The Party of Torture, The Tasering, and the New Republican Apartheid

It was another day in the life of what is left of the Republican Party.

Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) guaranteed his legacy after 29 years in the Senate as the champion and enabler of an Iraq war he long ago knew was wrong but never summoned the courage to oppose. After sabotaging Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-Va.) fight on behalf of American troops, he might as well be called Senator George W. Warner.

Meanwhile, having done a disservice to the troops and military families, the Republicans in the Senate, continuing their unprecedented tactic of waging war through filibuster, did a disservice to the rule of law through yet another successful filibuster against even minimal rights for detainees.

Poor Republican Sen. Susan Collins. She was upset because her Maine colleague, Sen. Olympia Snowe, voted in favor of detainee rights but neglected to tell Collins in advance.

Presumably Sen. Collins, facing a severe reelection challenge from Democrats, only votes her conscience for the rule of law when Sen. Snowe tells her in advance that she, too, will uphold the rule of law.

While the George W. Bush Republicans in the Senate spend their day disserving the troops and the rule of law, we learn that the State Department has given certain mercenary forces carte blanche in Iraq.

Blackwater may be hated by the Iraqi people and what is known as the Iraqi government, but in this war sold as a defense of democracy, anything goes in what retired Marine Corps Gen. James Jones has properly called an occupation that should end.

Feeling left out of this day in the life of the Republican Party, the white men running for the Republican presidential nomination continued their apartheid-like boycott of debates seeking to reach Hispanic and black voters.

It is astounding, bizarre and a sign of the magnitude of their collapse that Republican candidates do not even pretend to care about the opinions and votes of either Hispanics or blacks.

In their world, African-Americans hardly exist at all; they’re little more than objects of voter suppression plans on Election Day. Hispanics are treated like the background music for right-wing immigration politics.

Meanwhile, in the latest expression of extreme intolerance, a college student gets the Taser treatment at a political forum on a college campus.

It is true that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to rise to the occasion, did not distinguish himself.

It is also true, and far more true, and light years more important, that the Taser incident is only
the latest example of an aggressive, extreme and un-American intolerance of alternative opinion and dissenting voices in which patriotic Americans in opposition to policy have been demeaned, ridiculed and at times beaten to a pulp.

President Bush presides over a government that commits illegal acts of torture, and then, according to the universally respected Gen. Antonio Taguba, commits illegal acts of cover-up to protect the guilty from their punishment under law, for their illegal acts of torture.

There is a lineage of repression, from the crimes at Abu Ghraib to the beatings with the Taser guns, and to the sins of Blackwater and the attacks on democracy in the name of democracy, which have the common thread of disrespect for the core values, and the core ideals and notions of diversity and mutual respect that have been the soul of Americanism since the Liberty Bell first rang in Philadelphia.

Yesterday on the floor of the United States Senate the victory belonged to George W. Bush, and to Republican Sen. George W. Warner, and to the sycophants and shills who have enabled through their actions what they know is wrong on matters of private conscience, national security and honor.

In November 2008 in the voting booths of America, the bell will toll for those who bring these disasters to the nation, and American democracy will be cleansed of the abuses that should never have taken place in our country, and hopefully will never take place again.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …