Gonzales is In…

Alberto Gonzales has been confirmed and sworn in as our new Attorney General of the United States of America. And so the denial of any sort of conscience concerning the wholesale violation of human rights that our once-proud country now engages in continues. Having started with the presidential election of 2004, we now confirm and embrace the architect of the policies that have ruled at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib.

We’ve sent a message to the rest of the world, loud and clear: the practice of democracy in the USA is too weak, too insecure, to both retain its principles and also meet the challenge posed by motley groups of barely-organized thugs.

Congratulations, thugs, you have humbled the USA in a way that I could not have believed would come to pass within my lifetime. You may not get us to change our foreign policy or capitulate to any of your demands, but you did get us to give up the practice of recognizing innate human rights as a matter of course, to reverse centuries of jurisprudence and consider people guilty until proved innocent, and to deny certain liberties even to our own citizens. Ah, well, the society we built and nurtured up until a few years ago was a nice experiment while it lasted.

The Rude Pundit held forth on the peculiar position of Senator John McCain who voted to confirm Gonzales, and is also the only member of the Senate known to have himself undergone treatment that we used to call “torture” before Gonzales helped redefine the term. While I generally don’t go in for the profanity that marks the Rude Pundit’s posts, the content is on the money in this one.