mumbo Archives - Where Is The Outrage?

Mitt Romney lies – same as it ever was

(I wrote this for the Urban News several days ago. I wrote it before the vice presidential debate.)

One candidate’s views change with the wind

The new wave band, Talking Heads, had a song called “Once in a Lifetime.” There was a refrain in that song in which the lead singer, David Byrne, hauntingly sang, “Same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” As I watch the debates, I was thinking just that: “same as it ever was.”

Just a few months ago, I wrote a column for the Urban News that was entitled “Lies and More Lies,” in which I outlined Mitt Romney’s loose affiliation with the truth. I’m sure that President Obama as he stood at the lectern during the Wednesday night debate thought about saying, “I’ll start speaking when you say something that’s true.”

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that someone would stand up in front of the American people and tell not just one lie but, instead, a whole host of lies. In this article, I cannot recount all the lies that Mitt Romney told just in that 90-minute debate: the newspaper cannot give me enough space. But national fact checkers have come up with at least 27 separate instances where Mitt Romney simply did not tell the truth. Here are a few of them.

Romney stated he’s not going to raise taxes on middle-class families. Okay. Maybe he decided, just before he went on stage, that the tax plan on his own website was garbage and that, starting then, he would run on some other tax plan. Maybe that’s because the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center analyzed the one on his web site and said it cannot be balanced without raising taxes on the middle class. (more…)

Liz Cheney defends torture, again

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I don’t know… maybe it’s me. I find it offensive that someone would say, as Liz Cheney did, that the torture program was done carefully and responsibly. What? That may not be the craziest mumbo-jumbo that’s ever been spoken, but it has to be close. As far as I know, there are no exceptions in law for being “careful.” When you break the law, you’ve broken the law.

If you’ve noticed, the defense of torture has taken three separate avenues. Republicans have argued that torture helped save the country because it got “actionable” intelligence. Others have argued that in the hysteria of the immediate post-9/11 period, the CIA, the Defense Department and others in the Bush administration were under enormous pressure to stop the next attack… by any means necessary. Finally, conservatives have argued that the law was never broken and that this is simply partisan policy differences. No one should be prosecuted for differences in policy.

This is all horse hockey. Torture statutes are very simple. They can be understood by anyone who can read English.

(1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering;
(B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;
(C) the threat of imminent death; or
(D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.

Waterboarding, “walling” and stress positions are all clearly torture. No exception should be made for having a doctor in the room. (I question whether that doctor should have his/her license removed since this is a clear violation of every ethics code that I know.) There is no exception for protecting the subject’s neck to prevent him from breaking his neck as you throw him against the wall. This whole torture debate is simply crazy. What we did was wrong. Those who did it, those who sanctioned it and those who authorized it need to be sentenced and jailed. I understand there’s an open cells in Guantánamo.

Crooks and Liars has more.