R.I.P, U.S.A.

Today is The day the music died.

Dan Froomkin tolls the bell:

The new law vaguely bans torture -- but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn't. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture...

Here's the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules.

Tears of rage from Brent Budowsky:

The rain pouring down on this cold dark day in Washington is made of the tears of heroes and patriots through the ages of the American Republic looking down on us, with outrage, and asking us, with rage:

What in the name of America have you done?

How ironic, how demented, how vile, how sick, how wrong, how evil, how sad, that while the walls are crumbling around a failed policy of a war that should never have been fought, the great symbol of this policy, acts of torture that have never before been justified in this land of the free and our home of the brave, are sanctioned by smirking President, a supine Congress, and a nation that has lost it way.

How ironic, how demented, how vile, how sick, how wrong, how evil, how sad that these acts are done in the name of our commanders, when the indisputable truth in eyes of a just God is that those commanders hate and despise being ordered to do these things, no matter what lies are told from the morally undisclosed locations of secret and corrupt power.

How ironic, how demented, how vile, how sick, how wrong, how evil, how sad that while our intelligence community speaks with a unamimous voice that these policies create more terrorists, our leaders sanction the wrongs that created this nightmare that pours blood on our screens, while we eat our dinners and watch the television news.

How ironic, how demented, how vile, how sick, how wrong, how evil, how sad that these acts done in the name of fighting for freedom and democracy are an insult to every generation of democratic Americans that has loved this land before us, and a contempt to the decent opinion of believers in freedom and democracy around the world, who hunger for an America that is a beacon, and have such contempt and sadness for an America that resorts to this.

How ironic, how demented, how vile, how sick, how wrong, how evil, how sad, that these policies done by those who proclaim "One Nation, Under God" are despised by believers of every one of the world's great religions, and supported, only, by the spiritual advisors to the murderers, haters and killers we are unable to defeat in the battle of ideas...

We stand with Washington.

We have not yet begun to fight.

We will not stop until we win.

We will not let George Washington down.

We are the people of America, and we will never surrender the Dream, because we pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for All.

But from the comments at Smirky:

At some point one must resign oneself to the evidence that a majority of americans ARE "demented, vile, sick, wrong, evil, sad" and that the government and the military are reflective, indeed, a projection of that.

A majority?

Also from the comments:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security...

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, I found myself hoping that the Iraqi people would be able to throw off the yolk of Saddam's oppression by their own efforts. Now I find myself wishing the same thing for the people of Bush's USA. Ironic, isn't it?