Author: Gareth

2877 / 50000 words. 5.75% done!

Was too busy with work on Thursday and Friday to start, but finally kicked off this morning. I’ll be doing more today and throughout the weekend, and the plan is to do at least an hour or two per day during the week.

It was interesting to start with no idea where I was headed, beyond the general setting of the work. Characters have appeared, and seem to know where they’re going, so I’ll follow them for a bit.

EDIT: (5:38 p.m.) Word count updated.

It was beginning to look like the Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee were successfully going to stand up for the rule of law, and not send the nomination of Mukasey as Attorney General to the Senate for a vote….because he refuses to answer the question of whether waterboarding (a practice which we prosecuted as a war crime after WWII, and which was also done by the Khmer Rouge) was torture.

It was obvious that Mukasey was doing this to avoid a Catch-22 which would have eventually required War Crimes proceedings against the administration that authorized this abhorrent practice. Mukasey also claimed that he believed that there were conditions under which the President is above the Law.

The Democrats looked like they might actually have a spine. They might actually throw this one back in Bush’s face. Bush, of course, played the 9/11 card — saying that they were threatening the country by failing to confirm his AG nomination, who is “crucial in the War on Terror.”

Today, Bush’s fearmongering worked.

Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles Schumer of New York have announced that they’ll support Mukasey’s nomination. It’ll go to the Senate, and the Republicans will ensure that it passes.

For Chrissakes, Democrats. You can’t even stand against TORTURE?

Fuck this country. I’m out of here in a year and a half.

Andrew Sullivan has a great essay about Obama in the latest issue of The Atlantic. You should read it.

Central to his argument is that Obama represents the first true move away from the “War of the Baby Boomers” that has been fought in this country for the past 30-odd years:

Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

That’s pretty much why I’m supporting him. I’m tired of the Boomers defining the national culture and the national debate. It’s time for them to go gently into retirement, and for the next generation to step up.

In a related story — I’m pissed as hell that the Clinton campaign has decided to play the “gender card” — Apparently, when other candidates criticize her positions, point out her evasion of questions, and draw distinctions between her record and theirs, that’s part of the “all-boy’s club”, and 6 men “ganging up on her.” That’s BULLSHIT.

I’m disgusted that she’d use that has her fallback position when she was weakened by the debate, but sadly, I’m not surprised.