The New York Times pushes for the prosecution of those in the Bush Administration responsible for torture. That's all of them, right?

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president. 

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen. 

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

I still have my doubts that the President will sign off on this, after all we know too well how this will be framed by the Right Wing.

But if there is enough public outcry he ultimately may have little choice.

Yesterday I complained that the German human rights groups were doing what we should have been the first to do. And now it looks like we might have been shamed into doing so.

Could this be a Christmas miracle in the making?

A Deficit of Dignity.

I read this New York Times article this morning by Timothy Egan that is ostensibly about the disrespect shown by Elizabeth Lauten toward the First Daughters. However the article makes the case that this is the kind of disrespect the President, and his entire family, have been receiving since the day he took office.

Here. take a moment to read what he says: 

We know President Obama wants a lasting deal on immigration, something to make taxes fairer, a little help from a caveman Congress on climate change. If he’s lucky, he might get some of the above. But one thing his worst opponents have never given him, and probably never will, is respect. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. 

From the day he took office, his legitimacy has been challenged, his American birth has been suspect, and he’s been personally insulted, lectured, yelled at and disrespected in public, by public figures, in a way that few if any American presidents have ever faced.

At this point Egan discusses the Lauten incident, which I think we all know quite a bit about so I will leave that out and instead share what he says a few paragraphs down:

I want to believe this is not about race, but it sure looks that way. Barely nine months into his presidency, a Republican congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted out “You lie!” at the president in the decorous setting of a joint session of Congress — a flagrant show of disrespect for the man and the office. For this, Wilson became a hero in conservative media. 

The biggest slap at the president was the smear about his birth. It’s insulting and humiliating that Obama — alone among presidents — has been forced to release his long-form birth record to satisfy a clutch of fact-deniers. Leading the attack on the president’s very citizenship is the professional vulgarian Donald Trump, who gets away with the kind of preposterous, race-based comments granted few black public figures. 

Trump’s displays of idiocy on Fox News are a staple of that network. I wait for the day when something Trump says that is both stupid and incendiary is held up as representative of all white people — and he’s asked to apologize for his race. 

Also on Fox, Sean Hannity recently blamed President Obama for the troubles in Ferguson — because, I guess, he’s black. 

The list goes on and on: Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, wagging her finger at President Obama while lecturing him on an airport tarmac, as if he were some errand boy and not the commander in chief. The complete fraud of the Benghazi nonstory — as even a Republican House panel had to conclude recently. The endless millions spent finding nothing scandalous about the president on Benghazi proved just one thing: how grass-roots conservative hatred of the president drives Republican congressional action.

The article goes on to talk about the disrespect demonstrated toward Michelle Obama as well, which included this rather satisfying paragraph: 

The first lady cannot go on vacation without the Drudge Report hyping elaborate travel bills, playing to race insinuations. But when the family of Sarah Palin was involved in a beer-fueled, fist-flying brawl in Alaska this year, conservative media did not call them out for bad white family values, or failures as role models.

Yeah, I always love when the brawl shows up in an article just to remind all of us that despite all of her attempts to make it go away this thing stuck to Palin and her family, like a dingleberry on a dog's ass.

I don;t know about the rest of you but I found myself yelling "Goddamn right!" over and over as I read this article.

And that is really the thing after all. When people argue that this President could have done more, or  that he failed to keep all of his campaign promises, or that he is "ineffectual," I want to grab them by the shoulders and shake them vigorously while yelling "What could YOU have accomplished with this level of disrespect, obstructionism, and  partisan entrenchment?"

In light of what this President has faced since the very day of his inauguration, he is a fucking miracle worker.

His list of accomplishments is actually quite staggering, even without considering that he is piloting the country into unrelenting partisan headwinds that essentially never let up.

I told my brother during Thanksgiving that history is going to completely exonerate this man, and that he would hardly recognize his presidency in ten to fifteen years. After the historians get the chance to wipe way all of the mud that is being thrown at him everyday by the Right Wing politicians and conservative media, they are going to reveal some amazing accomplishments of which I really think most Americans are not even completely aware.

Ultimately, and I think this is going to anger the racists most of all, President Obama might really turn out to be the "Magic Negro."

David Brooks discusses the "Palin spasm" and the return of the Republicans as a "governing party."

Courtesy of The New York Times:  

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. 

Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party. Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative bodies. Republicans hold 31 governorships to Democrats’ 18.

When the next Congress convenes in January, Republicans will have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931; they will have a majority in the Senate, dominate gubernatorial power in the Midwest, and have more legislative power nationwide than anytime over the past century. 

Republicans didn’t establish this dominant position because they are unrepresentative outsiders. They did it because they have deep roots in four of the dominant institutions of American society: the business community, the military, the church and civic organizations. 

Brooks goes on to make the case that the Republicans elected in this cycle are more representative of the types of Republicans that came before the"Palin spasm."

In the end it sums it up thusly: 

During the Palin spasm, Republicans seemed to detest the craft of governing. Hothouse flowers like Senator Ted Cruz preferred telegenic confrontation to compromise and legislation. 

But current party leaders are talking about incremental progress, finding areas where they can get bipartisan support: on trade, corporate taxes, the XL oil pipeline, the medical devices tax, patent reform, maybe even tax reform generally.

I have to admit that I am not nearly as convinced that the Republicans are really prepared to put partisan differences aside to get some things accomplished for the good of the country, but I certainly do agree that the "Palin spasm" does appear to be over.

Of course the viral infection that caused the spasms is not yet convinced that her poison is no longer coursing through the veins of the body politic, and it may take another cycle or two for her to realize that her time is done and for her to fade completely from public awareness.

But that time is certainly coming. That much is for sure.