“Yes, a majority of Americans said they were against such measures, but let’s not brush past the obvious point: a third of the country is an alarming number of people.”
The problem with making a point like Steve Benen’s is not that it is somehow wrong or grotesquely exaggerated. Rather, the problem is that such straightforward, dramatic statements find themselves anywhere near the realm of American reality.
“In a press release Thursday, the committee accused the Pentagon of not being upfront about what it knew:”
This is a pet peeve.
Look: “Upfront” is not a word.
Two brief notes:
• Of course it was Americans.
• On the upside, at least they didn’t require rescue from a giant vagina.
Don’t get me wrong; the United States has not gone nearly as batshit in the last week as we did after 9/11 on the torture-and-stripping-civil-liberties front (and we haven’t declared war on the Tsarnaevs’ native Chechnya — or, worse, mistakenly declared war on the Czech Republic — which, after the Bush Administration, feels like a laudable bit of restraint on our part). But maybe we haven’t gone as crazy as before because, after Bush-era wiretapping laws and Guantanamo and too many other terrible policies that President Obama has failed to defuse, we just don’t have that many rights left to chuck into the fire.
Really, it’s worth your time, whether a fellow American or international neighbor, to read through Paul Constant’s open letter to Canadians for Prairie Dog, a Saskatchewan alternative newspaper, about life in these United States:
You guys, it’s getting weird down here.
Don’t get me wrong. Life in the United States is often weird, because we’re petrified of being bored. There’s always some actor who says something outrageous for us to swoon and bleat over, or some bored office worker who scrabbles together a perfect stop-motion Lego copy of the original Star Wars trailer. None of it is particularly meaningful, but there’s always more of it, at least; there’s always something new to gawp at. We’ve always been relentlessly weird.
The Boston bombing, ricin-laced mail, rights versus security, Alex Jones, and even Michael Jackson. How does all that tie together? Well, take a few minutes and find out.
This Is 