Republicans: the Torture Party

This is why we call them Repugnicans. Recently, Republican Party apparatchiks voted in the U.S. House of Representatives to sustain George W. Bush’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited the CIA from using torture techniques like waterboarding. With such a vote these politicians placed themselves firmly in support of torture. In other words, the Republican Party is the Torture Party. At the risk of speaking the obvious, they are a national disgrace. The former “family values” party reveals its true colors: blood red with a black heart. So much for the U.S. moral high ground. In the opening decade of the 21st Century far-right neo-cons and bible-banging theocrats have dragged this nation back into the medieval dungeons it took hundreds of years for humanity to crawl out of.

The far-right occupiers of the White House and Congress may call it “specialized interrogation techniques” , but torture by any other name would be as evil. The Repugnicans may be THE most Orwellian of signifiers ever to walk the planet. Voter suppression is called the Help America Vote Act; wholesale attacks on the U.S. Constitution is called the Patriot Act; gutting air pollution standards is called the Clear Skies Initiative. In order to create their own dysfunctional reality, to name a thing they must call it by its opposite. You know the drill: war is peace, hate is love. All it takes is a sociopathic college Republican mindset, a willingness to subvert the U.S. Constitution, and a blank check from the robber barons on Wall Street. And what a twisted web they weave: destroying nations while looting their oil; sacrificing young American soldiers to satisfy their lust for wealth and power; cynically transforming the Department of Justice and other agencies into tools for their own neo-fascist state. You think fascist is too strong a term? Think again. Look it up. Can you believe these people? You better believe!

As the little that’s left that passes for democracy in this nation slips from our hands, Democrats in Congress seem powerless to do anything to save what remains. Everyone’s praying for Clinton or Obama to ride in on a white horse and save the day. My advice is to prepare for the worse, now. Deus ex machine works well enough on stage, but here in the real world there are some seriously bad actors stealing the show in Washington. It’s like torture waiting to see what damage they will inflict next, but it’s not really torture. So far, we are led to believe, the Repugnicans have saved that for suspected terrorists. Yet, given that more than a few cops in this country have been torturing suspects all along, given that torture is being glorified in the corporate media by shows like “24”, how long do you think it will be before torture is common practice? How long before they get around to say, progressive activists?