Give thanks that you have a soul
is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in December 1776 in “The Crisis.” At least it does for those who have them.
I finished Sarah Stillman’s “Disappeared to a Foreign Prison” last night and it was everything I’d feared. Bush-Cheney goons 20 years ago snatched suspected terrorists off the streets (sometimes mistaken terrorists) and shipped them off to prisons in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan for torture out of sight of the press. Trump-Miller-Noem & Co. are deporting to third-country prisons immigrants they’ve snatched who cannot be sent back to their home countries. What happens to them after that is not Trump 2.0’s problem, much like they attempted with CECOT in El Salvador but got caught. So now they have enlisted more remote African nations to do their dirty work.
The remorseless lies and deep wells of cruelty behind these actions will make them notorious in time. The masterminds behind Bush-Cheney extraordinary rendition campaign never stood in the dock in the U.S. or The Netherlands. I despair that those Shanghaiing undocumented immigrants off to African hell-hole prisons won’t either.
Lying is company policy
Let’s review a line I read once and never forgot:
A long time ago, in a high school far, far away, a decade before the breakup of Ma Bell, I read a book about corporate rip-offs.
It included a tale of a private school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC that (IIRC) had a run of burned-out clutches in its fleet of brand new buses. Despite his repeated complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the maker’s regional manager who claimed that no other customers had experienced similar problems. This was a lie. The owner had contacted other fleet owners by long distance and letter (remember when this was) and had a file of receipts. Yet the regional manager insisted the breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers.
The money quote went something like this: “He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
Behold Stephen Miller:
“The highest year-over-year inflation rate observed in the U.S. since its founding was 29.78% in 1778.” – Investopedia
People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.
David Bier of Cato assembled a pie chart to show how few of those rounded up by DHS for deportation fit the administration’s “worst of the worst” narrative.
DHS spokesliar Tricia McLaughlin responded that Bier had made it up.
Bier replied with a link to data from DHS itself and wrote, “Just checking in on Tricia’s soul now that she knows that my data is accurate. Is her “soul” better now?”
Lying is company policy.
But the rot goes deeper. See the relentless cant from the right that Democrats they’ve branded [I’m not going to repeat it] instructed soldiers in a video to disobey legitimate orders from the God Emperor of Mar-a-Lago. They did just the opposite.
It’s not clear which of the denizens of the online fever swamps suffer from a severe lack of reading and listening comprehension and which simply know their mission is to lie anyway. Because lying is company policy.
Today give thanks that you have a soul. After reading Stillman’s story and the New York Times piece Digby spotlighted yesterday, I feel like these will end up in the evidence files of trials that will never happen. There is evil afoot with a capital “E.”
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Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?
No King’s One Million Rising movement
50501
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense