Hedges Don't Hedge

Chris Hedges, as usual, nails it

The only way the rule of law will be restored, if it is restored, is piece by piece, extradition by extradition, trial by trial. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and John Ashcroft will, if we return to the rule of law, face trial. The lawyers who made legal what under international and domestic law is illegal, including not only Rizzo but Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, David Addington, William J. Haynes and John Yoo, will, if we are to dig our way out of this morass, be disbarred and prosecuted. Our senior military leaders, including Gen. David Petraeus, who oversaw death squads in Iraq and widespread torture in clandestine prisons, will be lined up in a courtroom, as were the generals in Argentina, and made to answer for these crimes. This is the only route back. If it happens it will happen because a few courageous souls such as the attorney and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, are trying to make it happen. It will take time—a lot of time; the crimes committed by Bianco and the two former officers sent to prison this month are nearly four decades old. If it does not happen, then we will continue to descend into a terrifying, dystopian police state where our guards will, on a whim, haul us out of our cells to an amusement park and make us ride, numb and bewildered, on the kiddie train, before the next round of torture.

If you've not run across Hedges before, he is one of too few voices that refuse to be tempered by the mainstream media onslaught that we are in danger from terrorists and government spending on social programs.

Where are the voices in media decrying shrink-wrapped pallets of cash, the multi-trillion dollar bailouts to capitalists who are all free-market-don't-regulate-you'll-kill-the-economy, that is until they destroy the economy, the $2.3 Trillion Rumsfeld admitted was missing from the Pentagon budget (announced, conveniently enough, on September 10, 2001?

Any person who tells you our financial problems--any of them, including government debt--is due to social program expenditures or teacher pensions is simply and gloriously wrong.

Maybe they're lying, maybe they're merely stupid--

But. They. Are. Wrong.

If you need a little more convincing that we do indeed need to watch the little man behind the curtain, check Glenn Greenwald's brilliant speech here.

Cry, if you must.

I did.

Yes. Well.

Apparently all it takes to shift one's mood from apocalyptic despair to grinning mirth and optimism is a week deep in the happy confines of the Oregon Country Fair.

If you hail from the Midwest as I do, "Country Fair" conjures up images of massive produce and livestock displays, and butter sculptures, sure. Cotton candy, carnival rides (manned by suspiciously maimed personnel missing digits or hands or entire lower arms, one presumes from working with machinery with many moving parts designed solely to hurl humans about in ways only the young or mad can enjoy without puking)...squealing pigs, corn on the cob steamed and dipped in vats of melted butter, quilting demonstrations--your basic agricultural fair.

The Oregon Country Fair, is, um, nothing like that.

Like Burning Man, trying to explain it poses many problems, not the least of which is the fact that the "Real Fair" is an invitation-only private party for the 4000 or so volunteers who remain in the camps through the night. Burning Man is huge, fiery, public, MadMax. The OCF is sedate, private, hippie-hobbits in the Shire with plenty of Pipeweed and the odd mushroom bon-bon.

Point is, it pulled me back from the brink, and I remember why I love humanity, even as I plumb the depths of misanthropy.