Enough is enough

NPR's (and Fox's) Juan Williams is sometimes so awful that I confess to turning the damn radio off on occasion when I hear him.  But this morning, in answer to a question, he actually made sense.  Why, he was asked, are Obama's fervent supporters not rushing to defend the President when he needs us.  Williams thinks Obama supporters are tapped out.  I agree. 

The pleas for funding and more meetings (rah!) have continued long after the inauguration even as the President's actions (as distinct from the expectations and promises) have become increasingly disillusioning.  So I'm with Juan Williams in being unsurprised that the voters of Iowa, so enthusiastic about Obama, are now unwilling to throw their all into defending the President -- not particularly interested in climbing in their cars to dash over and protest Chuck Grassley's crazy politics.

Organize for America?  Give me a break.  If I get out there with a contribution and a sign, it'll because I'm protesting what Obama is doing, not cheering him on.  Enough is enough.
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More is coming about about the CIA, torture, and other illegalities.  Mark Mazzetti, writing at the New York Times' Caucus blog this morning, reports: 

A long awaited C.I.A. report provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including C.I.A. officers carrying out mock executions and threatening at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.

C.I.A. jailors at different times held the handgun and the drill close to the body of the detainee, Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, threatening to use them if the prisoner was not cooperative with his interrogators, according to a government official familiar with the contents of the report. ...

...  In a separate episode detailed in the report, C.I.A. officers fired a gunshot in a room next to a detainee, making the prisoner believe a second detainee had been killed.

It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a detainee with imminent death.

The full story began Friday night in Newsweek which adds this chilling information to the growing dung-heap.

For months, former vice president Dick Cheney has called for these documents to be released. However, a person familiar with the contents of the documents says that they contain material that both opponents and supporters of Bush administration tactics can use to bolster their case. The Senate Committee on Intelligence is now conducting what is supposed to be a thorough investigation of the CIA's detention-and-interrogation program. The probe is intended not only to document everything that happened but also to assess whether on balance the program produced major breakthroughs or a deluge of false leads.

We need to see some serious action from Congress -- and not merely a probe into whether torture can be useful.  Torture is  illegal.  Let me say that again:  it's illegal.  

First identify the perps, establish whether they broke the law and if they did, punish them. Then and only then make an effort to change the law if there's good reason to make a currently illegal action legal.  But for god's sake stop any effort to justify bypassing the law just because the law is inconvenient.  That's what dictators do, that's what Cheney did (and wants to justify), and that's exactly why, in a democracy, the law must be upheld.

Enough is enough.