Meet Me At Camera Three

Cartoonists Against Crime Day
Saint Crispin's Day
Sourest Day
Birthday - Pablo Picasso (artist)
Independence Day (Kazakhstan)
Retrocession Day (Taiwan)

 

I signed another petition yesterday that said, in essence, that George W. Bush is like Darth Vader, only without the redeeming qualities.*

 

While he didn’t mean it about the Military Commisions Act, I think Lewis Black summed up the way our rights are progressing perfectly well when he screamed “We’re going fucking backwards!” I am of the opinion that anyone with any sense could see why this bill is Bad, but it was signed anyway, indicating that either I am wrong or that fewer people than I thought have sense. So, please, allow me to explain what ‘sinking to their level’ means.

 

Here’s the reason that removing suspected terrists’ right to habeas corpus and giving our military the legal right to torture them to protect our country is a Bad Thing: it makes us the bad guys.

 

Now, this does not mean that The Terrists become the good guys. The Terrists are psychotic whack jobs. But what Our Fearless Leaders aren’t asking is why we consider them to be psychotic whack jobs. Where is the line between them and us? What makes us fundamentally different from Those Crazy Bastards?

 

Simple. We say they are crazy bastards because they don’t respect basic, common human decency.  They do bad things to people. They torture and rape and maim and humiliate and kill.  My god, man! They’re evil because they do such horrible things without remorse!

 

We say we are the good guys because we don’t do horrible things like that. We must protect ourselves from people like that, because people like that are bad, and we are better than them.

 

So what does that make us when we do shit that we say they are bad for?

 

It makes us bad guys.

 

And then we can’t justify saying that we’re better than them, because we aren’t.

 

That’s why the Military Commissions Act is a Bad Thing.

 

 

*Since you asked, the voice of James Earl Jones, the final redemption, and intrinsic cool badassery that puts the super in supervillain.

The Trouble With Tribbles, and Ghosts

No fewer than three packages in the mail today, as well as Netflix!

 

I got tea! Yogi Hibiscus Paradise.  Now the Fortress of Terror is complete. Also, the Dude sent me a couple of video games, including 妹’s well-traveled copy of Luigi’s Mansion, the perfect Halloween game.

 

And Mom sent me Liz’s birthday present, because Mom is awesome. It was, I daresay, a stroke of genius on my part, although Mom did all the work.

 

For her birthday, I got Liz a tribble.

 

It was simple. Get some furry-type material, sew it into a ball, and presto! you’ve got yourself a literal ball of fluff.

 

Liz named it Denny Crane.

 
Fuzzy!