Lights going dim for a couple of days as we do the holiday Fourth thing; no internets, no computers at all. I might wish the same for you, along with some good weather for the firecrackers and burgers this weekend.

At its core, as she describes in a new piece in The Nation, disaster capitalism is “today’s preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis.” And as we’re obviously in the midst of several great shocks and crises - the smell of blood is in the water.

(more…)

While Cindy McCain, her dependent children and the trusts and companies they control made as much as $29 million — and likely substantially more — from her family’s business interests from 2004 through last year, data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Center for Responsive Politics also reveals that they spent $11 million purchasing five condominiums for the family, hired additional household help and racked up progressively larger credit card bills almost every year.

Their credit card bills peaked between January 2007 and May 2008, during which time Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000. …

For instance, in the June issue of Vogue magazine, Cindy McCain said she favors suits made by the German designer Escada, which typically retail for around $3,000 a pop. If she becomes first lady, she told Vogue she may switch to an American designer, possibly Carolina Herrera, whose suits are comparably pricey. …

One of the Phoenix condos, a 6,600-square-foot unit for which Cindy McCain’s trust paid $4.7 million in October 2006, became Cindy McCain’s primary residence after the trust sold the couple’s Phoenix house for $3.2 million in December 2006. She had purchased the house years earlier from her father.

Less than one year later, a corporation controlled by Cindy McCain bought another condo on a lower floor in the same building for $830,000.

And, in between, the corporation plunked down $700,000 for a 1,900-square foot, three-bedroom loft condo for her then-22-year-old daughter Meghan McCain, who was moving back to Phoenix after graduating from New York’s Columbia University. …

That “elitism” thing? Yeah. It’s not gonna work for the GOP this year.

Or not.

This is the conservative meme that won’t die - but necessary, if they’re going to convince the American public that we can’t let no chi-neeese drill for oil so close to Miami Beach - even when they aren’t. Because, you know, they might. And that’s good enough - for some, at least.

Is this really what these people are selling this season?

Oil nearing $146 per barrel. $150 by the weekend?

Personally, I like the real big nose on Steinberg, who happens to be Jewish. But, you know, I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…

I like Barack Obama. I like his faith.** Up until recently, we shared that faith pretty much exactly. Time and again, I have defended his right to talk about his faith. Hell, for all I care, candidates can talk about their love of pooties if it helps voters get to know them. And yes, Obama has to overplay this hand in a sense to defeat the Bad-Christian-Muslim-Secularist-Infidel rumors that swirl around him.

But all that being said, do we really need a presidential campaign based on out-Jesusing the other side?

At what point do we stop speaking in the language of conservative Evangelicals and actually become them?

Well, I think the idea is to neuter them politically. Which sounds far more crass than Obama (and maybe even Pastor Dan) would ever put it.

Nevertheless, look: Evangelical Christians have tended to vote overwhelmingly Republican in recent years, but when you actually speak with evangelical Christians, you realize that a lot of their core beliefs are actually not conservative. I’m not talking about things like abortion or homosexuality, the things we’ve allowed to define the debate; I’m talking about society’s obligation to the less fortunate, the poor and the wayward. Go-go capitalism and deregulation doesn’t exactly foster compassion; there’s an argument to be made that progressivism and ulitmately the Democratic Party should appeal more to evangelicals. I can’t speak to Obama’s personal faith, though that’s obviously a huge aspect of this; but clearly he understands the political math, and is trying to do something about it.

Which is to say I don’t think this is so much about Obama becoming one of them. I think it’s about them coming over to the Obama coalition.

if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

But as part of his piece, he provides a very good summation of the argument for waterboarding; or at least the view of those who would dismiss the idea of any “moral equivalence” between what we might do, and what Islamists do:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Understood, but while this may be the view of some who know all about waterboarding up close and personal, within the general population those who support it have another reason to do so: As the terrorists might use these methods on us, we are justified in using these methods - and far worse - on them.

Because failure to do so marks this society as weak; we must be every bit as vicious as our enemies, for if we aren’t, they’ll overwhelm us. And that sentiment has nothing to do with freedom, nothing to do with human rights, nothing to do with the ideas of liberal democracy; it’s a tribalistic kill-or-be-killed instinct.

At the same time, Hitchens includes the contrasting view of counter-terrorism expert Malcolm Nance, whose argues:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

But as noted - some Americans would gladly employ the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack. Because for those folks, in the long run torture is less about extracting information than it is about inflicting punishment. And that, really, is how you turn into the very thing you’re supposed to be fighting.