Stewart on Cheney

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Dick (Uncut)
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Economic Crisis

The Bush administration brought torture to Poland

America corrupts Europe

Der Spiegel has published a report documenting the presence of a CIA prison and 'special interrogations' — read: torture — center near northeastern Poland's Szymany airport. Fortunately the former communist county still believes in the rule of law:

Warsaw public prosecutor Robert Majewski has been investigating former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller's government on allegations of abuse of office. At issue is whether sovereignty over Polish territory was relinquished, and whether former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and his left-leaning Social Democratic government gave the CIA free reign over sections of the Stare Kiejkuty military base for the agency's extraterritorial torture interrogations.

Would the world's oldest democracy be so committed to the law as to investigate its villains…

On the Wall Street grifters

Glenn Greenwald asks his readers to:

Just think about how this [Wall Street scam] works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced. This corruption is so tawdry and transparent — and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity — that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.

Greenwald continues by marking some of the ways President Obama and his administration had already helped these grifters to loot the public's money. He quotes with approval William Black who went so far as to identify the financial system as one grand Ponzi scheme and Secretaries of the Treasury Geithner and Paulson before him of "covering up" this immense fraud. Campaign rhetoric aside, that the Obama administration gave this help should have surprised no one. Not only had the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) given candidate Obama more money than any other candidate, but Wall Street has effectively captured not only the executive institutions which finance capital found most interesting but even the federal government as a whole, as Greenwald points out by quoting from Simon Johnson's recent article on the crisis.

Briefly put, the federal government is becoming — or has become — a massive rent extraction mechanism which serves the interests of American finance capital.

Truth or lies

Chris Floyd depicts the plain facts of our current situation:

The political class has failed us. At every level, they have failed us. Republican and Democrat, they have failed us. Liberal, conservative and centrist, they have failed us. They have lived on lies, and lived by lies, for so long that they no longer know how to comprehend the truth, much less communicate it or — God forbid — act on it. And so they plow on deeper into the darkness, in zombified pursuit of pointless goals, heedless of the signposts warning of danger, like some demented wagon train dragging a load of dead mules toward the edge of a cliff.

Political failure is nothing new, of course. Deliberate deceit — and egregious self-delusion — are nothing new. Misrule and evil on the part of elites are nothing new. But the great churning engines of the American Empire — especially its war machine — are infinitely more vast and powerful than anything seen on earth before. Its inextricably entwined economic and military forces permeate the globe. Nowhere on earth can you completely escape the tourbillions of these forces; yet because of this same pervasive reach, there is now no place on earth that cannot send its shock waves back up the line, roiling the imperial heartland itself. The very magnitude of the American power structure makes the consequences of its crimes and failures more destructive and widespread: the difference between your house being hit by a cannonball or by a cruise missile.

The United States is the core country of a highly militarized global political system — and may a God (any God) forgive America for what it has wrought.

A lack of integrity

Steven Walt leveled this very accusation against Richard Perle, the neoconservative policy wonk whose fingerprints dot the ill-fated Iraq invasion and occupation. Walt makes this case because Perle has recently taken to disavowing the role he and the other neoconservative intellectuals in the Bush administration played in the making of the Iraq effort. Walt's summary judgment: "Richard Perle is lying."

But Walt is just warming up!

What is disturbing about this case is is [sic] not that a former official is trying to falsify the record in such a brazen fashion; Perle is hardly the first policymaker to kick up dust about his record and he certainly won't be the last. The real cause for concern is that there are hardly any consequences for the critical role that Perle and the neoconservatives played for their pivotal role in causing one of the great foreign policy disasters in American history. If somebody can help engineer a foolish war and remain a respected Washington insider — as is the case with Perle — what harm is likely to befall them if they lie about it later? [emphasis added]

Not much harm, it seems, in Walt's estimation:

Let's face it: there is little or no accountability in Washington, where being wrong means never having to say you're sorry; indeed, you don't even have to admit responsibility for past mistakes, no matter how serious. It's just the American taxpayer who ends up footing the bill, along with the soldiers who fought and died for these blunders.

As Frank Rich and others have figured out, we are in trouble today because we have allowed a culture of corruption and dishonesty to permeate our institutions and pollute our public discourse. Until that changes — until our public institutions contain a lot more truth-tellers like Gene Kranz and fewer liars like Richard Perle — we are not going to know where we stand, where we are headed, or whom to trust.

Truth in politics is both an accomplishment and something inherently fragile, as Hannah Arendt might put it. Such truths refer to worldly facts that are both contingent and rarely obvious. Lying threatens these hard won truths merely by offering itself as an alternative account of the world that might be true and could become known as true by a significant number of individuals. Thus the claim that truth in politics is an achievement! And it is for these reasons that honest citizens of the country and the world cannot let individuals like Richard Perle alter the historical record so that it reflects their political needs. A cleaning of Washington's stables is needed now, not housing of a herd of well-fed jackasses.