a hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut

I’ve been meaning to write about President Obama’s implicit support for penile torture. Glenn Greenwald had a pretty comprehensive summary. Basically what the Obama administration has done is apply the Bush administration position on the state secrets privilege: the expansive use of the privilege to get entire cases thrown out of court, whereas earlier administrations had only used it to suppress certain pieces of evidence.

One of the judges on the three-judge panel explicitly asked the DOJ lawyer, Doug Letter, whether the change in administrations had any bearing on the Government’s position in this case. Letter emphatically said it did not. Instead, he told the court, the new administration — the new DOJ — had actively reviewed this case and vetted the Bush positions and decisively opted to embrace the same positions.

After eight years of nauseating crimes by the Bush administration, now we’re beginning to find out what hypocritical shits most American liberals are. Sure, this is a reversal from Obama’s campaign position on the secrets issue, but he gave ample warning of his predilections for authoritarianism and reneging on promises when he voted for the FISA overhaul. Now he wants to deny legal recourse to a man who was kidnapped, tortured genitally, and threatened with rape and electrocution. Everything’s OK as long as our president listens to hip-hop and uses a Mac, right? Our leaders’ awareness of hipster shibboleths is the truest test of our democracy! No wonder this country is such a shithole.

And only several days later, the administration invoked the state secrets privilege again, in a case regarding warrantless government surveillance. And here’s more about what the NSA’s been up to lately.

By the way, only in an utterly debased age would a man be considered a “style icon” when he can’t even wear the right shirt with white-tie apparel, and shows up at his inaugural ball in some kind of bastardized notched-lapel white-bowtie dinner-jacket fashion teratoma. President Obama displays the same Bushesque scorched-earth attitude toward sartorial aesthetics that he does toward human rights and the rule of law. Seriously, Barry, you look like a dweeb. Go read a book by Alan Flusser and stop hurting my eyes with that crap.

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