SNOWBOARDING IS FUN. WATERBOARDING IS NOT. RICE IS AN IDIOT AND WE HAVE A BIG MOUTH!

It appears to be open season on Condoleesa Rice, first from a college kid and now from a fourth grader who are challenging her stance on waterboarding and torture. Click HERE to read the story. I often wonder, aside from our obsessive need to know everything about everyone, especially the dirty little secrets, whether we would not be better knowing nothing about what our intelligence operatives do. Which is better, having an assassination program designed to oust those leaders that pose a global security threat, and no one knows anything, or sending thousands of troops in to fight a war that will, no matter the presentation, be considered controversial, costly and not usually victorious?   Gone are the days that military might alone achieves anything. There are too many whackos, terrorists and extremists out there for us to combat traditionally. It would make more sense to have a covert operation that goes in to do the dirty work, using intelligence and years of infiltration to blend in until called upon to awaken and act. Isn't that the same premise that terrorist sleeper cells use?  Johnny Barrot next door to you, the perfect neighbor, quiet, polite, no parties until one day you see him on the news as Yusaf Barsoum or some such name having been a part of a sleeper cell of terrorists called into action. The thing is we are very loud and noisy. Before we do anything we are sure to broadcast it everywhere possible. It goes something like this.... "America will be launching a massive military strike somewhere in the middle east, sometime in the next week. For national security reasons, we cannot tell you exactly where or when, but at least ten infantry divisions, four tank divisions and five aircraft carriers will be involved."  Why do we do this? Why do our local police announce they will be putting up a DUI checkpoint? Do they think you will want to stop by? Isn't the goal to get as many DUI drivers as possible, and not the ones too drunk to remember that you broadcast the location a few hours earlier? America is criticized for everything it does. In my opinion that is because we announce everything we are doing. We have endless experts talking up a storm about what we are doing. We ask the average idiot on the street their opinion about what we are doing even though most cannot name the people in office running the country and could not identify Iraq on a map even eight years later. Why are we talking about it? Just do it. Go do the deed and don't even talk about it then. That news report would be... "Unidentified forces bombed the crap out of XYZ city today killing one hundred terrorists who did not know they were coming. " We used to have a strong contingent of spies. Reportedly we used to conduct political assassinations. Who knew? It never made the news and the assassins were never on the cover of People magazine. There was a strength to the mystique of what America could do if you were foolish enough to piss off America. The Japanese learned that after Pearl Harbor. And yet, even after dropping two atomic bombs with repercussions that still affect the descendents of the atomic bomb survivors, America was regarded as a strong country, a decent country fighting for truth and justice and that all too famous "American Way." Today we are regarded as buffoons, blundering into countries to play policeman and screwing it up, whether by one president proclaiming victory in the second week, when victory was still not apparent eight years later, or by the sheer casualty numbers created by the action that I have to wonder could not have been achieved by covert spies taking out the one guy we really, really wanted. Certainly we would have had a chance of finding the hole in the countryside he lives in a lot easier. So whether waterboarding is legal or not, it is torture. The real question is whether we need to discuss the torture we do in order to protect our country, or not. The true question is whether all the horrible things we would like to pretend we do not do, get done away from society, but people who are trained to do that and do it well. Because if we are to cry out on moral grounds about the inhumanity we do to others in the name of freedom then we'll be standing in a very long line that covers the details of corruption, pollution, big corporations screwing the public, testing products on the general populace, why education involves no actual learning, why we work harder and longer and earn less, and my favorite, why we are all turning into sheep because we do not understand the complexities of law, disclaimers and are unable to identify truth anymore even if it smacks us in the face because we have no time to think, no will to try and decipher the microprint, and no way to really discern who is bullshitting us.  In other words, we should have no moral authority to proclaim anything in the name of freedom, righteousness, Jesus or any other appellation to which you wish to ascribe. We're just not qualified as a nation. Condoleesa Rice is an idiot. A college student and a fourth grader demonstrated that quite easily. But who is the bigger idiot? The idiot or the fools who followed that idiot's leader? MisterWriter