Virtuous Bill Bennett dreams of genocide:

"I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

That was Bennett, Reaganite moral scold and gambling junkie, holding forth on his radio talk show this week. (Via Media Matters.) To be sure, Wild Bill then pulled a classic Nixonian maneuver: divulging an evil intent, then qualifying it, for public consumption, with pious contextualizing. Nixon, as we all recall so fondly, once rounded off a discussion on procuring a million dollars in political slush fund money with a stirring aside -- aimed squarely at the secret microphone he knew was recording the entire conversation: "We could do that -- but it would be wrong." Of course, his minions were in on the scam -- and the slush money duly flowed.

In like manner, Bennett followed up his astonishing disclosure of the secret dreams of a vast swathe of Bush Faction faithful with some quick butt-covering for his 'abort 'em all' remark: "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do...." So far, so hypocritically good; but even at this point, even though he obviously realized that he'd given away too much of the game (hence the backpedaling), he still couldn't let go of the idea. Instead, he finished the sentence by going right back to the "justification" for -- and let's be clear about this -- the destruction of the black race in America, by saying: "But your crime rate would go down."

The crime rate among African-Americans was not even the topic of the exchange that gave rise to this outburst; it was a discussion about Social Security and the purported effects that 30 years of legal abortion has had on reducing the tax base to support the program -- typical right-wing, rag-chewing arcana. That's what makes Bennett's genocidal image even more remarkable: it just sprang into his head as the perfect illustration of an abstract point he was trying to make on an entirely different subject. It was just there, in his mind, as a template, a thought pattern, a mental connection -- an idea he had already envisioned.

And of course, Bennett's idea of eliminating African-Americans entirely is directly tied to the widespread -- and largely open -- right-wing  belief in the  inherent criminality of  black  people: a belief that was on naked display during the destruction of New Orleans, when the wildest rumors of "savagery" among the flood survivors were taken as gospel truth and amplified throughout the media (and not just the openly right-wing media). We now know that almost all of these horror stories -- child rape and wanton murder in the Superdome, vast armed gangs seizing control of whole quadrants of the city, etc. -- were completely false. But this racist meme -- which obviously lies behind Bennett's gruesome fantasy -- is impervious to reality.

All in all, a most revealing emission from the primordial ooze of the Bushist mind. Or as Shakespeare once said: "Murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ."

(This is an updated version of the earlier post.)

Among our many other remissals, we are often remiss here in not linking enough to Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution. This, er, remissalosity stems mainly from the fact that everything Jon posts is worth reading and we assume that all right-minded people out there are already reading him every day. Also, he is a lot funnier than I am, so why would I want to advertise that fact? I get enough humiliation from the mirror every morning. But we digress. Jon has got several great posts up on his front page right now, so why not scoot on over there and give them a look? Particularly fine are the "New Slogans for the Democratic Party" that Jon and several commenters have come up with, including:

"The Democrats: Blood Money FOR THE PEOPLE."
"The Democratic Party: We're here, we're becoming rapidly irrelevant, get used to it."
"We're the Democratic Party. No, we're the Democratic Party. You shut up. No, you shut up."

Jon also comes up with "The Nasser Quote That Never Goes Out of Style." Below, we excerpt -- all right -- steal the entire post:

Here's Larry Johnson, former CIA agent, on his discussions with people he knows in the mideast:

"Our friends and allies naively believe that we have a plan and know what we are doing... they are convinced that we have a secret plan we are not sharing with them... They look at me with disbelief and bewilderment when I tell them there is no secret plan and we are as incompetent as they fear."

Now, here's something Gamal Nasser said to Miles Copeland—another CIA agent—in the fifties:

"The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which makes us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."

Man, that's an evergreen.

From a piece first published on January 18, 2002, in The Moscow Times:

The bloviations of public hypocrisy are a never-ceasing wonder to behold. The art of mouthing sanctimonious twaddle while peddling murderous hardball on the side requires a degree of moral dislocation – an almost total divorce of word from deed, of image from reality – rarely seen outside madhouses, government offices, televised pulpits and certain caves in remote Afghanistan.

And these days there are no more adept practitioners of this dark art than those mighty Twin Towers now holding up the values of Western Civilization – George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

As we all know, the snack-challenged American prez can scarce ope his upper orifice without intoning noisome pieties about his own "good heart," his love of God and his humble struggle to walk each day in the footsteps of Jesus. Of course, we also know that he is responsible for more state-sanctioned killings than anyone else in modern American history; that he has given himself the power to assassinate anyone on earth, anywhere, anytime (even without those dandy new tribunal powers he awarded himself last year); and that through his connections to the Carlyle Group – that shadowy broker of backroom deals and bristling ordnance – his family and cronies will personally profit from every war and rumor of war he can stir up throughout the world. A sanctimonious death-dealing hypocrite, in other words, on a par with that other heaver of holy upchuck, Osama bin Laden.

