I feel that in regards to the current revelations about the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, there is only one reasonable conclusion to come to: People who continue to support the actions of this administration are insane. Plain and simple, I don’t think that this is terribly difficult a concept to understand. Here we have an administration that has failed at every major undertaking it has pursued, whose ideas about the economy, about foreign policy, energy policy and such have all been proven to be wrong. Catastrophically horribly wrong.

But that’s almost an aside. Let’s look at the prisoner abuse. And I’m not saying this is the world’s worst atrocity, I’m not saying that this is worse than the holocaust, or what have you. It is what it is, and by my comments, I do not want to make it any more or less than that. But look at it. Here we have a public revelation that the US, while claiming the “torture rooms” are closed, are torturing our prisoners. We have, basically, claimed moral superiority while wallowing in the same depravity we are publicly condemning. Not only that, we have an administration so fantastically incompetant that they could not, or would not surpress such behaviour on their own, and would do nothing about it until photographic evidence which would ignite a tremendous public backlash all over the world were released.

What kind of grotesque incompetance leads to such behaviour? And more over, what kind of depravity *DEFENDS AND SUPPORTS* such actions? Bush has said that Rumsfeld is an important part of his cabinet, and will remain so. Does this not strike anyone else as a complete and total abandonment of accountability? Not that this hasn’t happened before, and not that this isn’t practically Bush’s Modus Operandi. But the point, the plain and simple point, is that this administration let this happen. They let the actions happen in the first place, and they let the evidence that it was happening get out. This is a *catastrophic* failure of accountability, and of public relations, and at a bare minimum, it should be obvious that Rumsfeld, at least, should be out.

But more than that, it shows to me that for someone even marginally cognizant of our image, worldwide, this administration HAS to be upended, by the American people, to show the world that we *can* be accountable for our actions, that we *do* feel a sense of responsibility, and that we will *NOT* be overrun by tyrannical zealots.

And frankly, it worries me. Because if we do not boot this administration, in order to believe that democracy still works, I must believe that the American public, by and large, not only completely devoid of a sense of morality, devoid of a sense of accountability, but completely fucking insane. If this is to happen, my friend Alan put it really well, though he was talking about the draft – so I’ll paraphrase.

I love my country. But if Bush wins in 2004, that country will be Canada.