Gord's Notebook : Obama Still Kow-Towing To The Conservatives and The Republicans As He Breaks His Election Campaign Promises

UPDATE: See Lou Dobbs below. at 4:55 pm. Nov. 29, 2008

Anyway talking about torture is it torture to have to listen to Sarah Palin talking. She continues to talk as a man loads turkeys into a Turkey Killing Machine.

Here's a funny bit from Keith Olbermann and Sarah Palin Nov. 26 2008

Join in on the fun as Keith Olbermann watches the Sarah Palin turkey pardon interview for the first time

Torture

Obama still Kow-Towing to the Ultra -Conservatives and Republicans and The Religious Right. He is allowing them to set the agenda even though he won the election and trampled the Republicans. Is he afraid of their power or of hurting their feelings. He should feel no obligation to the conservatives who ran a dishonest hate-mongering campaign of smears. Is he trying to prove he's not really an evil "Godless Liberal " or a "socialist" so he's going out of his way to prove that he's just another conservative American politician who doesn't really want to change America or Washington in a fundamental way. So is it to be business as usual with members of his administration defending torture and the Patriot Act and throwing America's military weight around bullying and threatening and invading even more countries.

"A Commission ( investigating torture ) is passing the buck" John Dean

Countdown: John Dean on Torture Prosecutions- Nov.26, 2008
Keith talks to John Dean about whether it's likely for anyone in the Bush administration to be prosecuted for torturing prisoners.
Detainee Treatment act

Obama's attempts at reconciliation and bi-partisanship in the end means that the criminal activities of the Bush/ Cheney Regime are to be forgotten about and none of the criminals are to punished. Therefore if there is wrong-doing under Obama there is no way to make a case for seeking justice since justice is just an empty piece of rhetoric to hauled out during election campaigns and then quickly forgotten about. So if American soldiers or private contractors continue to murder innocent Iraqis or to abuse and torture detainees then this is not a concern for Obama's administration or any other American administration. So we are back to being told "Stuff Happens " and that suspected terrorists no matter how flimsy the evidence is against them have no rights under American law. As we have seen these attitudes have trickled down through the US military and into US penitentiaries. If torture is ok in one instance then why not in another. So if you want to get a confession out of a murderer or a pedophile then what's to stop local police forces from using certain forms of torture as in for example the over-use and abuse of Tasering or even beating to death a suspect .

Bush very pleased with Iraq War
American War Criminals urge Obama not to press charges against them in a spirit of reconciliation and moving on. So they broke a lot of laws and broke a lot of bones and heads and tortured a few thousand so what they say just grow up and get over it.

Maddow: Why wont Obama pursue war crimes, torture?-Nov. 24, 2008
By David Edwards
President-elect Barack Obama has been doing a lot of compromising lately, and it seems that his ideas are the ones falling by the wayside. Is he giving too much away to Republicans? Rachel Maddow is joined by Slate.com senior editor Dahlia Lithwick.

---------------------
How the Far Right still attacks anyone questioning the Bush Regime's Policies and actions from invading Iraq to the use of torture to interference with the Justice department and the judiciary at the state level.
Dick Cheney Indicted by Texas Grand Jury

Dick Cheney Indictment on Bill O'Reilly Show
A grand jury in south Texas indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on separate charges related to alleged prisoner abuse in federal detention centers. This is Bill O'Reilly's take on the situation, FoxNews style

In the above clip Bill O'Reilly dismisses the charges against his friend Cheney as " loopy". The charges are in themselves are serious but O'Reilly ignores their seriousness and significance and whether or not they are true. To him if Cheney was profiteering from being an investor in a penitentiary and if he acted in such a way as to have an investigation into the running of that facility squashed that doesn't matter to O'Reilly. O'Reilly argues as usual that Cheney is above and beyond the laws of the land. O'Reilly is also not interested in complaints concerning prisoner abuse since as a conservative he believes prisoners have no rights and get what they deserve. But it is certain that if the ones being charged and indicted in such a case were in fact Democrats O'Reilly would surely change his tune & would be praising any local actions being taken. Democrats in his view are still fair game but Republican are always above reproach. It is also odd since O'Reilly like other conservatives believes more rights should devolve from the federal government and federal courts to the States and local authorities

Glenn Beck Makes Fun of Racism-May 24, 2008

Glenn Beck Makes fun of the idea of investigating Racism in America. Glenn Beck like other ultraconservatives argues that since there are some African-Americans & Hispanic Americans who are doing well in America it therefore means there is no such thing as racism in America. Note he interviews a representative of the far-right organization Heritage Foundation. As I have said before the Neocon or Far Right organizations which call themselves Think Tanks is a bit of a stretch.

Note Beck being the insensitive boob believes he has clinched the argument by making fun of the name of the man who is investigating racism in America. Beck is truly convinced that America was never all that racist especially after the end of slavery. Glenn Beck and others of his ilk never talk seriously about the thousands lynched by "good God believing Bible Thumping Christian Americans". As I have discussed before these lynchings were not all secret isolated incidents but were done in public while hundred or thousands of white Americans watched with glee. But that these conservatives would claim was part of the good old days.

ADL-Anti-defamation Code Words Hate Speech

Immigrants are an invasion force , a plague of vermin, dehumanization , as corrupt bringing disease and criminality
can be targeted as objects of Hate they have no rights therefore its OK to treat them whatever way you want -
Conspiracy theory that Mexican illegal immigrants want to retake the South West as part of a reconquista.

