C-SPAN: Senate Vote to Confirm Alberto Gonzales
OK, so now the man who advocated torture is our Attorney General. He assures us that the administration and his office will never allow or condone torture. Of course, by his own definition, torture must be acts that are equivalent in pain to the loss of limb, malfunctioning of an organ, or imminent death. That awful stuff you saw from Abu Ghraib? Not really torture in Gonzalez’ mind. The awful stuff they did to John McCain in Vietnam? Not really torture.
All the Republicans who voted approved Gonzalez. That’s to be expected. I don’t expect morality or ethics from Republicans, I expect loyalty and profit-motive. I did hold out hope that perhaps that senator who had been tortured interrogated with tactics approved by the Bybee Memo, John McCain, might have a lapse in wingnut-loyalty, but no, he voted for AbuGhraibo Gonzalez as well. That dream of a presidential run in 2008 just won’t survive unless McCain kisses Bush’s ass, huh?
Thirty-six decent human beings voted against Gonzalez — 35 Democrats and 1 Independent. Nice to see them stand for something. However, they just can’t enforce party loyalty like the Reich-wing can. Six Democrats voted for Gonzalez: Landrieu (D-LA), Lieberman (D-CT) (ah, so that’s what Bush’s peck on the cheek was for!), Nelson, Ben (D-NE), Nelson, Bill (D-FL), Pryor (D-AR), and Salazar (D-CO) (who just couldn’t bring himself to not support another guy with a “Z” in his name). You six are cancers that must be excised from the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Burns, C. (R-MT), Baucus, M. (D-MT), Conrad (D-ND), and Inouye (D-HI) couldn’t even be bothered to vote on the issue. What, torture is just too nuanced an issue for you to offer an opinion?
The most shameful part of the process was listening to every Repug get up and praise the fact that Gonzalez would be our first Hispanic Attorney General. So fucking what? I’ve long believed that part of the reason American culture is so racist is that we continue to treat race as if it is a factor that matters. No one crows about so-and-so being the first Irish-American to… or the first Italian-American to… because it doesn’t matter. Neither do we praise the first blonde female to… or the first blue-eyed left-hander to… Maybe if we treated race as an unremarkable physical characteristic, we could get to that part of Dr. King’s dream where we “judge a man not by the color of his skin, but the content of his character.” And by that measure, I could care less whether Gonzalez wears a sombrero and sings the Spanish lyrics to “La Cucaracha”* while frying up a burrito on a clay stove in an adobe hut in Las Cruces. The content of the man’s character trumps the race card.
*I think I shall call him AbuGhraibo “La Cucaracha” Quaintzalez from now on. Particularly because I anticipate him pursuing the War on [Some Americans With Certain] Drugs with the same ethical zeal and moral compass as the War on [Countries That Have Absolutely No Link To WMD’s or] Terror. Because “La Cucaracha” (as some of you may know) is a song with a chorus about smoking marijuana:
La cucaracha, la cucaracha, (The cockroach, the cockroach,)
Ya no puede caminar; (Doesn’t want to travel on)
Porque no tiene, porque le falta (Because she hasn’t, Oh no, she hasn’t)
Marijuana que fumar. (Marijuana for to smoke)