Shut up John McCain

Hey McCain...Shut up.

The problem with presidential candidates generally is that they think they have big, good ideas. They think, after all, that they should be president. When they have the righteous fervor of one on a crusade, they are even worse. Like John McCain. John has been, to put it nicely, a royal pain in the ass to the Republican Party from the time he entered Congress in 1983 or so. I’m not saying that he doesn’t have the right to think and say whatever he wants to, but he is a member of a team, the GOP, and he isn't aiding its success . That team had better keep its substantive ideological spats out of the public's—and more importantly, the media’s—eye and present a united, coherent front so it can WIN THE ELECTION. Is that a hard concept? Should they walk in lockstep? Yes, pretty much, so long as it is properly agreed what the step will be.

So why pick on McCain? He’s not the only one that wreaks this destruction. Because right now, McCain is using his unique “moral authority” to push the particularly bad idea of mandating namby pamby treatment for terrorist prisoners. And John is the off-beat drummer who has thrown off the proper step. While he suffered under the barbaric North Vietnamese, he knows full well that what we have done and need to continue doing to terrorist prisoners is nothing at all related to the bayonet-stabbings, bone-breakings, starvation and beatings that he endured. That stuff is not simply an offense to “dignity” it is real, actual, torture. No one better than John should know that difference. Three things need to be realized by St. John and his squeamish toadies. First, the idea that he is protecting American prisoners is a pile of speciousness. Enemies of the United States are never going to obey the rules of civilized warfare. They are not civilized. That is why they are the enemy. Civilized people really don’t fight each other any more. Civilization is fighting monsters now. Monsters don’t sign agreements and obey conventions or rules of etiquette, any more than mad dogs temper their actions because others of their species are treated as friends by men. The Orcs who got ahold of John were in no way concerned with the Geneva Convention, and our kind treatment of prisoners wouldn’t've and didn't changethat a smidgeon.

Second, we aren’t even torturing anyone. Keeping people awake, making them chilly , putting bags on their heads and picking up their Korans without surgical scrubbing of the hands is not torture. It is okay to be impolite to the enemy.

Third, and this is a real biggy—stop with this ludicrous tripe that “torture doesn’t work”. It is an offensively transparent word game to anyone who should matter in this debate. Obviously whether or not any interrogation method works is matter of context and circumstances. Looking for general intelligence over a long period of time, the Make-Mahmoud-Your-Buddy Approach is probably more effective than any brutality. But if you need to know something—some very specific thing-- that Mahmoud knows, and you need to know it NOW don’t try to convince anyone honest that there aren’t ways to get that information very quickly.

So what we do to them is of such consequence only if criminals must obey the same rules as the good guys. They don't. The project here is to save American lives. Period. If a bad guy has information that will help do that, it is inexcusably softheaded not to do anything and everything necessary to extract it from him. Even if that means keeping him up nights. The other puff-bags who are holding up the clarification of the rules governing coercion are pathetic cases, but McCain is the one who matters and he needs to stop it. Shut up, John and let them get on with the work they have to do. Why he keeps this up is personal—and only personal—to him.

Conspiracies

I’ve wracked and racked my brain to try to assemble one coherent line of thought that is comparable to these deranged tales of a New American Century/BushCo conspiracy that knocked down the Twin Towers, shot down an airliner over Pennsylvania, and fired a missile—followed by de-winged airplane-looking thing—into the Pentagon, all while performing mass-hypnotism so enthralling that it convinced not only hundreds of people but cameras too, that they saw what they didn’t see. I can’t. It can’t be done. This “theory” cannot be compared, analogized, mocked or parodied. There is simply nothing else as ridiculously, pathetically, and irredeemably ludicrous as this notion. Nothing. Not the re-dating of the Crucifixion to 1056, Niburuans genetically splicing Neandertals to make great- grandpa, the Earth riding the back of a turtle, or the world power-elite being secret reptiles (though that one comes close).

But lots of people believe it. Lots of people who can dress themselves, drive cars, make money, raise children, …and (I choked a second there) vote, believe this nonsense. The question is Why? The only thing that pops to mind as approaching comparable territory are the concurrently wide-spread beliefs in ghosts, alien abduction, and Democrats’ being responsible adults sometimes fit for political offices. The difference though, at least with the first two, is that they are credible in some sense. That is to say it is not unabashedly irrational, though it is fairly non-rational, to believe them.

Many people, after all, have claimed direct experience with spirit entities of some sort, and surprisingly many have claimed to have been spirited away by creatures from other worlds. So, to those who have not experienced any such things there is at least the weight of a lot of personal anecdotal evidence to consider in their favor. More importantly, there is nothing that definitively argues against these things. Ghosts are not impossibilities, so far as we know, they just don’t fit anywhere in the standard-issue official reality. Aliens might abduct folks. Such would require, first, that there be said aliens. That, in itself is not a stretch even by scientific rules. Second, they must be kidnappers and piddlers of an odd sort. Why they would do these things is really beyond the realm of reasoning by us non-aliens.