Glenn Beck and other far right media stars frame their racist arguments in such a way that they can then claim its not really racism but a matter of common sense and that it is just obvious to anyone or it is a matter of patriotism or a matter of protecting traditional American values. So what is this common sense and traditional values they talk about ad infinitum ? For instance they seem to claim that America is a christian nation of European immigrants and that this heritage must be protected from the swarms of non-Europeans and non-whites who are invading and trying to reshape or even take over American society. So one wonders when was this "Golden Age" in which America was somehow purer than it is today. Was the Golden Age before the abolition of slavery or before the Civil Rights Movement which the far right claim was really a movement of outsider Marxists agitators .

They claim that for instance the 1950s was the "Golden Age " when minority groups such as Blacks and Gays knew their place in society and didn't try to go beyond their station. Do they believe for instance as some do that America was a better country before several million Irish Catholics invaded America even if it was by legal means.

Was America for instance better off before women won the right to vote and then fought for equal rights . So was America better off when much of America supported an Apartheid racist system under the Jim Crow laws which kept black and white Americans as separate as possible ?

also see:

Glenn Beck Wonders Why He's Resented as a Bigot
By Steve Rendall, FAIR. Posted November 21, 2008.

It takes an angry truck driver who threatened the hate-spewing host to wonder, "Is this who we've become?"

Glenn Beck has been telling a personal story illustrating what he says is a particularly intense level of hatred on the left.

According to the newly signed Fox News host, he was verbally assaulted by a truck driver while standing in line at a Wendy's restaurant at a truck stop. Writing on his blog, Beck says the truck driver called him a "racist bigot," blaming the talk show host and conservatives "for everything." Wrote Beck, "The hatred was palpable." As his security detail stood between him and his assailant, Beck says the truck driver ended his rant by threatening to run him over.

It was ugly stuff, and Beck was shocked by the level of hate: "I wanted to say, I think you have me mistaken for someone else, but I knew he knew who I was and he just hated me for who I was…. Wow. Is this who we've become? Is this who we've become?"

Concluding his appeal to civility, Beck explained that he wouldn't treat his enemies the way the truck driver treated him: "I could stand in line with Michael Moore and I wouldn't say that to him. I would say some things to Michael Moore, but it wouldn't be that. Is this who we've become? I believe there is a cauldron of hatred on both sides, but the left is quite frightening."

Beck might not say such things to Moore in person, but he has expressed a desire to murder Moore to his nationally syndicated radio audience (Glenn Beck Program, 5/18/05):

I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out--is this wrong?

And Beck wasn't exactly the picture of civility two years earlier when he told his listeners that he prayed nightly for anti-war presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich to be consumed by fire (Glenn Beck Program, 3/16/03): "Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames."

Beck repeated his Wendy's story on Fox's On the Record (11/17/08)--only in this version, Beck said Fox News was among the targets of the truck driver's vitriol. As he explained to host Greta Van Susteren, the story illustrated that "the left is just unbelievably out of control right now."

Whatever the truth is about Beck's truck driver story, his own record of hatred, including a prediction that in 10 years time "Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West," is not merely a matter of angry words spouted in a fast food shop, but a matter of nationally broadcast hatred.

UPDATE: 4:55 pm Nov. 29

Also see:Lou Dobbs anti-immigration Illegal Immigration and racism- Lou Dobbs just another hate Mongering Propagandists for the Far Right and the Racist Remnant in the Republican Party.

Why Is Lou Dobbs Minimizing the Impact of Hate Crimes?
By Heidi Beirich, Hate Watch. Posted November 29, 2008.

Dobbs, who has a long track record of defaming immigrants by linking them to crime, disease and other horrors, would probably like to pretend that immigrant bashing doesn't lead to hate crimes. But the facts of the Lucero case show otherwise. The teens implicated in Lucero's murder specifically declared that they were going to "go jump a Mexican" and went out hunting in the ethnically diverse village of Patchogue. Latinos in Suffolk County have long reported being threatened and physically harassed and there have been other highly publicized attacks there, including the near-beating death of two Mexican day laborers in 2001 and the burning of a Mexican family's house in 2003.

Dobbs also took issue with the idea that hate crimes targeting Latinos are a problem. Dobbs' report cited the FBI's annual hate crimes statistics to make the point that hate crimes nationwide had dropped from about 7,700 in 2006 to 7,600 in 2007. Dobbs claimed that hate crimes in Suffolk County had declined under Levy.
But it is widely known that the FBI's numbers severely undercount the extent of hate crimes in America. In fact, according to a 2005 Department of Justice study, there actually are about 191,000 per year--nearly 30 times the FBI's numbers. Most hate crimes are not reported to police and many jurisdictions do not participate in the FBI's voluntary hate crime reporting system. Hate crimes against undocumented immigrants are particularly underreported, because of an understandable reluctance to contact state officials.

And as limited as the FBI figures are, they show that hate crimes against Latinos are on the rise, having gone up by 40% since 2003. Dobbs left out that fact .
By diminishing the importance of hate crimes, Dobbs ignored the unique threat these crimes pose. The terroristic effect of hate crime creates fear and distrust along already fragile intergroup lines in a way that other crimes do not. When a black man is dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas, it instills terror in the entire black community.

This isn't the first time Dobbs has had trouble with facts. In what has now become a rather infamous incident, in 2007 Dobbs relied on Madeleine Cosman, a woman who repeatedly ranted about Latino men raping boys, girls and nuns, to argue that immigrants were largely responsible for some 7,000 cases of leprosy that had been reported in the United States in a recent three-year period. The numbers were utterly false, resulting in a New York Times column that said Dobbs has "a somewhat flexible relationship with reality."