New Man!

Being a boy in the fifties, one of the regular games that I played with the neighborhood kids was "Guns". Yes, that's what we called it, as opposed to, say, baseball or football. We were usually inspired by a Saturday matinee down at the Strand Theater.

"Guns" was usually either a replay of World War II or the winning of the West. With either actual real toy guns or sticks went blam blam blam at each other.

During the course of an afternoon of "Guns" all of us the kids would be "shot." Of course, not really shot, but if you are standing in the middle of a yard and someone aims a stick at you and goes blam blam blam, well, you can't rationally claim that you weren't shot or that the other guy missed you. Then again, unlike real life, playing guns lasted all afternoon and if you got shot in the first minute of the game you couldn't just lay there for three or four hours until dinnertime. So, the invention of "New man!"

Once you were "shot," after a dramatic fall clutching your chest, you could jump back up and shout "New man!" and then rejoin the war as a new human being. This was a wonderful process, and you could reanimate dozens of times during the course of a game.

I was reminded of this during the Mukasey hearings for the new Attorney General. What is clear is that the last guy, Alberto Gonzales, oversw if not personally committed all sorts of violations of law and Constitution and oversaw others. This is not a good thing for the top law enforcement officer of a nation. If you or I committed the crimes that ol' Abu, as he's known in genital electrocutors' circles, is accused of, well, you'd be in jail. At the very least, the next guy in the Attorney General's seat would have to ensure that such law-breaking would not ever happen again and the bad guy/bad guys who did the law-breaking would be punished.

I don't hear much of that coming out of the Mukasey hearings. I hear that he doesn't break laws like Gonzo did. But I don't hear anyone ask what he's going to do about all this criminality in high places. I don't hear about his position on prosecuting Gonzales, or Gonzales' puppetmaster. How come? Why aren't Democrats asking the hard questions? Why aren't they demanding that Republican criminals be punished for breaking laws?

This is not unlike Nancy Pelosi's problem with the NSA's illegal (yes, not authorized by law and in violation of the Constitution) spying program. When these crimes were discovered it was sold by the Bush Administration under the slogan, "After 9/11 everything changed." That is, Don't you want us to catch Osama, you pinko? But the problem is that the NSA was illegally spying on us at least seven months prior to 9/11. Nancy Pelosi is in the uncomfortable position of having gone along with this as she admitted in a Washington Post op-ed. The question is how long did she know. Since nothing seems to be getting done about it, since what once was crime is now becoming law, one really does have to wonder what the hell is wrong with Washington.

Who's worse, the criminals or the people who refuse to act against the criminals?

And with the way the Dems are caving on the NSA/FISA, er, problem, it's like after the robbery they are helping the robbers load up their truck. Huh?

When I noticed the kid glove treatment extended Mukasey because he hadn't publicly been witnessed torturing, robbing or killing anyone, the first thought that crossed my mind was "New Man!" Everything prior to his nomination had gone down the Memory Hole. We will no longer be troubled with Alberto's crimes and misdemeanors. Apparently, the morale in the Justice Department is down, as one top-of-the-hour news blip explained yesterday, and gee whiz Mukasey will be able to buck up everyone's spirit. Mukasey won't let 'em get their dauber down, no sir! Presumably, some the team spirit of some people in the Justice Department was lowered by the knowledge that their last leader was more loyal to the White House than to the law. But not anymore!

Here I give the simple reason why we really don't have a fully-functioning democracy anymore. Why laws are broken by the people at the top. Why Congress is impotent. As the greatly-slimed New Orleans DA Jim Garrison said in 1967, regarding the 1963 coup in Dallas:

The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions, and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.

1967 was sort of like today, eh? Many people who didn't notice it then still don't notice it. Nor do they notice the causes for this situation. They didn't see the changes that we've gone through as a country over the last forty years. Oh, every once in awhile the curtain slips and we see the terrible, horrible truth about what's happened to democracy and personal freedom, and the Republicans shout: "New Man!"

And the Democrats play along. Why? Well, they don't drive through downtown Dallas in a convertible anymore. But there's always a torch singer in a Little Rock bar to snare you, or maybe an unfortunate photo in the Enquirer of your flabby self in a bathing suit on the deck of The Monkey Business with a nubile young miss on your lap. Or maybe your airplane will crash. You ever notice how many liberal Democrats die in airplane crashes? Or maybe some guy who's been funneling money illegally to Republican candidates slips you a few bucks and only you get busted. Or maybe someone came to you and explained all the little details of your life that are on file somewhere. As a wag once explained this new age of ours: Beds, bullets and blackmail. In a world where people's lives, reputations, careers are so easily controlled, and if necessary, crushed, what can a Democrat do?

"New man!"

Comments

[Girlfriend]

That is really cute. My little serial killer.