The Paxton Pundit - by Stacey Youdin

Adhesive Tape
The President, he's got his war
Folks don't know just what it's for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We're chicken-feathers, all without one nut. God damn it!
Tryin' to make it real� compared to what? (Sock it to me)
Gene McDaniel Compared to What? 1968

The senior senator from New York has taken his duty to advise and consent to a new level of cowardice. The AP reported, Friday, he and Dianne Feinstein would vote to confirm the attorney general nominee: "'This is an extremely difficult decision,' Schumer said in a statement, adding that Mukasey 'is not my ideal choice.'"

Methinks the senator has so often conflated partisanship and principle that he is incapable of applying the appropriate one at the right time.

These are times which call for a line in the sand. The rare opportunity has presented itself.

There is no place in a democracy (of any variety) for the kind of newspeak which surrounds our nation's willing abrogation of international law and treaty. Following in a string of newfangled concoctions like preemptive warfare and hegemony on steroids, comes the notion that we don't torture because we call it an enhanced technique.

Does Mr. Mukasey consider the techniques we have recently found out about to be torture?

His cagey non-answer answers reflected the administration's cocksure wielding of power, much more than a reassuring nod to the supremacy of the rule of law.

This, honorable Mr. Schumer, is not a time for vote trading toward some future accommodation. This is the time for a US senator to stand in contradistinction to an executive derelict in his defense of the Constitution.

It is not the time to apply the test of percentage acceptability when it is the test of whether any man is above the law which is the matter at hand.

If I'm supposed to take my lumps for being a "good German" because of my proud membership in "we the people," then that's certainly sauce for the senators, too.

They are well beyond the "fool me twice" stage in their relationships with Dubbya.

You don't cave when the most important question before you is whether the nation's lawyer will answer to the president or the rule of law. This nominee hedged, hemmed and/or hawed at the proverbial, critical juncture.

Dubbya spouts a doctrine of we weren't supposed to find out about the exact tortures employed in our names, so he gets to keep calling them techniques. He's just like any guy with an opinion, in that regard.

With all due respect to the two senators, there is no sliding scale of acceptability possible when a nominee manifests an unacceptable attribute during the confirmation hearing. He did, and therefore would go to the mattresses to cover Dubbya's ass.

There is no caving in matters of principle. The tortures of Torquemada have no place in a modern world. We even gave the world our word we wouldn't do it. We have done it. Now what?

The question is whether to delay the judgement of history by endorsing the president's clumsy, transparent, Orwellian workaround. That's the nuts sack in a crude nutshell. "Chicken feathers, all without one nut." That's how the "hundred pounds of clay" guy described that before time which was supposed to warn us of this time.

Quagmire repeated. No return. (No, there isn't really an "I Ching" verse which says this.)

So much is transpiring in the wings which deserves more attention than the war in Iraq (and soon the region) but we are being inundated with more story line where there might be less, less alarm where where there might be more, and there's that droning malaise which the country has never experienced where there used to be some 'Johnny going off to war' collective effort.

This is not solely Dubbya's doing. It is the reactionary radical legacy which goes back to the 80's.

Think on this. In 1920, every medicine cabinet had gauze pads and adhesive tape. In 1921, Earle Dickson thought to put a bit of gauze on a bit of tape and his boss, one of the and Johnson's, began making the Band-Aid®.

Sales were sluggish at the start, but a promotional giveaway to the Boy Scouts of America made the brand name an American icon. Finding a clever formula such as this was a ticket to the penthouse in the Gilded Age.

Today, under the radar, our versions of the robber barons are having things their way. There is no outrage in response, no hyperbole possible which hasn't been pre-conditioned to have its effect short circuited. When, eventually, we learn of the ramifications of Bush's sundry doctrines, we will have a Democratic administration charged with fixing it yesterday.

And so it goes.

The savvy reader believes, one hopes, that the truth is approachable, yet remains skeptical of the microwaveable variety.

The Band-Aid® may have been perfect for 1921, let's hope, but it was fifteen years before they offered a sterilized version.

In public life, there's salesmanship and then there's statesmanship. The defining difference is our collective response, not extra marketing.

Tide® may get to be twice as good every two years but we ought to be wary of the crowd which tries to sell its radical ideas as improvements. They are not new and/or better if they destroy the fabric of the country.

Mr. Mukasey, despite his credentials, now exists as a sales pitch. May the buyers beware.

Next week: The Unrelenting Grind

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