hand and thank him from the depth of my heart for protecting this country’s honor. He replied quite simply: “It’s just the right thing for the country.”
We’ve become so polarized that I am more accustomed to hammering Sullivan, Shays, and Warner than in praising them. Today I will praise them.
Sullivan goes on:
he sight of so many Republican senators and one former secretary of state finally standing up against the brutality and dishonor of this president’s military detention policies is a sign of great hope. It turns out there is an opposition in this country – it’s called what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP. Slowly, real conservatives are speaking out loud what they have long said in private. The apparatchiks of the pro-torture blogosphere can vent, but it is hard to demonize the new opposition as “leftist” or “hysterical.” Warner? McCain? Graham? Powell? These men who have served their country are somehow less reliable on matters of war than a man who never went to the war of his own generation and has bungled the two critical wars on his own watch? Please. These men are less serious about confronting terror than Dick Cheney, whose own record of commentary in Iraq would be dismissed as unhinged and absurd if he were a lowly blogger? Please. This should have happened long, long ago – before the explosion in spending, before the conflation of religious dogma with conservative politics, before the reckless indifference toward the immensely challenging task of occupying a foreign country.
It’s time for the sane wing of the GOP to re-exert their power. John Kerry and Howard Dean tried to take our country back. They failed. We are now relying on people like Warner, Graham, McCain, and Powell to check the power grab and slip towards fascism until John Conyers and Henry Waxman can deal the deathblow to Bushism.
For some reason the prospect of george taking a stand because he wants to torture people makes me laugh.
I have never encountered a character like that except when Jack Nicholson played The Joker.
i guess anything can be funny if you look at the right way.
I watched the hearing you mention above and thought it was excellent in terms of the info, advice and opinions of the panelists. Especially interesting two of the panelists called for phased withdrawel, Galbraith suggested pulling back to Kurdistan (and he stressed, rather quickly, all seemed to be against any sort of pressure by us on Iraq to hold country together in terms of Federal concerns, but rather to allow the country to choose it’s own course.
Lots more in the hearing, wish I could relate more of it, but if you get a chance, folks, try to catch a rerun or watch on Cspan if available.
Shays has long seemed to me on the verge of getting it, but now he’s being shunned by GOP,,,,
It’s better to have a few anti-torture Republicans than not, I guess. Pre-Reagan such a thing wouldn’t have seemed all that out of the ordinary. My my how times have changed. Think about it: here’s an article seeing great hope in the fact that 3 or 4 elected Republicans have shown some limits on how much torture, kidnapping, denial of human rights, and illegal detention they’ll support by the United States governnment.
Maybe it is a sign of hope that some of the fascism-inducing pixie dust seems to be wearing off on the other side of the fence. I’d love to think maybe these are the first sprouts of a new US political alignment that bring together social democrats, libertarians, secularists, and those who want government to be as small and efficient as possible while insisting on basic economic security for all. But the fact that pols like the aforementioned insist on remaining in the intellectually and morally bankrupt GOP says they essentially see nothing wrong with that party’s theocrat/oligarch/neofascist principles short of war crimes.
I don’t trust Warner, McCain or Graham as far as I can throw them! In the end I suspect this supposedly “strong stand” against the insanity of BushCo by this bunch will evaporate.
Graham wants to be McCains running mate in ’08; McCain is determined to be Prez no matter how many principles he has to betray to get there. Warner wants to retire with the appearance of dignity and will not suffer a long-term “swifting” by the neocon loonies.
I don’t think anyone in this trio has managed to stand up against this Bush regime on a single issue despite all the high-blown rhetoric designed to make it seem like they have. And there’s little reason to think they’ll do so now.
IMHO!
These guys that you mention don’t give one flying fuck about you or me. Warner? McCain? Graham? Powell? They are only using this issue cynically, in order to throw our drowning country some hope-rope at election time, before they throw it another anvil. Where have these sorry-ass mofos been during the wholesale rape of America??? Consistently voting FOR and propagandizing FOR serial rape and abuse of the American people and the Constitution.
Do you think that those fourteen ‘detainees’ taken out of secret torture prisons are the only ones? TIP OF THE ICEBERG, DUDE. Whatever law the lame-ass Congress passes will not be enforced, and the secret flights into torture prisons will continue unabated, because the Congress doesn’t have the gumption to impeach the war criminals.
If a violent rapist says to his victim “I promise I’ll throw some Plan B pills in the toilet for you after I rape you twenty five times, and I might not flush them down before you have a chance to retrieve them – that is if you can still crawl to the toilet after I have my fun.” is likewise, a sign of ‘hope’ to a serially raped woman, I suppose?
“It’s just the right thing for the rape victim.”