Jesse!

So sad when cruel baldness takes the front of one’s mullet.

@Mistress Cynica: But ya gotta love what he said. He was the Joe the Plumber of his day. Oh how low we have fallen, that we wish for a return of the Joe the Plumber of yesteryear.

He lives in Mexico now? I wonder why.

Dick Cheney is a “coward” and a “chicken hawk.” I love it!!!

@Promnight: What? How is Jesse Ventura like not-Joe the not-plumber?

@Jamie Sommers: Well, come on, professional wrestling, anti-intellectual populism, he was just a smarter, or, I should say, smart, version, they even look alike. Not in the specifics of their policy positions, Not Joe the Not Plumber is too fucking ignorant to actually have policy positions, but I do think that their persona and appeal attracted the same demographic, hell, Not Joe the Not Plumber probably would not have been possible without the pioneering work of Jesse.

Except Jesse really does seem to have a mind, and a moral compass thats not totally fucked up.

Oh, what a fantasy, to see Jesse Venture waterboard Cheney.

@Promnight: Pro wrestling needs waterboarding!. He’d totally waterboard Cheney, but then Cheney would escape and grab a folding chair, hit Ventura in the back, and then grab him by the skullet and do the fakey stompy facepunch thing a few times, the crowd goes wild!

“OK, enough about Bush…” Yeah, that’s what America needs, Larry, to just forget about BushCo. Puppies and Budweiser, motherfuckers!

@Ripley:

Chief among the GOP’s many confused and sometimes contradictory strategies these days is to try and saddle Obama with our nation’s current problems… to make him “own them” as it were. How many times have you heard a conservative commentator on TV proclaim “it’s the Obama economy now” as if the GOP could simply wipe its hands of the mess it created over the past 8 years because there’s a new guy in office trying to clean it up? It’s like getting in a fight with the guy in line next to you in the cafeteria, spilling your lung tray all over the place, and then 10 minutes later trying to blame the janitor who’s come to mop up your spaghetti and chocolate pudding for creating the mess in the first place.

Thankfully, the American people have yet to show any inclination to buy this nonsense, but it is helpful to have people on TV reminding us of how nonsensical the proposition is, anyway.

Hearing Ventura go off on Bush and torture is refreshing and useful, IMHO. No one can accuse Ventura of being a lilly livered pinko.

I’m pretty sure Jesse would know about waterboarding being a former Frogman/SEAL.

SEAL “drownproofing” training is almost as miserable as from what I’ve read.

@Serolf Divad: I for one am going to heed your unintended advice, Serolf, and protect my lung tray very carefully today.

@Nabisco:

Wow, yeah… that was quite a typo.

I agree, the more people (particularly non-hippie/communists) we get on TV saying things like this, the better. I actually think that from a very practical, real-world standpoint, prosecuting all the torture enablers is difficult or impossible to do, but I have no problem with people appealing to the masses that it should be done.

This seems like a pretty good time for idealists to get a smidgeon more power, even if it’s fleeting and populist in nature. We need big fat crazy change to survive as we enter the world of climate change and economic shake-down. If “prosecute all the torturers” becomes the accepted crazy-left position, then going to the center still ends up with “let their state bar associations deal with them” as an acceptable compromise. Sure, it’s not prison, but to get those asshats out of the legal profession seems like a pretty good compromise.

@IanJ:

There’s only one logical reason that Obama, Holder and Congressional “leaders” are so desperate to obstruct justice, cover-up torture and protect the people that ordered it and carried it out: It’s still going on, and it’s the secret, yet official policy of the United States.

We are a torture regime.

We only have Obama’s word, along with the pathologically lying psychopaths at the CIA that the torture has stopped; meanwhile Obama’s (In)Justice Department is busy in court arguing for extra-Constitutional powers that even Bush didn’t claim and that foreign prisoners have no legal rights. Sick, sick, sick.

@Original Andrew: To drop a line I didn’t have room for tomorrow morning: We’re too big to fail.

@nojo: ding ding!

I’m still not convinced, however, that we are irreperably (fuck spellcheck) a torutre regime, as OA sez. And a part of me believes that the professional lying psychopaths at the CIA know that the only reason to go medieval on someone’s ass is to strike fear in them, not to get good intelligence.

But it could very well be that Hopey is learning so much shit on deep background that it’s too late to turn that particular ship around.

@Nabisco: Trust but verify.

@nojo, ‘bisco & OA: And Barry announces he’s blocking the release of the torture photos. Great…

@SanFranLefty:

And co-opts the Republican line that releasing the photos will endanger the troops. Nice. I thought our reputation as a rogue superpower that tortures and starts wars of aggression might be what endangers the troops.

It’s amazing how many people are furious about the release of the photos, and not what the photos reveal.

Why are the torturers so ah-scared, anyway? What’s the worst that could happen, other than calls for their immunity from prosecution or, at worst, retroactive legalization of their crimes?