That Putin Feeling

In Paris just now, a kooky charming friend of ours there -- a woman from the Balkans -- put it very simply: "America," she said, "is a country based on an idea. George Bush has destroyed that idea."

Out of the mouth of kooks...

George Bush and his enablers, I'd say.

Such as my senator, Charles Schumer. He says he will vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as Atty General, despite Mukasey' equivocation on whether water boarding is torture and illegal. I called his office to express disgust, outrage, etc etc. (There's an art to not sputtering in these situations, which I hope one day to master.) I told them I voted for him twice, but I will not vote for him again. (And so...?)

Schumer's defenses of his decision, in comments last Friday and in a NY Times op-ed Monday, are so full of tortured logic, question-beggings, and self-contradictions that I'm surprised his computer's spell-check didn't lock up.

Does Schumer himself not believe what most of us -- other than Bush, Cheney ,and their inner circle, and overseas ilk -- believe: that water boarding is illegal and torture? If so, how can he approve as highest legal officer in the land someone who would equivocate on this issue? How on earth can he claim such a person would restore the integrity of the Justice Dept?

Pray tell what you mean by integrity?

How can Schumer claim that Chairman of the W'Board Cheney and his henchman David Addington haven't "gotten" to Mukasey -- when it's the very war criminals in the White House (what else call them?) who are the ones being protected by Mukasey's hemming and hawing on this issue?

There's a fine piece by Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice offering some insight on the above questions, detailing Schumer's connections to Mukasey.

And this is not to touch on Mukasey's Constitution-wracking opinions on unitary executive and Bush's right to ignore laws when he thinks necessary. Not to mention Mukasey's past actions on behalf of Mr. Police Riot, Rudy Giuliani, involving subpoenaing lawyers to give evidence against their clients, etc.

Integrity, eh?

I was recently in Russia for a couple of weeks. I snapped these photo below from the car. Know what this building is?

This is KGB (now FSB) headquarters in St. Petersburg, where Vladimir Putin started his career. Who knows what went on in there, or for that matter still goes on. (Maybe some recipe testing? Putin's paternal grandfather was the personal cook for Lenin and Stalin).

Russia is one very disturbing place. No one considers it a democracy anymore, of course. But Putin is popular, having brought stability and sense of national might, even if everyone is at the mercy of how the state decides to interpret laws on the books at its whim. And you are asking for trouble in the extreme if you're considered troublesome.

The price of oil underwrites all this: $98 a barrel right now. If Cheney gets his attack on Iran, who knows high oil prices will go? Russia's production is actually down. But as long as prices go up....

The remnants of the Soviet era are everywhere in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite the Lexus dealerships and the gleaming Range Rovers, one has visceral sense of the oppressions of history: the massive Soviet architecture that turns apartment buildings into looming public monstrosities (albeit pretty cozy inside); the inhumanly scaled avenues, eight lanes wide; the hammer and sickle decorations still on the edifices; the subway mural mosaics overflowing with visions of agricultural bounty under a government whose policies had turned its national breadbasket into a death zone.

Here is another photo from St. Petersburg: taken from the bench where KGB agents would sit everyday in the 40's and 50's to watch one the land's great poets, Anna Akhmatova, wave from the window above the door there, to show she hadn't fled, or escaped it all through suicide.

To survive, Akhmatova even came to write poems praising Stalin, who had tortured and killed so many in her life.

It is the monumental hypocrisy of the totalitarian state that does the big daily Orwellian headjob on one. And the resonances with the hypocrisy of US under Bush can't help but echo. When Bush speaks of the spread of democracy, who doesn't groan in sickened laughter and derision, and a twitch of fear, especially if you're entering or leaving the country? (Wealthy Russians, who love to travel, won't come to the US any more, I'm told. They don't want the humiliations, the two hours interviews just to get a visa.)

Who can listen to Bush saying "We don't torture," and not realize he is doing everything he can with his nominations to protect himself against the obvious charges of his criminality?

A criminality that corrupts those participate and those who enable. See this timeless essay by Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident who was a torture victim.

George Soros at one point said that the first election of Bush was about Bush. The second was about America.

A country that used to be based on an idea.

I'll close with another, piquant photo: Brezhnev and his posse. Any resonances for you?

Thanks to Uber.com, where this piece first appeared on my blog Brain Flakes.
Also at www.smirkingchimp.com.