"I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction"

 

The only disappointment is that it took a century too long.

I can't really add anything to the indictment Eric Loomis posted at LG&M, but I agree completely that the bipartisan tongue-bath this evil fuck received from both sides of the aisle as well as the political media is a thorough rebuke of the United States' political culture.

Kissinger himself was an amoral scumbag.

The fact that the scumbag was welcomed in every corridor of power outside the Dirtbag Left is worse than "amoral scumbag". These were people who weren't committed to Kissinger's vile agenda of bringing murderous dictators to everywhere he could reach so long as those dictators would do his bidding. There was no reason to cross the room to do more than spit on the sonofabitch.

But you wait and watch; the sucking-up will continue even after the nasty shitbird has finally been terminated. He'll be called a "great statesman" and "diplomat" even though Ribbontrop would be green with envy at the raw number of people that Kissinger's works butchered.

Update 12/1: Worth a glance at this post over at (again) LG&M, which goes into some detail about what an utterly shit "statesman" ol' Hank was using the example of the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War:

"At every step of the crisis, the two men appear to have been driven as much by their loathing of India — West Pakistan’s rival — as by any cool calculations of power."

As the post details, this "loathing" wasn't remotely political. It was largely driven by, as Lemieux points out, by the fact that "Nixon greatly enjoyed the company of the jockish (Yahya) Khan (then-dictator of Pakistan) and needless to say despised Indira Gandhi."

This would have been a stupid prize for stupid games even if the political calculations had been correct. Getting a big bro-hug from your locker room buddy? Fuck me runnin' but that's a goddamn dumbass logic.

But in fact the calculations were utterly, completely, disastrously wrong. India was the obvious heavyweight in that fight, as it proved by mopping the floor with the Pakistani armed forces. As Pakistani historian Ali Tariq wrote in 1997: "Pakistan lost half its navy, a quarter of its air force and a third of its army"

To think that the Pakistanis would have done better, given the massive economic, demographic, and military-strategic imbalance? That's Austro-Hungary in 1914, Hitler-declares-war-on-the-US-in-1941, Israel-in-Gaza-level stupid.

The blood-trail this slug of a putative human left behind him is more than enough to have convinced any humane American, let alone the "leaders" of the nation supposedly concerned for its reputation, to shun him.

But to have piled those corpses so high, for so many repeated and disastrous failures?

Even on "pragmatic" or "realist" grounds - the supposed metric by which Kissinger was measuring his results - the man was complete and utter shit.

Friday Jukebox: Dirty Deeds Done Damn Spendy Edition

This is, apparently, a parody of some sort of Miley Cyrus song called "Party in the USA". I ran into the video at Frank Moraes' place and, like him, liked the goofy Cubist cartoon style. But, like him, I can see how this isn't exactly a purely-for-fun sort of thing.

"Party in the CIA" also bothers me

Frank says,

in that it is the kind of thing that people can take differently on the basis of their politics. I know that Yankovic is a liberal. But I also know a lot of authoritarians who would watch this video and come away with the idea that it would be totally great to be in the CIA and topple unfriendly governments. The truth is, in this song, Yankovic doesn't tip his hand. That's great for most subjects. Not for this.

Yep. Living as we are in the Age of Trump, where "terrorists" are people who kill people with cheap automatic weapons and homemade explosive belts but not people who kill people with silenced rifles or torture or air-launched cruise missiles...yeah. I can see the problem here.

It profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the entire world...

...but for Wales?

I'm having a hard time saying anything coherent at the moment because my mind keeps circling the sewer drain of torture that is the national honor of my country, the country I served for 22 years as a soldier, the country I pledged to defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.

Because the domestic enemies who committed these crimes shat on that honor, and all for nothing.

Why do I say that? Given that the "defenders" of these crimes are raging and swearing that the crimes were done to protect me, that the crimes DID protect me in that they obtained intelligence that defeated nefarious plots and evil plans.

To which I say: bullshit.

Let's stop a minute and think about this.

Let's say that all this went down like the torturers and their buddies say it did. Let's say that the heroic CIA torturers knew that Evil Abu Badguy knew where the nuke was hidden. Knew it. Let's say that was you, or me, and we knew that the goddamn dune coon was holding information that could save lives if we just electrified his nuts long enough.

Would you be crankin' that generator?

I would.

Yes, I would. I know because I had to think about the possibility that I might end up with enemy prisoners of war that I knew had intel that could save my troops if I could get it quickly enough, and what would I do then?

Here's the thing, though. I'd be a criminal, a war criminal. My guys would be alive, so to me it'd be worth it. But I couldn't - and, I hope - wouldn't try to deny what I'd done.

I hope I'd have the guts to hunt up the nearest provost marshal and turn myself in.

So ISTM that the thing that sets off my bullshit detector is that the torturers and their masters went to such lengths to hide and destroy the evidence of what they did. If this really was "worth it", if I'm the torturer and my torturing really had produced some sort of valuable intelligence?

I'd have kept those cameras rolling.

Rolling through every horrific thing I did, every vile atrocity I worked on some helpless sonofabitch, every sob, every scream. Rolling as the broken bastard choked out the address of the hidden nuke, the name of the contact, the details of the murderous plan.

I'd present myself and that tape before a judge, or a jury, and say, look, here is what I did to save you. Here is how I did save you.

And then I'd throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Because I would be guilty. I'd just know that no judge, no jury, in America would convict me and if they did no President would be able to refrain from pardoning me. Because my guilt was their guilt, too; they lived because I did horrors in their name.

And yet...there is none of this.

So I know there was no hidden nuke. No contact, no plan, no secret. Just what torture does best at producing; what the torturer wants to hear.

These people tortured because they wanted confessions, for the same reasons that the Inquisition and the NKVD tortured. They wanted confessions. They wanted what they needed for their auto-de-fe, for their show-trial, they wanted to hear that we needed to fight them there so we didn't have to fight them here, that the smoking gun was going to be a mushroom cloud, that they hated our freedoms, that they were coming to kill us.

They wanted to make us afraid, and they did.

So these fucking bastards sold our honor, my honor, for nothing. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. For worthless fucking bullshit to support their goddamn lies. For a mess of goddamn pottage.

And I think I'm as furious about the worthlessness of the reasons as for the infamy of the torture itself.

"We do not torture"

You don't say?

To me the saddest part about this hot mess is that we pretty much all knew all of this all along. We knew what was going on, or, at least, that something fairly awful was going on, and didn't care enough to make a fuss about knowing the details or care enough to stop it.

And make no mistake; without punishment there is no reason to assume that this won't happen again. There's always a good reason for breaking the laws. Smoking guns become mushroom clouds. Not fighting them there means fighting them here. They hate our freedoms. They're coming to kill us.

But then you find that if you cut down the laws to get at the devil, when you catch him you'll find that there is nowhere for you to shelter from the broad highway of evil you've opened up, the laws all being flat.

Update: The always-eloquent Charlie Pierce has more. And worse. And much, much more and much, much worse.

"I no longer take seriously anyone, in or out of government, who talks about "the debate" over whether the United States tortured people. The only debate left is the debate over whether or not it will remain the policy of this nation to torture people, or to outsource the job of torturing people, or to otherwise commit moral and national suicide by euphemism.

Anyone who still believes there's a "debate" over whether or not the United States, using techniques previously used by the Japanese Imperial Army, the Gestapo, the North Korean People's Army, and the KGB, tortured people is an idiot and a coward and I have no time for them. Not any more. Debate's over. We became what they think we are. And worse. This is not debatable and, alas, it is anything but a surprise."