Bush churns out moral idiocy so fast it's hard to keep up, but last week brought us a particularly glaring example. The U.S. military is now amassing captured members of Al-Qaeda at its peculiar military base in Cuba. (We almost said "alleged members of Al-Qaeda" before we remembered the First Rule of Bush Jurisprudence: everyone is guilty until proven innocent – and sometimes even then.) The captives – having first been forcibly shaved in an act of deliberate religious humiliation – are now being caged and chained and subjected to, er, "intense interrogation."

This treatment is a violation of the Geneva Convention, of course; but Bush has decreed that these men are "unlawful combatants," not prisoners-of-war (despite all his soaring rhetoric about the September attacks being "an act of war" and so on). Therefore, in the chilling words of Pretzie's squinty henchman, Donald Rumsfeld, these human beings "have no rights." And because they are technically on foreign soil, they cannot avail themselves of the protections of the U.S. legal system. (Those that have not yet been shredded by the Great Pretzel and that other chicken-hawk draft-dodger, John Ashcroft, that is.)

Thus the captives can be trussed up, tortured and killed at the pleasure of Jesus' favorite little sunbeam, Pretzie. However, the Pentagon has forbidden the national press to show pictures of the prisoners as they disembark in their wretched state. And what is the justification for this ham-handed censorship? It's simple, say the brass: such media intrusions on the captives' privacy would be a violation of – you guessed it – the Geneva Convention.

The piece below was first published in The Moscow Times on January 25, 2005. The first half deals with the then-breaking (and now forgotten) Enron scandal. The second half of the column deals more directly with the Bush Faction's use of torture and other illegal methods in the Terror War.

Family Business
Enron the Great, "The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth," has fallen. The vast wake of its collapse has covered the White House with stinking pitch, and occasioned much excited comment amongst the punditry. Unfortunately, most of these editorial exhalations have veered between tortured defenses of the Dear Leader and gleeful gibes of the most unnuanced sort: e.g., "How is George Bush just like Bill Clinton? They'd both do anything for a Lay."

Here at the Global Eye, of course, we eschew the bitter prose of partisanship and the low tone of sniggering frivolity. As always, we seek to elevate the level of public discourse, to give, as it were, a choral voice to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." Toward that end, we have today invited a very special guest commentator on the Enron scandal: James, the brother of Jesus.

Rebbe James has no little experience with the troublesome nexus between government and powerful special interests. He spent several decades as the undisputed head of his brother's religious organization, an extremist variant within Judaism that espoused radical asceticism and stressed charitable works over theological posturing.  Resisting both the modernizing pressures of the Western infidels occupying his country and the relentless ambitions of the devious Roman collaborator, Saul of Tarsus, James held the group together until he was executed in a political plot engineered by Roman functionaries and local intriguers. His brother's organization was eliminated a few years later when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and proscribed all local sects except the collaborationists: a few Jewish splinter groups – and the followers of Saul.

James' central role was later suppressed by the Saultines, who were now almost exclusively Gentile, and overwhelmingly anti-Semitic. They had bigger fish to fry: seizing the wealth and power of the Roman Empire. This Christian coalition – which operated according to Saul's conspiratorial dictum of being "all things to all men," then lowering the boom once you're in control – condemned the remaining loyalists to Jesus' family as heretics, and relegated James to the back pages of their anthology of folk myth and theological posturing, The New Testament. The rest, as they say, is history – and a pretty sordid tale it's been, too.

But as they also say, you can't keep a good man down. So, through the miracle of modern publishing, we are pleased to welcome Rebbe James back to the "marketplace of ideas," to give us his views on the Bush-Enron debacle, and its deeper implications for global business culture – especially the vexing question of labor relations. Take it away, James!

"Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten.

"Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat at your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

"Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.

"Hearken, my beloved brethren: hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs to the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?"

Wonder if we will see testimony of this caliber on Capitol Hill anytime soon? Or will the Enron-spattered Democrats let the Enron-encrusted Republicans wriggle free, out of mutual self-interest for the profitable status quo? [Note, September 2005: Yep, that's exactly what they did.]

As for the president, and his transparent lies about his relationship to Enron's influence-peddling chairman, Kenneth Lay, we'll let the venerable Rebbe have the last word: 

"If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain."

Shadow Warriors
Meanwhile, the latest Saultine Emperor has set his own private army loose in Afghanistan. Yes, the pale riders of the CIA are back in the saddle again, operating under "greatly relaxed rules of engagement" as they do Bush's covert bidding, the Boston Globe reports.

