A plea to Warren Buffett and his ilk

There's nothing new here, but it kills me to read comments like this* from Obamaite billionaires:

Warren Buffett, America’s second-richest man, is one of Obama’s most high-profile supporters, but he has declared that he will not support Super PACs, saying, “I don’t want to see democracy go in that direction.”

A short history of America's rightward turn

In Jane Mayer's long chronicle of the billionaire Koch brothers' 30-year campaign to mainstream extreme libertarian ideas by founding and funding up think tanks, PACs and astroturf activist groups, and one observation struck me as a capsule history of American politics since 1980.

The source is a former friend of the Charles Koch, Gus diZerga, who met Koch in a John Birch society book store decades ago. The Kochs' father, founder of the conglomerate the sons have built into one of the country's largest privately held companies, was a charter Bircher and fed his boys tales of communist conspiracy from early childhood. DiZerega, once steeped in Birchite paranoia, wrote in a Beliefnet essay:

As state socialism failed...the target for many within these organizations shifted to any kind of regulation at all. 'Socialism' kept being defined downwards.

Over the same period, I'd add, media kept being defined downwards, so that now fringe froth has a mass market.Contiguous with the career of the Kochs is Rupert Murdoch's progressive corruption of media throughout the anglosphere.

Addington's legacy: we're "one bomb away"

By now, much of the astounding information unearthed by Jane Mayer in The Dark Side has been replayed in media accounts and augmented by the release of documents including the torture memos and the ICRC's report on U.S. treatment of prisoners held in the "black sites."

The book remains indispensable, however, in documenting the extent and means by which David Addington and John Yoo hijacked the Justice Department and for at least two years cowed, silenced or marginalized their colleagues and superiors to ram through binding opinions that authorized the executive branch to abrogate the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers stipulated in the Constitution.

To my mind, the most telling passage in the book comes in the account of how Addington and Yoo green-lighted the NSA's violation of the Foreign Service Intelligence Act (FISA) through domestic spying in the Terrorist Surveillance Program. According to Mayer, with reference to the FISA Court:

Addington had been heard to mutter, "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious court."

We were one bomb away, and ultimately perhaps remain one bomb away, from getting rid of not only FISA, but perhaps all the civil liberties and Constitutional protections that Americans have enjoyed for 200+ years. This was my constant thought in early 2008 as I listened to the thug's gallery of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination strive to outbid each other in promises to continue torturing those held in US custody and otherwise reaffirm the Bush Administration's twisted concept of the "unitary executive."

It's true that antibodies in the US political system did kick in to a degree -- in the person of Justice Department and Pentagon attorneys including Goldsmith, Comey, and Mora; in multiple reports by the military and later by the Senate detailing the extent of abuse; in Supreme Court decisions; and ultimately at the ballot box.

But taboos and norms, once violated, will be violated again under stress if the violations are not unequivocally repudiated. Which they haven't been.

The New Yorker laughs off torture

In February 2007, Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, did us all a service by documenting the extent to which Fox's 24 had inured Americans to torture -- making it seem necessary and thrilling and heroic. How sad, then, that the same publication this week should publish an obscene little attempt at humor by Geroge Saunders that replays the old RosannaDanna op-ed in favor of "violins on TV" by coming out in favor of "washboarding" terrorists. That is, playing a washboard as a percussion instrument. Catch the hilarity:

I honestly don’t understand the mind-set here. Are these people terrorists or not? Or, I should say, is it possible that these people might be terrorists? Or, rather, has someone (possibly us, possibly someone other than us, such as, for example, someone they knew back in their home country, with whom they have possibly been having, say, a blood feud) alleged that they were possible terrorists? Keep in mind that we’ve never washboarded anyone who has not been, by someone or other, accused, more or less, of being a suspected, pending, or eventual possible terrorist. So why do we want to coddle these people? I say washboard the bastards 24/7, then supplement the washboarding with a circle of Peruvian wood flautists, then reinforce the flautists with a circle of acne-faced, oblivious fifteen-year-old boys with Fender guitars and distortion boxes, and let the war on terror begin.

Gilda Radner waxing enthusiastic about "violins on TV" was funny. Pretending to enthusiasm about "washboarding" terrorists is disgusting. What's the difference? First of all, RosannaDanna had no inkling what violence on TV was. Second, the evils of violence on TV, such as they are, are a matter of degree, part of the furniture of everyday life, fair game for humor. On the other hand, to mix the rhetoric of enthusiasm for torturing terrorists with depictions of ridiculous un-pleasantries is to trivialize the intense evil that we have collectively consented to. An extended joke about waterboarding in The New Yorker is perhaps stronger evidence of the coarsening of our culture than the popularity of 24.