I'm an artist, take five

I have lots of pictures of nature, too, but this is today's picture.

Um, so, has anyone noticed that the current ruler has started using one scandal to distract from the last scandal? I guess raising the yellow to orange stopped working, or at least started generating more suspicion than fear.

I was talking to a professor and friend of Other's a few weeks ago, and asked him why nobody is willing to say that anyone else is "lying." They're dispensing misinformation, disinformation, they're saying things that are "counterfactual," they're "dissembling." They may be intentionally misleading. They're "disingenuous." But nobody's ever lying. Oh, heavens no. He said that it's just not done - it's not passe, exactly, but bad taste or bad form, or something like that. (The vagueness is accountable to my poor memory and not his inartculateness.)

But people, I think it's time for the word.

I guess the most disturbing part is that King George isn't bothering to lie about this latest whole "spying on Americans without an easy-to-obtain warrant" thing. This represents a new step in the terrifying progression of his presidency. He's broken the law, obviously, purposefully, repeatedly, secretly, and he's not even bothering to deny it. The argument they're providing for its lawfulness is somehow like a turnabout with two dead ends: 1) the congress justified it with their vote on Sept. 18, 2001, which gave the president wartime powers, and 2) they couldn't take what they wanted to do to the congress because the congress clearly wouldn't go for it.

Um... This is the worst logic I've ever seen, and I've graded hundreds of freshman composition papers.

But who cares? The logic doesn't matter. He can do it because he's the president. For years he's shown a disconcerting lack of understanding of the purpose of checks and balances, saying once that the Congress had "no right" to vote down something he wanted passed. And I can't tell you how many times Other and I have repeated the words "I'm the prezzi-dent," drawn from an actual quote sometime in the first term.

The whole NSA thing needs to be huge. There needs to be an impeachment. (If only we could trick King George into accepting a blow job from an intern.)

Here is a line of reasoning I'd like to hear: the Republicans seem to think that Democrats (and anyone else daring to disagree with them) are unpatriotic, unamerican, hell, probably even enemies of freedom. If we're not with him, we're against him, right? How much more against him can you be than trying to make him not be president anymore?

I'm not saying that King George has declared John Kerry an enemy combatant, but seriously, these are the same people who ran an ad associating Max Clelland (a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran) with Osama bin Laden. For a long time I've believed that that sort of thing was empty (but powerful, for those of us not paying much attention) rhetoric - but what if they actually believe that Max Clelland, and people like him, are on the same level as bin Laden?

Well, that would justify spying on just about anyone, wouldn't it? In the name of security? If it would be catastropic to get a pansy-ass bleeding-heart liberal flip-flopper in the White House, then how could spying on his campaign possibly be wrong?

I have no proof, nor even a claim that this has happened. But following the logical road these people are building, this sort of argument is practically the next exit. They say they're spying on terrorists. They're defining "terrorist." This is double-plus ungood.

It doesn't seem like there would be any point to setting up this Unitary Executive and then taking a chance on losing the next election. But under what circumstances would Americans possibly go for allowing the same regime to continue? I'd guess that the same circumstances leading to the Patriot Act and the declaration of the War on Terror might help.