Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground

With the knowledge that it's been said before, honestly, I might have to hang up my spurs. The Republican Party, after failing for so many years now to connect with the majority of Americans, is now hanging its battered fedora on a most ridiculous peg. They're trying to pin the Bush administration's torture policies on Democrats.

Specifically, they're asking the very tired question of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "What did she know and when did she know it?" Pelosi has fired back in a fit of anger. Her flypaper story is that the CIA told her that "enhanced interrogation techniques" had been used on detainees, but that waterboarding was not one of those techniques.

Conservatives say otherwise, intimating that Pelosi understood fully that people were being tortured, so Bush was cleared on this. Never mind that Pelosi's Party lost the Senate in a matter of weeks following her debriefing. Never mind that the Bush torture policies continued through the next six years (as did wiretapping). All that matters is that Pelosi knew.

If she did, and if she approved of such un-American activities, then she should be driven from her Speakership if not from the Congress altogether. And she can take the monstrous Jane Harman with her. Pelosi hasn't been reliable since committing her first public sin in 2oo6 when she refused to consider impeaching Bush, Cheney et al for any number of Constitutional crimes.

In the meantime, GOP attack dogs like Michael Steele (not to mention the circus clowns of right-wing media) have continued to flail away at President Obama, making the same failed arguments that lost them the last election. They are the Party of panic; when they're not beset by it, they're instilling it in others.

Looking at the nation through reality-colored glasses one realizes that so many things have not happened in the past six months since the election. The Democrats didn't take our guns away. They haven't dined with terrorists. They didn't reinstate the draft. They didn't blow our taxes through the ceiling - they didn't even rescind the Bush tax cuts.

Republicans, although they did try to suck the life out of this country, are not one-hundred-percent vampires. Their fangs have been extracted by a public that took way too long to become concerned. Could they come back? Absent due vigilance on our part, sure, they could.

So could I?

Absolutely.

pH 5.19.o9