A sense of proportion, please...

I have noted with dismay the efforts of the RNC these past few days to link Barak Obama with the crimes of Illinois governor Blogojevitch, and the complicity of the press to keep that charade alive. I can understand the RNC's actions, particularly in view of the following item by Scott Horton from the current issue of Harper's:

This week the Senate Armed Services Committee issued a powerful report, released jointly by chair Carl Levin and ranking member John McCain, that received the unanimous support of its Democratic and Republican members. The report concluded that Donald Rumsfeld and other high-level officials of the administration consciously adopted a policy for the torture and abuse of prisoners held in the war on terror. It also found that they attempted to cover up their conduct by waging a P.R. campaign to put the blame on a group of young soldiers they called “rotten apples.” Lawyers figure prominently among the miscreants identified. Evidently the torture policy’s authors then enlisted ethics-challenged lawyers to craft memoranda designed to give torture “the appearance of legality” as part of a scheme to create the torture program despite internal opposition. A declassified summary of the report can be read here; the full report is filled with classified information and therefore has been submitted to the Department of Defense with a request that the materials be declassified for release.

Am I alone in that I find it astonishing that when a unanimous, bi-partisan committee concludes that the Bush administrationauthorized a the highest levels a policy of widespread torture, the press has nothing to say about it?

Torture and the rule of law

"...the Bush administration’s abuses illustrate (in a concrete way) precisely why we should care about the rule of law. It’s a story as old as Ulysses. Law exists because man is weak, and captive to passions. We bind ourselves ahead of time to the mast, because we know we’ll be unreliable if, say, a couple dozen terrorists attack our cities."

From a review of Jane Meyer's book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals", by Publius.

To me, the saddest thing about the Bush admimistration's response to 9/11, or perhaps it is fair to say America's response, is how small we looked. Granted, the attacks were horrific, but it is dismaying how disproportionate was...and has been...our response. And how sadly comic some of that response has been, nowhere more visible and risible than the shoe-removal lines at every airport in the country.

Unintended consequences

According to legend, before Oedipus was born it was prophesied that he would murder his father and marry his mother. To prevent this calamitous turn of events, the father, Laius, king of Thebes, ordered the child's feet to be bound and pierced by a stake, and that he be abandoned on a hillside to die.

It is said that when a shepherd by the name of Phorbas, who was in the service of Polybos, king of nearby Corinth, came across the infant Oedipus, he was moved by pity and rescued the child. Unlike Phorbas, who knows nothing of the prophecy, we watch the scene having heard the entire story. We know that the shepherd will take the child to Corinth, where he will be raised by king Polybos as his own son. That Oedipus will one day meet Laius and, ignorant of his identity, kill him in self-defence in a roadside quarrel. That he will go on to Thebes, defeat an evil sphinx that plagues the city, be hailed a hero, and marry the newly widowed queen. However much we may wish it to be otherwise (for his sake and our own), we know that his innocence will not protect him from the tragedies that continue to unfold: Jocasta's suicide upon discovering his identity, his own degradation and death in exile.

This sculpture by Antoine-Denis Chaudet ( 1763–1810) shows Phorbas in the act of saving the child. I find it moving beyond words.