Antiwar.com Blog

The feds have become super vigilant in tapping our phone calls, tracing our movements, and intruding into our lives over the last 5 years.

Wouldn’t it be great to have hidden microphones around the White House this morning to hear what was said by dignitaries, congressmen, and other sociopaths invited for the signing ceremony of the torture/dictatorship law?

The microphones could capture the gloating  – the  gleeful hand rubbing over the coming suffering of Muslim detainees – the macho strutting about their courage in sanctifying barbarism in the name of freedom.  We would likely hear about how the Republicans plan to hype the signing ceremony in the final weeks of the congressional campaign – the ultimate sign of the GOP’s respect for average voters.

If Bush often sounds insipid and mildly deranged when the television cameras are on him, one can only imagine how inspiring he is off the cuff. And many of the congressmen who championed this bill are as blackhearted as Cheney himself.

On the other hand, Bush and his supporters have made so many false and bloodthirsty comments already regarding torture and other atrocities of the war on terror.  Perhaps nothing Bush could say at this point would wake Americans from their slumber.

Comments on this post and on the signing ceremony are welcome over at my blog here.  Also, if people hear interesting comments by politicians or others on the signing ceremony today,  that would also be most interesting…

UPDATE: The White House posted Bush’s signing statement here.

One highlight: Bush promised, “The passage of time will not dull our memory or sap our nerve.”

Who had the bright idea to have Bush mention “dull” and “sap” in his wrapup?

Ralph Peters takes a whack at redrawing the Middle East.

The Boy Emperor explains.

The U.S. has recently raised the possibility of a long-planned embargo of North Korea, but the Chinese and the Russians are against it, and probably won’t vote for it in the UN Security Council. However, I have it from a very good on-the-scene source that the U.S. isn’t waiting for the UN to act. U.S. Navy ships are already blockading shipping coming into North Korea, and they aren’t letting anything out, either.

If true, this is a very dangerous course to take: the North Koreans, a cranky lot in any case, are not likely to take kindly to it. An incident is inevitable, one that could escalate rather quickly into a full-scale conflict on the Korean peninsula.

Every once in a while the formerly libertarian Cato Institute lets loose with an analysis of the shape of libertarianism in the form of a voter profile: they did this some years back, you’ll recall,with a study (based on a Pew Center survey) that showed a considerable portion of the voters belonging to loose designation known as “enterprisers” — Americans who don’t want to regulate what people do with their bodies, or put in their bodies, and don’t cotton to government regulation of business, either. Now they’re back again, with a profile of “The Libertarian Voter” — but, in this era of war and “weapons of mass destruction” on every streetcorner, there is one curious omission, and I quote:

“We’re omitting foreign policy issues from this analysis because they are not easily categorized in a yes-no, less government-more government dichotomies.”

This is nonsense. Aside from the question of how does a “libertarian” fund an effort to “liberate” Iraq — and, indeed, the entire Middle East — the whole issue of an ostensible libertarian endorsing mass murder by the state would seem to run head on into the issue of the non-aggression axiom, which — unlike, say, school vouchers — is essential to libertarianism properly understood.

Of course, the folks over at Cato haven’t understood libertarianism for quite some time now — as we pointed out here, here, and here, for starters — and so this latest outrage is hardly surprising. It ought to give pause, though, that what many point to as the premier libertarian thinktank is not committed in principle to a noninterventionist foreign policy. The next time our libertarian readers consider where their donations are going to go, they might factor this into their decision. It’s interesting that the authors of this Cato study, David Boaz and David Kirby, aver that endorsing gay marriage “or civil unions” is a defining characteristic of the libertarian voter, while opposition to a foreign policy of unremitting aggression is not. Over in Cato-land, it’s all so very subjective ….

By the way, for a real libertarian analysis of “War, Peace, and the State,” by Murray N. Rothbard — the founder [.pdf] of the Cato Institute — go here.

It’s hilarious — that’s the word for The War of the Words: The 101s Fighting Keyboarders, a satiric take-down of the “war-bloggers,” who earned a place in military history by leading a heroic assault on the third-rate, broken down army of Saddam Hussein from the safety of their homes. Part One here, Part Two here. And it looks like we can look forward to three more beyond these …

One caveat, though: the film depicts columnist Bob Novak as a war-blogger who supported the invasion of Iraq. Not true: Novak, along with Pat Buchanan and a few other conservative pundits (including myself), opposed the Iraq war, and spoke out against it before the shooting started (unlike, say, John Kerry). The three of us were smeared for our efforts by the evil David Frum in National Review. But the folks over at DailyKos.com — who, it seems, are largely responsible for this filmic effort — don’t seem to realize that due to their partisan blinders.  Maybe they will correct this glaring error in the sequences to come — but I wouldn’t count on it. Oh well: it’s still pretty funny, and Glenn Reynolds deserves everything he gets.

Oh, and check out this early take-down of the Keyboarders written by Tim Cavanaugh before he was ruined by getting a gig over at Reason magazine and being forced to incorporate references to The Simpsons into every post. You’ll laugh ’til you cry ….