Bush is building a "shadow military organization" within the CIA, top US officials say – proudly. Like the "unlawful combatants" of Al-Qaeda, these troops wear no uniforms, are not bound by the rules of war like honorable soldiers under their country's flag, engage in terrorist actions as well as combat, and answer to no one but their divinely-inspired leader.

Do these Osamic echoes trouble the self-proclaimed defenders of democracy and civilization? Not a whit.  ''If we didn't think it was appropriate, we wouldn't be doing it," said a senior Bush official. "If the commander in chief didn't think it appropriate, we wouldn't be doing it. If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

Why indeed? After all, a similar set-up worked wonders back in Vietnam, where the CIA's Phoenix Program murdered anywhere from 20,000 (the CIA's own admission) to 70,000 people. But hell, they were just a bunch of commies, right? Or suspected commies. Or suspected commie sympathizers. Or their families. Or whatever. As one Phoenix vet told Congress: "Quite often it was a matter of expediency just to eliminate a person in the field rather than deal with the paperwork."

Now those happy days are here again. ''We are doing things I never believed we would do – and I mean killing people!" enthused one of Bush's new Praetorians.

Rebbe James? Any comments?

"The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God."

Heretic! Appeaser! Send this nut to Guantanamo Bay!

Below are a couple of vintage pieces that will be used as sources for the upcoming Global Eye column this week, which deals with the revelations of Captain Ian Fishback about the widespread, systematic, countenanced and encouraged use of torture in Bush's Terror War gulag. Fishback's devastating evidence, corroborated by other soldiers and gathered over the course of 17 months with the help of his fellow officers, adds even more weight to the mountainous bill of indictment against the Bush Faction. The good captain's moral courage stirred a mild flurry of media interest over the weekend, but now the usual dignified silence is settling over the affair. There will be much more on this in the MT column, which will be posted here as well.

The articles below will be used as sources for the passages in the column noting that torture was endemic, systematic -- and openly approved by the top levels of the Bush administration -- from the earliest days of the Terror War. Both of the columns were first published in January 2002. This descent into atrocity and dishonor didn't start with Abu Ghraib or even the criminal invasion of Iraq. The taint had set in long before that.

Pretzel Logic (Jan. 18, 2002)
Family Business/Shadow Warriors (Jan. 25, 2002)

Below is an excerpt from "Shadow Warriors":

In regard to the item below, dealing with the further revelations of torture in the Bush gulag brought to light by Army Captain Ian Fishback, we offer this brief ballad in the good captain's honor.

The Good Captain

Good captain, good captain, now what have you done?
You've laid out the dead in the light of the sun.
You've opened the door where the dark deeds go on,
Where the fine words of freedom are broken like bones.

Good captain, good captain, you tell us of crime
Done in the name of your country and mine.
Of torture and murder, perversion and lies,
In a land where no echo will carry the cries.

Good captain, good captain, now who do we blame
For the horrors you bring us, for this undying shame?
Should we lay all the guilt on the grunts with no name,
Or the high and the mighty who set up this game?

Good captain, good captain, don't you know the fate
Of all those who speak the hard truth to the State,
And all who disturb the people's sweet dreams?
They're mocked into scorn and torn apart at the seams.

The indefatigable impresario of this site, Richard Kastelein, has posted an important story in The Pub today, dealing with rapidly deepening implications of the Jack Abramoff scandal. As Rich and his links point out, the Abramoff affair is not a "lobbying scandal": it's the linchpin of a vast criminal enterprise involving every facet of the Bush Administration. Josh Marshall has been leading the way on this story, which could indeed be the "key to all mysteries" in piercing the dark heart of the Bush Faction's nefarious operation.

The breaking stories all underscore a theme that we've sounded here many times: The Bush Faction is not a political group interested in governing the country; it's a criminal gang of thugs in silk suits intent on enriching themselves and their cronies. There will be more, much more on all this to come. And as Rich notes today, it is now taking a decidedly sinister turn, with mafia-style contract killings now entering the mix. Check out his posting, and feel free to add your own info and comments.

When that sad sack of shinola Joe Biden starts gearing up for his quadrennial failed run for the presidency in 2008, let's be sure this little clipping gets a wide airing:

Strict Bankruptcy Law New Blow for [Storm] Victims (NYT).

Biden – the highly perfumed courtesan of the credit card companies headquartered in his home state -- was one of the chief proponents of this draconian bill (which, by the way, the NYT completely mischaracterizes in typically pro-corporate fashion in the above item). Biden's staunch support helped knee-cap any effective Democratic opposition to the measure. This is the same Joe Biden who, every time it looks like anti-war sentiment is gaining traction among national Democrats, runs like the teacher's pet to Tim Russert or Brit Hume to declare that he supports the president's war – it's just that we ought to do the goldang job better, that's all.

The fact that this silly suit of clothes is considered one of the "giants" of the Democratic Party tells you everything you need to know about the utter degradation of our political system today.