Padilla Padilla Padilla

I haven't been posting much lately, because every time the Bush administration puts me in a rage, other posters beat me to it. This is a good thing. I want there to be an avalanche of rage pouring down on the Bush criminals. I want my own now-six-year-old rage to be just the palest imitation of all the rage there is. Nevertheless, when I read Robert Scheer's eloquent post about Jose Padilla this morning ("Becoming What We Despise"), I thought, "He is too kind." In fact, as shocking as the treatment of Padilla has been, and as horrifying as Padilla's condition now is, and as terrifying as the fact that Padilla, a US citizen, was stripped of all of his constitutional rights and tortured without recourse just exactly as if he lived in South Africa during apartheit, or in Russia in the Stalinist period, or in any South American dictatorship you could name is, the most vile, stinking, contemptible, debased, and humiliating fact about the whole episode is that yesterday, when Padilla's condition was reported on AOL, 75% of AOL's poll responders voted FOR the government's treatment of Padilla. Apparently they did not know that he is no longer being accused of the dirty bomb crime, and apparently they didn't care ANYTHING about their constitutional rights as Americans. Gosh. I thought the Democrats won the election and that the Bush administration's policies had been repudiated.

I have to say that I can't find the poll today, so perhaps those folks who voted yesterday were a small, skewed sample, and perhaps it was Mary Cheney, whom I now discover works for AOL, who kept voting repeatedly (personally, I voted twice against the government) (and now that I know that AOL gave Mary Cheney a job, I will have to rethink having anything to do with AOL) (but on the other hand, AOL is in big trouble, so maybe Mary will lose her job before her pregnancy leave kicks in), but WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?

Anyone at all who does not find Padilla's treatment repugnant in every way, and perfect grounds for impeachment, imprisonment, and solitary confinement of everyone in charge of our government for the last five years and ten months, has devolved from a human being to a reptile. Those votes on AOL are the best argument for global-warming-as-the-fitting-end-to-the-failed-human-experiment that I've seen lately. Jose Padilla, whatever it turns out that he has done (and I bet it won't be much) is a martyr to our Constitution, and that picture of his face in black goggles should be on the wall in every classroom and in every government building and in every church in the nation.