BANANA REPUBLICANS

Two news reports. One about a former Chilean dictator. One about our Bullshitter-in-Chief. Note the similarities. This from Reuters regarding Augusto Pinochet's arrest for torture, murder and kidnapping early in his regime and this from the BBC regarding the bullshitter's denial that the U.S. uses torture.

Is it possible we'll read one day about the arrest of a former U.S. president on the same sort of charges? (Pinochet is being held "for 36 cases of kidnapping, one of homicide and for 23 cases of torture" committed at a detention center run by his secret police.)

To ask the question implies an answer -- and why, despite claims to the contrary (such as "saving American lives"), the bullshitter's Republican enablers rammed through the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The new law was designed to protect him and his henchmen from potential prosecution.

As reported by ABC News:

The legislation says the president can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts.

The bill not only "authorizes continued harsh interrogations of terror suspects," it applies to "14 suspects who were secretly questioned by the CIA overseas and recently moved to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay."

Since the interrogations are top secret, there is no way to verify the bullshitter's claims. But even if American lives have been saved, the legislation is a statist endorsement of thuggery. It puts government officials beyond the reach of justice by bending the law to their purpose. And it contradicts the U.S. Constitution, let alone American ideals (if not the realities).

October 28, 2006 1:33 PM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on October 28, 2006 1:33 PM.

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