Fucking torturers. And we’re all complicit. Rather, as I’m sure Arthur Silber has said or is saying — I can’t read Silber without wanting to hang myself, so I don’t — we’ve always been complicit, it’s just that Bush forced us to know that we are.

As many have said, everybody — including, well, me — is greeting the news that Bush and his “principals” are orchestrating torture, down to picking the brand of thumbscrew and the number and order of fingers and toes to be crushed, with a collective yawn. As we used to say, back in the day when we had a media critique, “Move along, people, move along! There’s no story here!”

Why?

I don’t know. It’s not a good sign.

For me:

1. The exhaustion of Cassandra in the age of the anti-Cassadra. (We all called this shot; here’s my contribution, back in 2004/5 ).

2. Sheer disbelief at the scale of the evil. It’s one thing to call one’s shot; it’s another thing to have one’s nightmares come true. I mean, besides calling again, writing again, petitioning again, what do we do to get through to the Village on this? What pricks the sack of pus? The fact that I’m sure they want me to feel powerless doesn’t make the feeling of powerlessness go away.

3. Distraction. In the primary wars, it’s possible to feel that one has some effect, however marginal. People converse, events happen, there’s a feedback cycle. But the Ministry of Fear is a blank-faced monolith, with walls so thick that even the loudest scream dies behind them, and certainly wouldn’t echo outside to the mall. So one does what one can do, not what one “knows” one cannot do.

From Hillary on all this, nothing. I don’t think her response would be much different from the other Centrist in the race. Here’s the operational paragraph that Will Bunch extracted from Obama (via the great Digby) on holding the torturers accountable:

[OBAMA] I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

which is either suicidally naive or completely cynical, or both, since at this point we all know, and Obama himself must know, that the Republicans will perceive anything as a “partisan witch hunt.” (The use of the political cliche to categorize policy on evil is interesting.) And clearly, being a nation of torturers is a “problem” we have to “solve.” So, clearly, Obama doesn’t give two shits.* Which doesn’t mean that Hillary does, let me hasten do add.

Do we want to keep being evil? Do we want to keep shopping while the evil run our country?

When I started this post, I felt that the solution would be a Ghandi, or an MLK: A transcendant leader.

In fact, I think the solution is a Truth and Reconcilation Commission. I wonder if I could get my town council to pass a resolution in favor of one?

However, at least some good has come of all this: Abu Gonzales can’t get a job, but not because of the latest Bush recession.

Nobody likes to work with the evil.

NOTE * My critique of the Unity Pony has always been that it shields the evil from accountability. Also: Leaders lead….

NOTE One odd result of the latest happy news from the gulag is that “the incompetence dodge” regains its central place in the litany of Bush administration woes, not as cause, but as symptom. Vladimir Bukovsky:

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one’s sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin’s notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria’s predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.

So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to “improve intelligence-gathering capability” by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some “cruel, inhumane or degrading” (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.

No doubt, in retrospect, the propagation of the incompetence dodge will no doubt be seen to track the descent our descent into the abyss quite closely.

But it doesn’t matter. At this point, everything has become its own justification…