Our Tractable Media

The eunuch media is astounding in its passivity. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney was allowed by our lamestream media to molest our moral ideals and condemn succeeding generations of Americans to the same kinds of torture he didn’t even try to hide behind the bullshit scheme of ‘plausible deniability’ which sustains every other lie and crime the government chooses as policy.

His answer to the damning Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report was, “I’d do it again”. This is a rather stunning lack of contrition considering one of the main conclusions of the 528 page report is that our Exceptional American torture proved to be as ineffective at revealing truth or credible information as that practiced by other barbarians. Torturers and their victims usually come to a meeting of the minds, that being, an agreement to the script of the torturer. Apparently job securitization screws are turning causing so-called journalists to be “fair and balanced” about cruel and unusual punishment, which under the Geneva Convention to which the U.S. is a signatory says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture”. Is that clause so irrelevant to our national self-image and world opinion that, “I’d do it again”, was enough validation of Mr. Cheney’s insane and ineffective indiscretion to accord him such gentle journalistic treatment very disproportionate to the magnitude of his legal and moral infraction, and the risks we are all now inescapably heir to?

It is, I suppose, just another of the litany of the bizarre anomalies that have materialized in our physical, moral, and legal universe since the morning of 9/11. Things that were torture and illegal before, and are torture and illegal now, still enjoy the special dispensation from logic and precedent so peculiar to the Bush/Cheney administration.

Why aren’t Americans frightened by our political leaders’ embrace and legalization of torture when these are the same authors of The Patriot Act which only requires a pointed finger to cause one to be disappeared into this Cheney-esque legal limbo from whose bourn you may never return?

They’re not frightened because our Fourth Estate is a watchdog that doesn’t bark.