"Kinder, Gentler Banditry [RENDITION], and Its Domestic Chaplains"

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Link to original (scroll down) here: http://www.smithbowen.net/linfame/

Al Schumann earlier posted an LA Times article explaining how Obama is going to continue kidnaping people and shipping them off to secret dungeons in friendly dictatorships (a practice known by the somewhat sanitized term "rendition").

Al's normally aquiline eye seems to have overlooked what was, for me, the best part of the story:

The decision to preserve the program did not draw major protests, even among human rights groups. Leaders of such organizations attribute that to a sense that nations need certain tools to combat terrorism.

"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "What I heard loud and clear from the president's order was that they want to design a system that doesn't result in people being sent to foreign dungeons to be tortured -- but that designing that system is going to take some time."

In the meantime -- which may be quite a long time -- the tender-hearted Mr Malinowski can live with the dungeons, the torture, etc. All in the name of "combatting terrorism." Malinowski would probably deploy the word "realistic" if you taxed him about this.

Malinowski, like many liberal-schmiberals, has put himself in the position of serving two masters, a thing we are warned against on good authority. One of his masters is the rather nebulous but earnest ideal of "human rights". But the other, it would appear, is the Empire and its mendacious categories: "fighting terrorism", for example, is what a truthful person would call "suppressing resistance." And once you allow the validity of the Empire's claims and categories, you've given the game away.

This little item came along, happily, as I was pondering the dissociation of consciousness that my incurable-Obamaphile friends seem to be practicing. They won't actually defend any of the things I enjoy mentioning to them -- rocket attacks on Pakistani villages, for example. But there's a look on their faces that suggests I'm somehow being pedantic, or silly, or rude.

This is why I'm sometimes tempted to argue that people like Obama are actually worse than people like Bush, at least for the moral character of liberals. Back when Bush was kidnapping and torturing pro imperio, my liberal friends were quite willing to deplore these things. But now that Obie is doing it, it's sorta tacky to bring it up in good society, and there seems to be a tacit agreement that it would be asking far too much to demand that he stop it.

In practice, my friends' love of Obama has reconciled them to activities that they would otherwise reprehend.

This can't be comfortable for them. So they seem to have had recourse to what old Dr Freud referred to as a splitting of consciousness. The split components then pursue independent and indeed contradictory courses of action. One side tends the flame of high humanitarian moral standards -- by contributing, for example, to groups like Human Rights Watch -- and the other side kicks back in a cozy, well-lit, tastefully-appointed, book-lined living room of the mind with a big portrait of the Kidnapper-In-Chief above the mantelpiece.

Neither component wants to be reminded of the other's existence, and so when one is tactless enough to bring them into contact, they agree -- temporarily -- in exasperation at one's ham-fisted gaucherie.

It will be interesting to see how long they can keep this up.