Do YOU Want to Swim in This Gene Pool?

For all his apparent skills in assessing and manipulating--, uh. . .the entire world, our President is a little out of step right here at home in the backwaters of the ignorant pond in which wade what used to be called the silent majority. Though I guess we need a new name now for the generation that succeeded the dim bulbs who re-elected Nixon since that original group seems to have produced offspring of equally challenged mental capacity. The question is whether he will float with the backflowing current or power up the pumps and flush the filth.
The latest issue that separates the know-somethings from the know-nothings is whether to torture our enemies or not. The Know-Somethings who should include the President and Eric Holder and Nancy Pelosi (and probably do) are quite right in their belief that torture is wrong no matter what information it produces from anyone about anything. The know-nothings that include Newt and Mitch and Sean and Rush (and why is this list longer than the other one?) are pressing forward with their ignorant and jingoistic drumbeat that torture saves american lives so therefore is OK. For all the nonsense that now passes for analysis on NPR, there are occasional unintended lapses that produce fleeting moments of vision on their air. The other day, they had a guy with a British accent who works for some think tank observing that other countries have suffered far worse proportional attacks on their own soil than the USA did on 11 September. But you don't see those other countries taking high handed (or would that be low handed?) measures to beat the so-called truth out of unfortunate captives to head off another attack. Here is a guy who can cut to the core and boy I wish he could bottle that and inject it into the mass bloodstream. But it's too late. The testosterone and adrenaline have been so pressurized by the titilating details of waterboarding and genito-electrical stimulation and dog biting and face-punching by big bruiser military macho men with stars and bars patches on their shoulders that the average clod out there scared of foreclosure is telling the president to "move forward instead of looking backward."
It has been a couple of weeks since I saw any poll numbers but as recently as the first of this month, a majority of citizens advocated torture as a means to extract information from "suspected terrorists." This is consistent with the high percentage of people who advocate murder by the state but call it "capital" punishment. These same people are buying up all the bullets and guns they possibly can in places like Texas and Florida so they can be armed and ready to resist whatever threat they think the government represents as it tries to keep order and calm amidst the widening chaos. There is a twisted sense of Twilight Zone irony in there somewhere; I should have that worked out in my next posting. For now though, I will try to get back to my main point. All this garbage about "looking forward" is code for "we reserve the right to bust mooslim ay-rab heads to protect the red white and blue."
The president and the Congress do have lots of stuff to deal with; like how to de-fuse the stink bomb the previous administration set off last fall that was calculated to produce the economic collapse which is hurting so many in the middle and lower classes. But that job does not take up every hour of every day. The hard work has been done; the groundwork laid and yes there is some tuning and tweaking and monitoring to be done. But there are thousands of smart lawyers and investigators and journalists reporting to work every day with time on their hands to dig up the ugly and illegal truth about the last eight years. If Pat Leahy and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Obama himself can keep sight of Santayana's warning, they will be able to measure their forward progress by how meticulously they examine the past records of old emails and memos and phone transcripts. For if the crimes of the past are not exposed and recognized for the transgressions they were, we are doomed to play out the same bad scripts with unhappier endings.
The President needs to educate and enlighten and lead; not follow and cower and buckle. Whether he will yield to the ignorance and let bygones be forgotten and swept under the rug, or forcefully make a case for moving to the next level of social conscience and awareness and honesty will be the first real test of his character.