Fiat Lux

I tried to take some notes during the debate but my friends have 3 kids under 5, so we had frequent distracions. Still, I saw enough.

Obviously Kerry ‘won’. Bush stared out OK but as the evening wore on he floundered more and more, seemed to run out of new material, looked flustered, and generally did not seem on top of things anymore.

A few bits that jumped out at me:

Kerry — “He outsourced that job too” — referring to how the US did not catch Osama Bin Laden. Also — “You can have my plan in four points, which I can tell you about here or you can go to johnkerry.com and read about it. Or you can have the president’s plan, which is four words: ‘More of the same.'”

Bush — “What kind of message does it send to our troops to tell them ‘wrong war, wrong time?'” He said it several times. He seemed to be saying it is better to lie to our troops than to tell them that Iraq is a mess.

I thought Jim Lehrer did a very good job moderating, and except for one lame softball on character issues, asked good questions. I hope the other moderators are as good.

Time to go read the spin.

I’ll be at a friend’s house for the debate, so will not be liveblogging or offering immediate post-debate comment. There’s plenty of bloggers who will be doing that with or without me, so no great loss. I will post some comments once I get home though.

It was bad enough that it was just a proposal, but now it’s looking more likely that the US is going to go forward with the godawful plan of sending people to other countries to be tortured so we don’t have to dirty our hands with it.

The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership’s intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago.

The provision, part of the massive bill introduced Friday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would apply to non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorist organizations but have not been tried on or convicted of any charges. Democrats tried to strike the provision in a daylong House Judiciary Committee meeting, but it survived on a party-line vote.

The provision, human rights advocates said, contradicts pledges President Bush made after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal erupted this spring that the United States would stand behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the Justice Department “really wants and supports” the provision.

And don’t bring up that “known terrorist clock is ticking” freshman philosophy class canard, please. This isn’t about that. This is broad permission to ship off anyone we want — provided s/he is not a US citizen — to some other country for torture.

It’s wrong. No two ways around it.

A vote for Bush says that you think torturing possibly innocent people is a good idea.

At one time I would have been spitting outrage and venom. Right now I’m mostly numb, but know I have to move, to say something, to get the word out there. This is too important.

The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. “Extraordinary rendition” is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, “We don’t kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.

Digby, as he so often does, hits the nail on the head with a long piece about Bush v Gore 2000 and the likelihood of something similar happening in 2004. I agree with him that if the election is at all close then a raft of lawsuits will follow.

In 2000, the concept of waking up the morning after election day and not knowing who was elected was new and in a way a little exciting. It was uncharted waters, and back then, we didn’t know how much the fix was in. Call it naive, call it willful blindness, call it an inability to accept that the other guy is less honorable than you are — all true. We went to a rumble without a knife, and the whole world is paying for it.

Like Atrios, I can’t quite bring myself to this point, but I can’t say Digby’s totally wrong either:

Foolishly, Gore thought that being modest and fair still meant something. He was not prepared for a streetfight. And, looking back I realize that I wasn’t either. Like a green youth I didn’t believe they’d actually go that far. Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.

It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them — even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice…won’t get fooled again….

No, I do not believe they would stage a terrorist attack. But when it comes to internal domestic matters, especially ones pertaining to winning elections, yeah, there’s not much they wouldn’t do or try to do. We just have to find a way to keep them from doing it again. Hopefully while still holding on to what makes us better than them.