Live their lives, looking behind...

Time goes by.
No time to cry.
Life's you and I.
Alive...
Today...

I think there's such a thing as torture porn. Do you?

We've seen enough pictures, read enough details, nobody is denying the cruelty of "what happened?" ... right? So why is the press once again missing the ball and now hyping the "Show Me the Pictures!" meme, as if some evidence were still needed?

Respectfully, that's not what the American people want now.

Krauthammer* gets this:

The reason Pelosi raised no objection to waterboarding at the time, the reason the American people (who by 2004 knew what was going on) strongly reelected the man who ordered these interrogations, is not because she and the rest of the American people suffered a years-long moral psychosis from which they have just now awoken.

It is because at that time they were aware of the existing conditions -- our blindness to al-Qaeda's plans, the urgency of the threat, the magnitude of the suffering that might be caused by a second 9/11, the likelihood that the interrogation would extract intelligence that President Obama's own director of national intelligence now tells us was indeed "high-value information" -- and concluded that on balance it was a reasonable response to a terrible threat.

And they were right.

You can believe that Pelosi and the American public underwent a radical transformation from moral normality to complicity with war criminality back to normality. Or you can believe that their personalities and moral compasses have remained steady throughout the years, but changes in circumstances (threat, knowledge, imminence) alter the moral calculus attached to any interrogation technique.

It's not wise to release torture porn for its own sake, so everyone can say, "Look! See what we did." with an emphasis on that collective "we" there.

In retrospect, what happened in the previous administration in linking Iraq to the 9-11 events, was costly. Very costly. Plenty of people paid with their lives for those mistakes, which cannot be undone. We get that. We have faith that in time, the relevant details will be parsed and an accurate accounting submitted for history's sake. Not for messy drama, or politically-driven criminal charges.

The country has to get past that now, and live in today. Learn to lose the petty youthful mentality and look ahead...

We want good reporting on the facts of now: tracking these massive spending bills and how they are trickling down. Is the money being spent wisely on the state and local levels? What incentives are being created -- who is benefitting? Where do they end?

If you think House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's in the hot seat now, can you imagine how future Americans are going to look back at the people in power in early 2009? The politicians, the press, the players w/"power" were so busy looking behind, they missed looking at the pricetags of the programs the country was being locked. buying into.

The administration led. The press never questioned. The people went along.

For example:
That would be a shame if policy wonks are able to push through something like a revamp of the health care system now, instead of taking on the much needed job of Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security reform. I forsee -- like the wars -- an administration spending us into a hole, instead of offering their advice on what kind of a job we could do on providing health care, given the limited budget we have available at this time.

I wonder in years to come, if future Americans will wonder how, not once, but twice, the press and the people got played by looking back at emotional details of big events ... and missing the real story action of their times.

Something about keeping your eyes on the ball.







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* "(By the way, I've never seen five seconds of '24.')" Heh. Me neither...