Death Squads, Cheney, and American Standards:
If you're a manwhore occupying a bit of sidewalk real estate in Houston, you can tell every other cockgobbler-for-hire that you have standards, that you won't risk neck injury by blowing 400-pound dudes whose little dicks are barely visible in the intersection of pendulous guts and gelatinous thighs. That you won't get ass-reamed by any man who's dick has even a single scab or scar unless he's got a rubber. Sure, yeah, you can say that as much as you want, your little ethical code. But at the end of the day, meth doesn't buy itself. And pretty soon, you're going down on guys whose cock warts tickle the roof of your mouth and you're getting teabagged while being shit on by some fucker who has open sore needle tracks behind his knees. At that moment, in the back a pick-up in an alley in Montrose, hoping this ain't some repressed cowboy with daddy issues who'll beat the fuck out of you after he jacks off on your shit-covered face because it's harder to enjoy tweaking on that ice when your jaw is numb, you've pretty much lost the moral high ground on just about anything. So when some good looking guy drives up in a nice car a couple of nights later, you don't actually have a leg to stand on when you say "No" because he's Asian and you'd never let an Asian guy fuck you.

The point here is that, right now, with just a little revealed and a more-than-likely horrible lot more waiting in the shadows like Orson Welles in The Third Man, it seems that Dick Cheney was, at the very least, concocting with the CIA a plan for a secret assassination army. Surely, we'll hear soon about how many terrorists were killed by crack shots, their heads brought to Cheney so he could use them for a delicious freedom stew, keeping the skulls as trophies until he had enough to construct a throne of bone. And, really, and, c'mon, what would be surprising would be to find out that Dick Cheney wasn't constructing a skull chair.

Yet, bizarrely, some Republicans are saying there shouldn't be an investigation into the potential that the CIA was putting together a death squad and that the Vice President told the CIA to lie to Congress about it. It's as if they're throwing up their hands in a comical "what can you do?" gesture, as if they're saying, "Well, that's just Cheney," and a laugh track will play to cover their asses.

While it's screamingly frustrating to keep saying, "But...but...if Clinton..." and just sigh, Republicans set the bar lower than a snail turd as to what's a scandal worth having investigated. Fucking "Travelgate" was an eventual independent prosecutor's investigation, demanded by Republicans, into why the White House fired seven employees in the White House Travel Office. It was mostly about the involvement of First Lady Hillary Clinton in order to embarrass the President. Whatever the point of it was, there were motherfucking investigations, including one by a Republican-run House oversight committee, about it. Fucking Whitewater was about a goddamned real estate deal.

There's your scales of Republican justice: travel office employees fired? It's a crisis that demands millions of dollars spent to discover nothing. Potential secret CIA death squads and the involvement of at least the Vice President in lying to Congress in violation of the law? Nah, why bother? Let's move forward, not look back.

Yet the very nature of investigation and criminal proceedings is to look backward, with the knowledge that the past very much impacts the present. If Attorney General Eric Holder does go forward with a probe of Bush-era torture policies and if Dianne Feinstein and other Democrats are serious about looking into the CIA/Cheney story, then we will be making baby steps back to being a nation that actually gives a flying rat's fuck about the laws we pass.

And if we don't look back, if we simply attempt to bury the past in our inexorable march forward with the knowledge that unpunished crimes have been committed, then we, all of us, become co-conspirators. We all carry that burden then, that we know we are a country that has done wrong, but we are unwilling to prove it and punish those who ordered the commission of crimes in our name.