Lee Harvey Libby

disinformation capture courtesy of Daily Kos.

"So I'm the patsy..." must have been running through Scooter's head this long year, knowing that he is the one to take one for BushCo, to take one for the vile conduct of this corrupt administration, knowing that his head in the proverbial noose is the official place holder Darth Cheney.

But, hey, relax Buddy...You'll get pardoned for being such a loyal soldier, and this act will pretty well sum up Bush's legacy of Executive Malfeasance, Global Treachery, and Treason.

Update: A Cold Beer Reflection (in my frosty freezer Bengals Mug)

"Oh no, not me

I never lost control

You're face to face

With The Man Who Sold The World"

\

Boston Lager: The best beer brewed in Cincinnati-ever (I'm old enough to remember the other local offerings, and if you are nostalgic for Hudy DeLight, Weidemann, Schoenling, then you need your head examined).

Anyway.

Maybe pardoning this son of a bitch is the best thing, though not for the reasons the NRO give.

Certainly, if we are to trust the "mandate", then maybe now the Democrats will quit dickin' around with Bush, quit dickin' around with Parliamentary shell games, and do what we put them there to do: End the War.

Most of us who aren't smelling yesterday's breakfast festering in our colons have known for YEARS what a sham this whole thing is, from conception to execution, but what most people in the media and in government are failing to ascertain is the sheer immorality of the exercise: We went into this based on bald bullshit which was clear for all who bothered to look, even back in 2002, and to claim that "we didn't know" or "that we were misled" is in and of itself an even balder bullshit equivocation: We knew...you didn't want to (yeah Hillary, I'm looking at you...).

You are tools. Yes. Tools.

Kant tells us that people are a priori to be treated as ends in and of themselves, and never as means: the human being is always a subject. Those "misled" fools on the hills allowed to themselves to be means, allowed themselves to be objects. De Beauvoir, in her Ethics of Ambiguity, calls these creatures "serious men" in that they deny their own subjectivity, and must therefore, deny the subjectivity of others, seeing people as means to an end. When the "misled" fools allowed themselves to be "misled", they forgot their humanity in favor of a neocon fantasy; choosing to be facillitators of history, they forgot the stuff of history, and, often times, its victims: The people-three thousand plus of ours, hundreds of thousands of Iraq's. The sad part is that these "fools" are allegedly the good guys. We expect the Administration and its sycophants to violate Kant's principle and conform to the very definition of the "serious men" because that's what cryptofascists are.

Thus, an enterprise such as this, began immorally, cannot be made moral because Iraq is now broken, and our continued presence there now threatens the peace in the region. Once objectified, always objectified.

However, there exists yet a chance at a redemption (it is Lent, after all) for our nation and its people, and that chance, believe it or not, may lie in the fact that Libby probably won't do a minute of time: If we use this opportunity, this official testimony of an Administration gone imperial, with no oversight, with no moral sense beyond the lip service it pays to its adherents, the official testimony of an Administration illegal to the point of being war criminals abroad and tyrannical at home, to actually go after these bastards who have objectified us all in service of the mythic "America", just as Hitler did with the "volk" of "Greater Deutchsland", we can reclaim our soul, reclaim our creed from these "serious men".

To accomplish this, at the very least, the Democrats who voted for this disaster need to publicly declare "Mea Culpa", and then, act like they have a spine. Immediate investigations into Cheney and Rove, because the testimony of the court as well as the testimony of the people make it such that, beyond reasonable doubt, that both are up to their fat wasp asses in this, and Libby is the patsy. Move to impeach Cheney.

Whether or not that happens, if Libby is incarcerated pending his appeal and Bush pardons him to keep his ass out of the slam, then I say, go after Bush as well.


Slainte!

P.S.: If any of you "conservatives", either in congress or out in the world have a conscience left, you'll follow it and get on board with this. Are you a Republican first, or a responsible citizen of these United States?


After all, deep down, you know I'm right...

