Rhinocrisy

Thank god we don’t live in an evil torture state! Remember, it’s okay for us to hold people indefinitely without rights if it’s not on American soil. We can do that without being an evil torture state. Hooray!

Some of you may have missed the fact that we started the Tribunal farce process in Guantanamo Bay, to finally give those terrorist scum the cursory dog-and-pony show they deserve. There was a lot of fanfare a few weeks back when Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessed to planning every single terrorist attack of the past ten years. They even released his testimony. Note how the names of the judges and all the court officers have been redacted from the record, just like in a real fair, impartial public trial!

Anyway, my point. A few months back I was throwing up in my mouth because someone made me remember that Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s kids were at one point in American custody, fate now unknown. Well, since then, we’ve heard a little bit more on the subject, in this rather disturbing letter from the father of one Majid Khan, formerly a legal resident of the United States, one-time guest at a CIA “black site”, and now cooling his heels at Guantanamo Bay. Majid’s father, who had no idea whether his son was alive or dead for the past few years, is submitting testimony to the Tribunal, not being allowed to attend himself. Just like in a real public trial! Ha ha!

[left eye twitches unsteadily]

Included therein is this nice little bit about those kids:

Also according to Mohammed [Majid’s brother, not KSM - ed], he and Majid were detained in the same place where two of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s young children, ages about 6 and 8, were held. The Pakistani guards told my son that the boys were kept in a separate area upstairs, and were denied food and water by other guards. They were also mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and get them to say where their father was hiding.

Good to know they’re in such warm and tender hands.

Please disseminate this letter widely, so everyone can know what a wonderful, freedom-loving government we have.

I’ve spent the morning getting mad about Al Gore.

It seems that soon after Al received his Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth”, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research released a report about his profligate consumption:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average.

Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.

Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006.

Gore’s extravagant energy use does not stop at his electric bill. Natural gas bills for Gore’s mansion and guest house averaged $1,080 per month last year.

Now, this is an absurd amount of power. Reportedly Al Gore’s house is 10,000 square feet (data not shown), which is maybe twice or three times the size of my house, depending on how you reckon things. I live in a northern clime, so presumably our consumption in this eight-person household should be much greater than in Tennessee. So I’m not clear what, exactly, Gore might be doing to burn so much power, and that makes me suspect there’s a little more to this story. But, be that as it may…

This story was widely reported with great glee across the blogospore, with many pointing out that since Mr. Gore was such an unmitigated tool, he was in no position to tell them what to do.

[Pause for dramatic sigh.]

This blog is called “Rhinocrisy”, for reasons of fancy more than anything else. But it behooves us to reflect for a moment on our sister-word, hypocrisy. The moment will be brief, and we will use it to say only this: hypocrisy is not important.

We’ve had precious little reflection on hypocrisy, here. I have always firmly believed that one bears responsibility for one’s own behavior. I attribute this to my Hindu upbringing, which inculcated in me the idea of “dharma”, which Spike Lee translated quite well: do the right thing. That’s all. So it doesn’t matter whether someone else says one thing and does another, or whether you yourself can’t reconcile your speech and actions. The balance of your sins is determined simply by whether you did the right thing, plain and simple. Whether or not Al Gore is a sinner has no bearing on your own sin, or on your right to sin. The Dude said it clearly two thousand years ago:

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

So, when we speak of “rhinocrisy”, we mean to say: failure to do the right thing.

I read Chris Hitchen’s 9/11 editorial in the WSJ last night. I realize Hitchens jumped the shark quite a while back, and one really should give very short shrift to everything on the Journal’s editorial page, but I’m continually astounded that people can openly espouse doctrines that should, at least ostensibly, be anathema these days. Here’s his conclusion:

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. “We”–and our allies–simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, “turn,” isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future.

This is what happens when you stay up late nights watching “Commando” and “Rambo, First Blood: Part Two” on FX.

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

This might be the perfect reference next time some idiot asks, “Why do they hate us?”

(Via)