// Courtesy of my favorite Greenpoint blog, New York Shitty, as seen on a mailbox on Willoughby Avenue (for non-New Yorkers, Bed-Stuy is a neighborhood here in Brooklyn).

…well, so-called American Democracy anyway — you know, the American Democracy where the populous engages in the decision-making process only once every four years in order to choose one wealthy man to serve as the most powerful ruler in the world. What does it say about the American people and their system of governance that Bush’s judicial intervention in the prison sentence of Mr. Libby is so relatively unsurprising and yet completely unstoppable (even though the majority of the U.S. population apparently disagrees with his decision)?

What does it mean that (a) despite widespread recognition of obvious lying and deceit in making their case for a war that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, none of the major Liars-in-Chief have been held accountable (or even face the prospect of being held accountable) for their actions, and (b) that even the mere slap on the wrist (for acts that many consider to be treasonous) for the low-lying-fruit scapegoat Scooter Libby has now been rendered moot?

It’s fascinating to me that Bush even bothered to present an argument explaining his rationale for the decision. In case you missed it, it went like this:

“I respect the jury’s verdict, but I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.”

Wow, can’t argue with that. Is the Commander in Chief now also to be thought of as the Judge in Chief — is he really supposed to have the final say on issues of jurisprudence? I thought that was intended to be the job of the Supreme Court (you know, the one that made a stunning assertion last week of its newfound conservative direction under the leadership of the supposed Chief Justice, John Roberts). Ah well, so much for the system of checks and balances as a way to curb the abuse of executive power! But I guess everyone can rest easy knowing that Bush doesn’t normally take such an active interest in intervening on questions of judicial prison sentencing — that is, except when the person in question is either (a) a loyal member of his own administration, or (b) someone who’s resentment for being sold out by Rove, Cheney and Bush could have motivated him to reveal all sorts of dirty secrets about the administration during his lonely days in confinement (or in a tell-all book shortly thereafter!).

Of course, the Democratic majority in Congress would never consider trying to limit the President’s ability to exert executive privilege in matters ranging from willful rejection of Legislatively-mandated regulations, to judicial pardons and commuting sentences, because, hey, they want to have the same access to abusive power when their next turn at the wheel comes around.

Yippee!

Artist Carroll Dunham paints the Freudian id run amok. His latest efforts at Gladstone Gallery are perhaps his most violent yet. Although Dunham has always had a knack for abstract, eye-popping dynamism on canvas, I’ve long since lost interest in his brand of inward-looking, testosterone-fueled work. So I’m not so much interested here in Dunham’s new paintings, as in the meaning art critic Jerry Saltz has ascribed to them in his review for the Village Voice.

Saltz, an acknowledged long-time friend of Dunham, takes particular notice of the painting Square Mule (pictured above, right), and oddly enough, interprets it as something like a vicious political critique of contemporary American Imperialism:

“This is an image of the end of empire. It is someone getting medieval on his own ass, embodying Homeland Security and turning himself into a war machine…. This is America as a failed state…. Not only is this creature a suicide bomber, a lone gunman, and a wounded beast, he’s us—a collective body in psychic civil war.”

To my ears this sounds like a wildly stretched interpretation, to say the least. A painting of a mule sticking a gun up his ass embodies Homeland Security and a suicide bomber and America as a failed state? I wish Dunham had intended to create a work of such rich metaphorical allusion to contemporary affairs, but the painting bears too much resemblance to Dunham’s twenty-plus year obsession–adolescent, comical renderings that nearly celebrate, if not openly indulge in, depictions of male-centric sexual domination.

That Dunham has opted to have the character performing a violent act upon itself is noteworthy when compared to his other works, but it’s not enough to lead me to Homeland Security or America as a failed state. As even Saltz acknowledges, this work is coming from the man that, in the past, has frequently “denied that this thing is a character at all, identifying it instead as a ’shape’ or a set of ‘formal concerns’ and ‘painterly events’ in ‘graphic fields.’”

Maybe Saltz’s interpretation of Square Mule says more about Saltz’s proven ability to cull a dense web of poetic meaning from the most spare of sources, than it does about Dunham or Square Mule itself. Sometimes art can be transcendent, but sometimes an overpriced sadistic painting is just an overpriced sadistic painting.

The NY Times has recently dug up an interesting bit of behind-the-scenes reporting on the first days of Robert Gates’ appointment as defense secretary. He argued, albeit cynically (he was obviously more concerned with a U.S. image problem than any kind of justice for the inmates), that the detention camp at Guantanamo should be closed. While he was expectedly overridden by the Cheney administration’s love affair with the prison, it’s worthwhile to note what he was able to curb:

In the end, Mr. Gates did succeed in killing plans to build a $100 million courthouse and detention complex at Guantánamo, after he argued that the large and expensive project would leave the impression of a long-lasting American detainee operation there and that the money could be more effectively spent elsewhere by the Pentagon. Mr. Gates approved a far more modest facility at one-tenth of the cost.

A one hundred million dollar courthouse and detention complex? And what exactly would the courthouse be for … fake trials?!! But this is obviously the money quote:

Some administration lawyers are deeply reluctant to move terrorism suspects to American soil because it could increase their constitutional and statutory rights…

Oh no, we can’t have that. I guess it would simply be too dangerous to give someone a trial when you already know that they’re guilty. It’s amazing that this kind of stuff can be so blatantly reported, and yet so many American citizens are still convinced of the benevolence of their government. What they fail to realize is that their own constitutional and statutory rights are only protected so long as they pose no serious risk of impediment to the desires of their leader.