Update to the Update:Rintrah Roar's First Epistle to The_Wizard:

Fri 3/9/2007 1:36 AM

"Before I get all uppity and rip you a new asshole, please help me to make sense of this paragraph:

Kant tells us that people are a priori to be treated as ends in and of themselves, and never as means: the human being is always a subject. Those "misled" fools on the hills allowed to themselves to be means, allowed themselves to be objects. De Beauvoir, in her Ethics of Ambiguity, calls these creatures "serious men" in that they deny their own subjectivity, and must therefore, deny the subjectivity of others, seeing people as means to an end. When the "misled" fools allowed themselves to be "misled", they forgot their humanity in favor of a neocon fantasy; choosing to be facillitators of history, they forgot the stuff of history, and, often times, its victims: The people-three thousand plus of ours, hundreds of thousands of Iraq's. The sad part is that these "fools" are allegedly the good guys. We expect the Administration and its sycophants to violate Kant's principle and conform to the very definition of the "serious men" because that's what cryptofascists are.

So means is agency, no? That is, the way in which a human being--a subject (as laid out in the Critique of Pure Reason--is used as an object? (Though, clearly, agency can cut both ways as passive and active depending upon the perceiver's positioning.) And ends are results, nes pas?

So we're on the same page, cf., "heteronomy," "subject," and "thing-in-itself":

"(b) Space is nothing else than the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility, under which alone external intuition is possible. Now,because the receptivity or capacity of the subject to be affected by objects necessarily antecedes all intuitions of these objects, it is easily understood how the form of all phenomena can be given in the mind previous to all actual perceptions, therefore a priori, and how it, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, can contain principles of the relations of these objects prior to all experience." (Critique of Pure Reason, "The Transcendental Aesthetic," "Of Space," Sub-section 4.b, "Conceptions of the foregoing Conceptions ["Of Space"]).


As in "subject" in the above passage is the human being and its capacity to be affected by external phenomena and noumena (in this case space): externality which can be manipulated (for good or ill) that affect the subject's (the human being's) mind and, thus, reason.

So returning to your paragraph . . . if "the human being is always the subject," does not that then mean that the human being is also the agency, the means by which the subject (the human being) is objectified? Please help me here. I'm daft and struggling.

Oh, and I think the final "serious men" allusion may refer to de Beauvoir as you've constructed the paragraph.

So yeah. In my classes when I say that a student of mine is a student for life? . . . not empty words, my friend.

This Guinness is for you,

Rintrah Roars "


The_Wizard Replies:
(Jesus, I feel creepy referring to myself in the third person...I can practically
feel a combover happening)

Friday, March 09, 2007 1:36 AM

Okay…om om shivaya…live long and prosper…

My reading of Kant (parochial, as you know) is a simple, lefty notion of not using people to further one’s one agenda-in this case politically…kind of like how stalin loved the people, just not anybody particularly…Always with dignity.

Perhaps it was the beer that mangled the jargon, but I also found it interesting that an echo of this can be found in the decidedly un-Kantian Existentialist thought. In this realm, subjects ( emphasis squarely on people) and objects (constructed “things”, for lack of a better word, like chairs, microwave ovens, and ideological state apparatuses) are assigned phenomenologically (we experience ourselves, and then chairs or ISA’s). Agency is, as you know, the positioning of being in that phenomenological space.

But what I really love is the fact that, given this, I am alive to witness “serious men” in action, with all their death angst and transcendent nationhoods. It is the fact that they never took responsibility to become “human”, accept their termination, and move to make meaning through liberation that makes them assign that which should be subjective to the objective: agency is reversed, and people become “the people” in this field of faux nationhood. State becomes person, person becomes a cog, because if the state survives, the “serious men” escape death in a holy communion which history and their own significance. It’s the same reason why people cling to God, essentially. Or chairs.

“Serious men”, to paraphrase De Beauvoir, are “often politicians”. Or become them-the manipulators of agency, for loftier, nobler (selfish) purposes-history…

What strikes me about how wrong things have gone is that, for all their seriousness, the are, by virtue of that fact, unable to act morally-or ethically, existentially speaking, because of their twisted sense of agency. Those “misled” democrats were only misled because, in a sense, they, too, have agency confused, are “serious” and, therefore, are dicking around while Iraq and all in it sputter like the death rattle of a sucking chest wound. Was it a sputter? No, it was gurgling…”It is a shoe”…”It is a sandal”…”IT IS A SHOE”.