Something Good Will Come Out of This

On a discussion site I frequent, a poster named Ariel wrote:

The simple fact is that the Democrats complied for funds requested for the war for seven years.

And now that they are in power, they continue the war policies of the last administration.

Nobody is going to make me believe that the congress of the US is so ignorant, blind and stupid to go along with this war only because the CIA didn't tell them that torture was one of the methods used to fight the war. Was everything else OK?

This is not a fight between the good guys and the evil ones. The good guys went along with the evil ones every step of the way and that makes them not so good.

This whole discussion seems to be confined to whether Pelosi knew about the details of torture or not. If she didn't know about this, she knew a lot of other things and she kept quite, because she and most other Democrats agree with the basic premises of the war.

I responded:

Ariel, thanks for bringing a higher level of discrimintation to this discussion. You've reminded me again that what Pelosi and other Democrats didn't do matters just as much as what the Bush Gang DID do.

There are no innocent bystanders.

A rotten system bears rotten fruit. A few Democrats are worth picking up and putting in the basket. Very few.

This is something we knew back in the sixties. Back then, we were very much aware that Vietnam and environmental degradation were not matters deriving from the clash of donkeys and elephants, and we didn't differentiate. It would have been foolish then, just as it's the height of foolishness and irrelevance today.

We called our political-big business alliance "the establishment," an accurate and descriptive term. It still fits. And we knew then that the establishment was a machine out of control. It still is.

But we forgot. Somehow we got sidetracked in our mission to either get a collar on this violent, larcenous, and out-of-control establishment, or failing that, arrange things so its minions were unable to sleep at night. We were diverted by other things -- working, starting families, being responsible, fitting in -- all that happy horseshit. But that won't happen again.

There are a lot of people my age who share my disposition, and at this stage of the game we have nothing but time, along with sense enough to know who does what to, and for whom. And the truth will out.

The day of reckoning is coming, and sooner than people realize. It's time to put an end to this intolerable regime of institutionalized corruption, payoffs and patronage, sham democracy, and endless war.

"The dog starved at his master's gate/Predicts the ruin of the state," said William Blake. And the howls of a taxi driver from Lahore getting a broomstick shoved up his ass in Gitmo are going to bring down this rotten, lying government. The falling rubble won't discriminate between Republicans and Democrats.

Obama has said there will be no investigations into these matters, as another poster noted. What Obama doesn't know is that he doesn't have the last word on this issue. He can't finesse this mess because it's too big and too hot, and in the end we'll have the final say on what happens