But the Bush Did It conspiracy has none of these advantages. It is simply not possible. Put the really important question of what in God’s name would be the purpose of such a project aside. It isn’t even necessary to consider given the empirical evidence. That is the very high tonnage of evidence against any such thing as US official involvement in the disaster. Direct evidence, as with those who actually saw what did happen and the various expert investigations of how it happened, and indirect evidence— the easily demonstrable necessity of the vastness and perfection of the conspiratorial assemblage and the impossibility of the existence of any such thing. Unlike ghosts and aliens, belief in this doesn’t even pass the most kind gullibility test. So why do so many people….etc. etc.? Because they are sick. Not like Jeffrey Dahmer-sick, but more like Al Gore-sick. Disconnected from reality. The reverse of the interesting and entertaining scifi set-up. Convinced that they are in The Matrix when actually, they are on plain old Earth where lots of things are just what they would look like if you were not wearing bizarre glasses. Not so much dangerous as sad, unless, of course, they start to influence public policy. Then there is a real problem. A REAL problem. Not one made up in the fevered brains of the victims of this psychosocial or sociopsychological plague that is running rampant up and down the coasts and at selected points in between.

Of all the specious or at least suspectedly specious information the media constantly spew, one unquestioned datum has been bestuck in my craw for long enough that it may be doing permanent craw-damage: The "American people" are very upset with how the war in Iraq is progressing. Or, better, not progressing. So upset are they that The War has been the destruction of Bush's approval ratings, Republican prospects in November, the Bush "legacy", the chances of any kind of victory in what is apparently another war, (the one on terrorism), etc.

The problem with this wisdom is that just as often the same media are telling us that the "American people" are rubish dullards who "can name the finalists of American Idol" or name the most desperate housewife but cannot tell you who the secretary of state is, or what the secretary of state is, or what the Constitution says about the team mascot of the Electoral College.

Obviously these two pieces of received truth can't coexist, and it is obvious what the big lie is. The people are NOT upset about The War; no matter how many times the Pollsters say that they are. They may well be upset with Bush, and Republicans (though they probably don’t know what those are, either) but The War is not keeping them up nights. In fact, in only shows up on their radar screens in two instances: When pollsters ask them if they are upset with Bush and the Republicans over the god-awful war in Iraq, and when they are told that polls say they are.

The war in Iraq has been called the one-percent war because it affects such a tiny fraction of Americans. Chiefly those are the folks in the military who have actually been fighting—and even these are mostly soldiers and marines, not sailors or airmen-- and their families. In other words, hardly anyone out of 280 million people. World War II it is not. Plenty of sugar, chocolate and nylons to go around. No tire contributions solicited at the gas-rationing stations. It is not even Vietnam. No boys from down the street are getting drafted, and with 100-plus channels you can easily and completely fortify your living room by avoiding any news at all, save that of the MTV-celebrity world. In fact the same sinister liberal Democrats who off one side of their talking-points index cards lament the people's war weariness and the cultural combat fatigue condemn the Bush Administration from the other side for not requiring the American people participate in, let alone sacrifice for, the war effort. So the question begs (no, it doesn’t but that’s another issue for another day): If Americans, like goldfish, can’t be bothered by, even be aware of, anything that is not presently in front of their overstressed infotained eyes then how can the 99 percent of them be so upset about The War that is entirely an abstraction to them? The answer is that they can’t be and they aren’t.

So why do the media claim that Americans are all atizzy over this? Well, besides the fact that over 90 percent of so-called journalists are elitist, semi-educated Demopolitans horrified by the prospect of normal people’s values saving civilization, they are also frozen out of covering The War for their own benefit. They can’t leave the Green Zone. They can’t mine the biggest gold vein of a news story in their lifetimes because The War is just too damned dangerous. Oh yeah, they say it’s because the military won’t let them. But the Nazis, Japanese or even the Viet Cong didn’t search out journalists on purpose to saw their heads off. Even journalists know this much. So, instead of blaming this enemy for its unprecedented vileness, they say it is the Bush Administration’s fault that they can’t get out there and catch GI’s torching villages with their Zippo lighters and they express their own frustration by projecting it onto the American people.
The War is not “frustrating” common folks as the pundits claim, The War is not weighing on them, The War is not relevant to their everyday lives. Well, at least not in the obvious in-front-of-your-face way that something needs to be in order to catch and keep their attention. If the upcoming election turns on the Iraq issue it will be for one reason only and that is that the media have created it. They planted it, watered it, nurtured it and weeded from around it any real issues that might distract from it.

Now mind you, none of this is meant to suggest that the American people shouldn’t be concerned about The War. They damn-well should be, and about winning it. Decisively. That one-percent is carrying a hell of a burden for everyone else, and they aren’t complaining.