My Two Guys

I got a whole list of blogs that I love to read, but there are three that really stand above the rest. For me, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and Joe Posnanski are daily reads (just so they do not feel left out, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the staff at the Hardball Times are also on the top of my list)- Sullivan's posts are short vignettes about his thoughts and daily news that he posts multiple times a day. Glenn Greenwald and Posnanski are longer, so there are (sad) days where they have not updated. Greenwald, though, is more focused and scholarly, he is after all a constitutional lawyer. Posnanski's blog is how I'd like mine to be- meandering with plenty of parentheticals (he calls them posterisks). Anyway, they are all quite thought-provoking and very insightful. Many of the ideas I get from my posts are directly as a result of writing that they have done.

Not to slight Joe or anything but this post today is about the other two, Sullivan and Greenwald. They are separated on the ideological spectrum, one is a small government conservative, one is an unabashed liberal, but both been incredibly outspoken on the failures of the Bush Administration, particularly the expansion of presidential power, the domestic spying regime, and the general incompentence which has accompanied this administrations response to everything. (sidenote, I think that eventually we could have a political party, which is a combination of the best of libertarianism and progressive liberalism, I want to write about that combo later) But what I think is most commendable is their continued vigilance on the subject of torture.
I don't think people still understand the gravity of what Bush/Cheney authorized during the past 8 years. WE TORTURED! Say it to yourself: the United States of America tortured people! We have to repudiate this every chance we get. This is NOT just another policy dispute- it gets to the very fabric of who we want to be as a country. I don't understand why there is not more outrage in our media and in the populace as a whole.

People talk about how Barack Obama should not prosecute the people who authorized these atrocities, that it would be too political, that the right wing would skewer him. While I think that Obama's consensus governing style and willingness to listen to dissent is going to work for our country in the long-term. But for the health of our country I also think that we must repudiate to the maximum extent, the policies of this administration. If that means a Truth Commission then so be it, but we've already let these monsters sully our reputation, are we going to let them get away with it too? If we do, it not only means that we've allowed torturers to go free, but we also say out loud that those in power are above the law.