The New American Values

Last night, the United States Senate voted to confirm as Attorney General a man who could not say whether or not waterboarding, a practice heretofore deemed as torture and hence illegal, was, in fact, torture. That is right ladies and gentlemen, the highest-ranking law enforcement officer in this great land is on fence when it comes to controlled drowning of criminal suspects. Fucking brilliant; we have sunken so low as to now debate the relative merits of torture.

And this is merely the latest betrayal of our once semi-principled, egalitarian society. Mismanagement of Iraq and Afghanistan has hollowed out our military. We operate the world’s most expensive healthcare system, have some of the world’s most profitable healthcare companies, and have 40 plus million uninsured citizens. Reckless spending has broken the national budget and yielded the weakest dollar in recent memory or as David Sedaris called it, the “American Peso”. Indeed, the American economy is so fragile that the comments of some semi-anonymous Chinese Central bank official caused the dollar to plunge. How scary is that?

Indifference and incompetence in this Administration destroyed New Orleans. Now we learn that those twin malefactors continue to plague that city’s former residents. It seems that FEMA has banned its employees from entering the same trailers that so many displaced Gulf Coasters still call home because they contain toxic levels of formaldehyde. That level of ineptitude and apathy is hard to fathom really. Why doesn’t Chertoff, heartless fucking bastard that he is, just come out and say, “Let them eat cake”?

A few years ago, Michael Moore sarcastically asked “Dude, Where’s my country?” It’s pretty clear to me that that question is more pertinent than ever. We, as a nation, have lost our way. A gaggle of mush-headed assholes has misled us and yet, our opposition continues to acquiesce to their stupid demands. That is simply unconscionable; the goddamn job of the goddamn opposition is to fucking oppose. Why is that so hard to understand? Everyone knows the first rule of getting out of the hole is to stop digging. Confirming an Attorney General that cannot define torture is, in my mind, plunging the spade ever deeper. This nation once symbolized freedom, equality, and justice. Now, on the heels of this latest offense to our national values, what say you?

I say, somewhere in the ether, the ghost of James Madison is weeping.