Drugged Immigrants and Lying to the Public? So?:
At this point in our history, America is like a victim of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, held captive in a pit, softened up, and then murdered for our supple skin so that the batshit killer can prance around and imagine he's the belle of the ball. If you're living the end of your days in a chamber of horrors, then, really, nothing awful is surprising anymore. The gruel you're fed has maggots in it? Yeah, okay. You're blasted with cold water every now and then? Sure, sure, whatever. You're in a goddamn dirt pit, a pseudo-grave, fer fuck's sake. Waiting to be skinned. What the fuck else is gonna be worse?

So it is with the endless streams of revelations of how nightmarish and cynical the Bush administration actually is. The Pentagon was manipulating the media through the placement of ex-military members as "analysts" on the news networks and programs in order to hype the war? Fine, fine. What else ya got? Homeland Security is doping up immigrants for deportation? Really, what would have been shocking is if the Bush administration hadn't been shooting drugs into detainees.

That's how low we've finally sunk. America has reached the point where some reporter for the Times could discover that George W. Bush has personally authorized and encouraged a program where illegal immigrant children have been rounded up from schools and hospitals and work camps, slaughtered by Blackwater mercenaries who were given free rein to kill them in whatever way they thought necessary - knife, gun, machete, spiked-glove beating - and then told to make sure they're dead by fucking the corpses, their bodies brought to rendering factories, where, in front of their parents, the children were boiled until there was nothing left but bones, and their families, under threat of their own murder, corpse rape, and rendering, were forced to grind their children's bones into a powder, which was then mixed with other materials and poured into a mold in order to make spiky dildos that were shipped to military prisons in Iraq where CIA agents would use them to sodomize the asses of bound up "suspected terrorists" with electrodes attached to their nipples, whose screams and weeping were recorded and edited into a several-hour long loop, put on an iPod and sent to Dick Cheney, who would play it when he was alone in his office so he could get an erection to masturbate and cry over pictures of the illegal immigrant children who were killed in the first place, and the news media and most of the country would just shrug and say, "Yeah, like Dick Cheney wouldn't do that."

Of the legion of harms done to this nation by this presidency, one of the worst has been the elimination of our capacity to be appalled. The administration has just raised the bar too high. And that is a loss of innocence, in a sense, like post-Watergate or post-Kent State. When a government demonstrates what depravities it is capable of, and the people are willing to blithely accept them, then we have indeed fallen; we have been traumatized into apathy.

One of the greatest goods an Obama administration could do would be to lead us back to a place where we can feel again, where we can rightly and righteously be angered into action.