One of the least funny things ever

Ok, so the people that read this agree with me about most things, but somethimes a man needs to vent, and to state the ebvious.

Our country took several spins around the toilet bowl on it's way down the drain yesterday when the senate passed a horrible bill that destroys 800 years of democratic growth in the western hemisphere.

What will be legal (hopefully only until the supreme court smacks it down, or a democratically controlled congress can amend it) once president asshole signs it is this:

The president will have the sole discretion to determine who is an enemy combatant, including anyone living now or in the future anywhere in the world. If you're a US citizen, tough shit, as an enemy combatant you lose all rights inherent in that citizenship.

Once determined to be an enemy combatant you will have no opportunity to challenge your imprisonment. So, for instance, if you were a Canadian citizen who the authorities in your country told the US was a terrorist, you could be imprisoned without charges. You might even be sent to Syria to be tortured, and if one year later you're determined to have been completely innocent, whoops. You should feel lucky you weren't summarily shot. Or maybe you're a litttle old lady who gives money to a charitable organization with nothing but the best intentions, and later that organization gives money to a group that gives money to a group that is aiding Palestinians. You could be sent to jail. Or maybe even if you're an environmental activist plotting to sabotage some logging equipment. To jail. No charges. No recourse. Because in the released portion of the latest NIE 'leftist' terrorists groups are a serious threat.

Once in custody you can be interrogated using 'aggressive' techniques, the definition of which is again up to the sole discretion of our dear leader.

You can be held indefinitely without charge.

If and when you come up for trial you will likely face evidence that you will never be allowed to see, secret evidence, some of which may be the result of other people being interrogated 'aggressively' or information that is classified.

It is quite simply the worst piece of legislation in at least 100 years. It throws away hundreds of years of advancement in fairness for fear of the faceless brown man.

We already know that innocent people have been imprisoned at Guantanamo and elsewhere during this so-called 'war on terror'. Some of them were imprisoned FOR YEARS with no way to challenge that detention. Now that process is legal.

Benjamin Franklin wisely said that someone who would give up a little liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security. If we transform ourselves into what we are fighting in an effort to win, what have we won.

I don't know for sure whether the Republicans who control are government are either the biggest scared babies, the most cynical and opportunistic assholes ever, or a combination of the two.

Certainly they did this in part to flog Democrats with during the upcoming elections, making it easy to say that Democrats who voted against it want to coddle terrorists and don't want the American people to be safe. It makes a convenient soundbite, one that will be ineffectively countered by Democrats talking about habeus corpus and other noble ideals. Democrats are so pathetically ineffective at having strong opinions that once again they were rolled over by the win-at-all costs Republicans.

And as a result we are now 75% of the way to a fascist government. I know that sounds alarmist, but when you strip away all checks and balances, invest more and more power into one central figure, and enact laws that would have made Stalin proud, you don't have much farther to go.

As a sidebar, the recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly has a story detailing one of many terrorism trials in the country. A gentleman was imprisoned not for what he had done, but for what he might do, and one of the principal pieces of evidence against him was a piece of paper he carried in his wallet. That paper was an Islamic prayer, translated for the jury as something like 'Allah put me at the throats of my enemy'. When the author of the story went to multiple sources for interpretations of that apparently very common Islamic missive, he discovered that it also is translated as 'Allah protect me from my enemies'. Pretty different. When we enter the world of The Minority Report where people are convicted of crimes they haven't yet committed and without evidence of an actual crime being planned, then we have truly entered a world George Orwell would have known his way around.

We must resist the irrational fear of the boogeyman. We expect our children to come to realize that there is nothing in the closet, even though there are lots of scary things in the world. We adults need to do the same. The threat of terrorism is real. In many parts of the world it is present nearly everyday. My semester in Italy was marked by heavily armed security forces in almost every public place and by three separate terrorist bombings, one that destroyed a part of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Did the Italians cower in the homes afraid? No. They retained one of the most vibrant cultures I've ever experienced. Somehow we need to get over our intial shock at being punched in the face, strip away all the superficial rhetoric about how 'everything changed' and say nothing changed. We are still a country that stands for more than our own self-interest. We will not sacrifice what makes us great to make ourselves safe. We will not be afraid. For if we are afraid, then the terrorists have won. It's as simple as that.