Is Likable Laura really so misinformed about the current level of violence in Iraq, or is she joining Cheney in his “last throes” misinformation campaign? Either way, her professed disappointment with how the supposed “one bombing a day” in Iraq [the Brookings Institution suggests closer to 185 a day] is having on the morale of the U.S. mission points to the fact that the White House is either (a) at the least, very poorly informed and completely out of touch with the facts concerning the level of violence in Iraq, or (b) maliciously spreading lies in an effort to sway public opinion towards the usefulness of continued U.S. military intervention.

I’m sure this is all too frustratingly obvious for most. Watch the whole thing at Think Progress.

You may have missed it, but yesterday was a huge day for the little guy in America.

First, the Supreme Court overturned a landmark class action suit against Philip Morris. You know, the company that amassed a gigantic fortune by selling an addictive product that killed its customers, and attempted to hide and discredit this fact for decades. It must be bad when even the New York Times is outraged at an acquiescence to corporate interests. It wrote in an editorial:

“The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday overturning a nearly $80 million punitive damage award against Philip Morris is a win for corporate wrongdoers. It stretches the Constitution’s guarantee of due process in a way that will make it easier for companies that act reprehensibly to sidestep serious punishments.

It also provides unsettling new evidence that the court is more concerned about — and more willing to protect — the powerful than the powerless.

…

The court in recent years has become increasingly activist when it comes to defending the rights of corporations by striking down punitive damage awards. And yesterday’s ruling continues that trend….

Unfortunately, the court has been far less activist when ordinary people seek protection or challenge their punishments. The ruling stands in particular contrast with the court’s 2003 decision that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” did not bar California, under its “three strikes” law, from sentencing a man to 50 years in prison for stealing $153.53 worth of videotapes. Yesterday’s decision is another disturbing sign that — as the current court reads the Constitution — powerful parties have more rights than regular people.”

And the Times certainly could have gone even further, because the other big “Protecting the Powerful over the Powerless” news yesterday included a legal defeat for Guantanamo prisoners.

A Washington Circuit Court decided that those being held at Guantanamo have NO LEGAL RECOURSE in U.S. courts to challenge the legitimacy of their imprisonment. In other words, if the U.S. government decides you are an “enemy combatant,” then all your legal rights are stripped, and the military can do almost whatever it wants to you, without any accountability to the U.S. legal system. The case looks headed for the Supreme Court, but with their recent record, what hope is there for justice?

There’s really not much to say about last night’s speech. Lots of empty cliché:

Call: Let’s fix health care!

Response: Hooray!

And disturbing patriotic zealotry:

Call: We are the greatest nation on earth, and we must defeat anyone who challenges us!

Response: Hooray!

Call: We must never LOSE! We must always WIN!!!

Response: Hooray!

I guess the night’s most interesting development was Bush’s relative shyness from engaging with the specific circumstance surrounding his push for troop escalation in Iraq. Hmm, maybe this had something to do with the fact that nearly everyone on the planet disagrees with him.

For the most part, he was content to divert attention away from Iraq by emphasizing domestic issues. When he did engage, he resorted to his old generalized scare tactics of good v. evil, and ‘beware of the next attack.’ He even trotted out the memory of al-Zarqawi, who has been dead for nearly seven months, just to hammer the point that if we don’t win in Iraq (whatever that means), all of us could face unspeakable pain and suffering by the hands of the evil terrorists (whose only goal in life, apparently, is to seek the destruction of the Eternally Good and Righteous United States of America).

I nearly shit myself when Bush started talking about how ‘lack of freedom’ breeds terrorism. Had this man suddenly found the humility to admit that perhaps American-led oppression and violence has contributed to this world of violence and terrorism in which we find ourselves? Would Bush really echo the words of Malcolm X by admitting that maybe the chickens had indeed “come home to roost”?

But it was not to be, as I soon realized that what he meant was that the terrorists were actually oppressing themselves, and so by restricting their own freedom they were contributing to the escalation of more terrorism. Perhaps ABC’s Charlie Gibson summed it up best when he described the evening in a single word:

Majestic.

uring President Bush’s primetime address to the nation last night, the words ‘digging himself in deeper’ came to mind. And yet the hole being dug is not really his at all, but one destined for the dead Iraqi and American bodies that will continue to pile up as the result of this President’s determination to escalate the Iraq conflict in order to ‘de-escalate’ it.

I’m not sure Americans are ready to give him the benefit of the doubt this time, however. Considering that a recent poll has opposition to the deployment of additional troops at 70%, and the new democratic majority in Congress is anxious to make some kind of statement that it has arrived and is a new force to be reckoned with, even some of the correspondents from Fox news couldn’t hold back from taking a few jabs at this so-called ‘new’ policy shortly after it was announced. Sounds like more of exactly the same, but with a few thousand more troops’ lives thrown in the mix.

Al-Qaeda, 9/11, terror, enemies, al-Qaeda, win, extremists, etc. What was that again? I swore he just said something about how if we end our war on Iraq that al-Qaeda will build a worldwide empire of Islamic extremism and will destroy America. Oh wait, from the elephant’s mouth:

This would bring al-Qaida closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Another gem, apparently hinting at the President’s loss of his former ‘mandate’:

Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue … Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.

So let me get this straight: even if everything goes exactly as planned, we won’t know it, because the situation will mirror the daily violence of the previous year’s policy. Sounds like someone’s setting the American people up for disappointment.

And my absolute favorite (or, least favorite), apparently speaking of Islamic extremists:

And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.

Who was he talking about again? Now that’s what I call “taking the blame.”

But the most honest moment of the evening may have come within 5 minutes after the broadcast, on Fox News, otherwise known as Bush’s mouthpiece, when one of their military analysts made an impassioned defense of Bush’s proposal to increase military operations in Iraq, concluding that the U.S. couldn’t afford to “lose in Iraq” because there’s “simply too much oil at stake.” Too bad the President can’t afford to be that candid, or maybe he would have been impeached by now.