Panetta Shits The Bed......

Neon Leon dropped the Ball today......

The Ball.....and any hint of actually claiming any balls of his own.

Yeah,well......I had always thought that Sylvia actually claimed that anatomical function in their family anyway.......

In the process, Neon Leon pissed all over any remotely believable idea that there is any fundamental difference between any given group of politicians.

Ralph Nader people are chortling into their Kambucha tonight.

Change?

A change perhaps of whores.....brunettes for blondes. Maybe not so many diaper people like David Vitter....who knows? Maybe there is a rise in Nazi paraphernalia-style sex geeks? Like the Formula One car guy. My friend The Hassler is finally off-loading his stash of Wehrmacht gear he collected in high school in Munich at record prices....and touring the West this spring on the proceeds.

Neon Leon re-appeared before the Senate today and avowed a number of startling cowardly and false ideas:

1) The United States of America has NEVER renditioned ANYONE to any foreign country for purposes of torture or harsh interrogation....or disappearance.

2) No U.S. personnel who actually tortured humans will be prosecuted.

They were just following orders, you see.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!!?

The thing I hated most about the Bush era was people in positions of power, influence and information feeding me slimy turds and telling me it was foie gras.

These fucking guys don't even bother to realize that we are not stupid.....we are compliant. There is a difference.

We will go along with your crap.....because we are too busy bailing down here in the hold to care too much about whether the Captain is drunk or not.....or whether we just hit rocks.... or an iceberg.

Just stop fucking lying to us!

We have more information than even you do! We spend way more time on CSPAN and YouTube than your butt-slurping aides will ever have time for.

We have the tail numbers of each and every private jet that was used in the renditions. We have the corporate information and addresses that match the tail numbers. Our super-geeky friends the plane watchers have the entire itineraries of each and every rendition jet on each and every shitty stop they made all across the shittiest countries in the world. Times, numbers and dates.

The rendition people were so fucking stupid that they did not realize that their cell phone transmissions leave a permanent record.....at the same time their friends were recording every sigh, syllable and semi-colon in every communication made by anyone in North America.

Who knew the Italians were up to these standards? Why aren't they dealing with shoes and pizza?

We have a bunch of our Foreign Service officers, State Department guys, CIA guys.....with active warrants for war crimes, civil rights abuses, kidnapping, etc........in Italy. Our people set guys up in Italy, and had them renditioned to Egypt and tortured. I myself have fotos of the scars and the abuse of the guys they renditioned.

The US Government has been protecting these guys from the justice of......Italy?

Foie gras, Leon? Nah....bullshit.

We won't even talk about the Canadian guys.....or the random German guy dropped off in Albania after 18 months......

Leon, you dumbfuck!

You are supposed to be apologizing for all this shit everyone knows about......not maintaining the status quo!

Isn't "Panetta" Italian? Do you not want to go there without subpoenas?

2) "I did not know.......I was just following orders."

After WWII, the US, and NATO, tried dozens....hundreds of guys...at Nuremberg.....for this exact thing. We strung them up and dropped like the fucks they were and composted them.

When I was in sixth grade in Anaheim, California.....my weird reading thing was already well-known. One of my dad's friends was Dr. Connie....a Russian optical scientist who had been captured by the Germans and shipped to Peenemunde to help make rockets to kill Brits and Yanks. All the construction crew at Peenemunde were slave-labor: Slavs, Jews, Russians, Poles.....

I was supposed to be studying for my Confirmation....but I had run across a copy of "Lady Chatterley's Lover".....and a copy of "Judgement at Nuremberg".

One book involved mad wanking, and the other a strange sense of what-the-fuck? This was 1962...only seventeen years after the fact of the Trials.

I overheard Dr. Connie....who had been a defendant at the Trials........talking to my dad.

"What do you think?"

"I think it is time he knows and understands......."

I thought they were talking about DH Lawrence and the mad wanking.........

"I don't know......."

"He needs to know......We have to have faith in the next generation......."

I scoured "Judgment at Nuremberg" for any hint of crazy sex......and all I found was hideous depravity on a global scale.

Our lead prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson .....a guy often quoted by both Sam Alito and Chief Justice Roberts in their confirmations, despite the fact that he was a New Deal guy.....Judge Jackson laid down the law in Germany:

This is really boring shit for anyone who is not an Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Superstar.
You can skip it.....or better yet....read his whole speech at the link. There is so much in here that makes me want to leap up and beat someone with an American flag standard.....

The Charter also recognizes individual responsibility on the Part of those who commit acts defined as crimes, or who incite others to do so, or who join a common plan with other persons, groups or organizations to bring about their commission. The principle of individual responsibility for piracy and brigandage. which have long been recognized as crimes punishable under international law, is old and well established. That is what illegal warfare is.

This principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as logical one if international law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace. An international law which operates only on states can be enforced only by war because the most practicable method of coercing a state is warfare.

Those familiar with American history know that one of the compelling reasons for adoption of our constitution was that the laws of the Confederation, which operated only on constituent states, were found ineffective to maintain order among them. The only answer to recalcitrance was impotence or war.

Only sanctions which reach individuals can peacefully and effectively be enforced.

Hence, the principle of the criminality of aggressive war is implemented by the Charter with the principle of personal responsibility. Of course, the idea that a state, any more than a corporation commits crimes, is a fiction.

Crimes always are committed only by persons. While it is quite proper to employ the fiction of responsibility of a state or corporation for the purpose of imposing a collective liability, it is quite intolerable to let such a legalism become the basis of personal immunity.

The Charter recognizes that one who has committed criminal acts may not take refuge in superior orders nor in the doctrine that his crimes were acts of states. These twin principles working together have heretofore resulted in immunity for practically everyone concerned in the really great crimes against peace and mankind.

Those in lower ranks were protected against liability by the orders of their superiors. The superiors were protected because their orders were called acts of state.

Under the Charter, no defense based on either of these doctrines can be entertained.

Modern civilization puts unlimited weapons of destruction in the hands of men. It cannot tolerate so vast an area of legal irresponsibility. Even the German Military Code provides that: "If the execution of a military order in the course of duty violates the criminal law, then the superior officer giving the order will bear the sole responsibility therefor. However, the obeying subordinate will share the punishment of the participant: (1) if he has exceeded the order given to him, or (2) if it was within his knowledge that the order of his superior officer concerned an act by which it was intended to commit a civil or military crime or transgression." (Reichsgesetzblatt, 1926 No. 37, P. 278, Art. 47) Of course, we do not argue that the circumstances under which one commits an act should be disregarded in judging its legal effect. A conscripted private on a firing squad cannot expect to hold an inquest on the validity of the execution. The Charter implies common sense limits to liability just as it places common sense limits upon immunity. But none of these men before you acted in minor parts. Each of them was entrusted with broad discretion and exercised great power. Their responsibility is correspondingly great and may not be shifted to that fictional being, "the State", which cannot be produced for trial, cannot testify, and cannot be sentenced.

The Charter also recognizes a vicarious liability, which responsibility recognized by most modern systems of law, for acts committed by others in carrying out a common plan or conspiracy to which a defendant has become a party. I need not discuss the familiar principles of such liability. Every day in the courts of countries associated in this prosecution, men are convicted for acts that they did not personally commit, but for which they were held responsible because of membership in illegal combinations or plans or conspiracies.

The American dream of a peace-and-plenty economy, as well as the hopes of other nations, can never be fulfilled if those nations are involved in a war every generation so vast and devastating as to crush the generation that fights and burden the generation that follows.

But experience has shown that wars are no longer local. All modern wars become world wars eventually. And none of the big nations at least can stay out. If we cannot stay out of wars, our only hope is to prevent wars. But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law.

And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power against the rights of their own people only when we make all men answerable to the law.

This trial represents mankind's desperate effort to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.

But it points to the dreadful sequence of aggressions and crimes I have recited, it points to the weariness of flesh, the exhaustion of resources and the destruction of all that was beautiful or useful in so much of the world, and to greater potentialities for destruction in the days to come. It is not necessary among the ruins of this ancient and beautiful city with untold members of its civilian habitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.

Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law."

Basically, the United States of America.......following the example of the Greatest Generation....drew a line in the sand and said: "Never again!"

Band of Brothers. Local heroes like 10th Mountain guys like Ross Green and Clayton Anderson. Silver Star guys like Stuart Walzer......and don't forget the Manzinar folks....and Gordy who hid in Hatton Canyon all during high school, rather than go to Manzinar with his relatives.

We have had heroes since.....most of the guys living under bridges were Vietnam people. Lots of the quiet guys who buy twelve-packs at The Store in Cachagua....

I always think back to my high school buddy who went to West Point.....and when the rotors stripped off his helicopter at 1000 feet in Vietnam, who had just enough time to shout out to his buddy on the radio the account number of the secret account he had set up for the son he had never seen..... before impact.

There is a reason we all work harder than we should here in California.....We cleave to a higher ideal.

America is not a reality....it is a vision and a goal.

Back in the day.....my dead friend Hunter Thompson used to villify random dick-shit scumbags who would rear up out of the Democratic slime.....

Most memorably to me, he once said that Hubert Humphrey should be "stuffed in a goddam bottle and floated out on the Japanese current......"

Hubert's direct descendent was Walter Mondale.....another limp-dick, bound for failure, Democratic-machine whore.....who clearly also needed floating out on the Jap current.

Leon Panetta supported both these losers......

Somehow, I thought that the skills he had learned in all the bureaucratic infighting of his long career would be eventually brought to bear in the defense of Freedom and Change.

Why did I think that?

I just realized that it was because my old friend, Mary Green.....who passed just last month...was a Leon supporter.

Back when he first ran in local politics.....And all the way along the line.

My friend Mary had many occassions to kick my ass.

I can't decide right now if I am glad that Mary did not live to see Leon "Shit The Bed"......

Or if I miss 82 year old Mary...walking up to Leon....and knocking him on his fat ass.

And stuffing him into a goddam bottle....

And floating him out on the Japanese current....

Mary could do it......