What would Jefferson Smith do?

Where, oh, where is Frank Capra when we need him?

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may be playing out in the new century as Mrs. Sheehan Goes to Washington, only with the disillusionment taking place before the anti-war activist even aspired to political office.

This story from The Associated Press . . .

Cindy Sheehan, the soldier’s mother who galvanized the anti-war movement, said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush. That’s when Sheehan and her supporters are to arrive in Washington, D.C., after a 13-day caravan and walking tour starting next week from the group’s war protest site near Bush’s Crawford ranch.

“Democrats and Americans feel betrayed by the Democratic leadership,” Sheehan told The Associated Press. “We hired them to bring an end to the war. I’m not too far from San Francisco, so it wouldn’t be too big of a move for me. I would give her a run for her money.”

. . . plus this . . .

Nearly half of the US public wants President George W. Bush to face impeachment, and even more favor that fate for Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a poll out Friday.

The survey by the American Research Group found that 45 percent support the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Bush, with 46 percent opposed, and a 54-40 split in favor when it comes to Cheney.

The study by the private New Hampshire-based ARG canvassed 1,100 Americans by telephone July 3-5 and had an error margin of plus or minus three percentage points. The findings are available on ARG's Internet site.

The White House declined to comment on the poll, the latest bad news for a president who has seen his public opinion standings dragged to record lows by the unpopular war in Iraq.

The US Constitution says presidents and vice presidents can be impeached -- that is, formally charged by the House -- for "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" by a simple majority vote.

Conviction by the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority, means removal from office.

. . . means that we could be in for some interesting times.

I'm just sayin'.

The naked truth about Michelle

Here's the naked truth. And, no, I'm not talking about the new Starbucks cups.

The naked truth is that it's often useful to change the subject when, like right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin, you're backing an administration guilty of war crimes -- both in pursuit of its "War on Terror" and in its prosecution of an illegal war in Iraq.

LIKE WHEN you start bleating about Rachael Ray's allegedly Jew-hating scarf in a now-canceled Dunkin' Donuts commercial.

But wait. Didn't Malkin appear in a web ad promoting a conservative T-shirt company selling stuff like this?
And this?
Not to mention this?


NOW WHO'S supporting terrorism? Rachael Ray and her Ay-rab lookin' scarf or Michelle Malkin, endorser of unambiguously fascist T-shirts?

All I know is that given a choice between Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, those craven appeasers of the waterboard right, I'll get my java jive on with the nekkid mermaid.

War crimes aren't just for Serbians . . . or Saddam . . . or Nazi Germany anymore

Oh, Lord. Seymour Hersh has another blockbuster about American war crimes in the "War on Terror."

The general who first investigated Abu Ghraib, now retired, is pointing fingers. So are some other military and congressional insiders. And all those fingers are pointing to the top.

HERE ARE LENGTHY EXCERPTS from Hersh's piece in The New Yorker (which I strongly urge you to go and read), but they're only a fraction of the whole long, horrifying article.

On the afternoon of May 6, 2004, Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba was summoned to meet, for the first time, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Pentagon conference room. Rumsfeld and his senior staff were to testify the next day, in televised hearings before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees, about abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. The previous week, revelations about Abu Ghraib, including photographs showing prisoners stripped, abused, and sexually humiliated, had appeared on CBS and in The New Yorker. In response, Administration officials had insisted that only a few low-ranking soldiers were involved and that America did not torture prisoners. They emphasized that the Army itself had uncovered the scandal.

If there was a redeeming aspect to the affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. “Could you tell us what happened?” Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, “Is it abuse or torture?” At that point, Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

Rumsfeld was particularly concerned about how the classified report had become public. “General,” he asked, “who do you think leaked the report?” Taguba responded that perhaps a senior military leader who knew about the investigation had done so. “It was just my speculation,” he recalled. “Rumsfeld didn’t say anything.” (I did not meet Taguba until mid-2006 and obtained his report elsewhere.) Rumsfeld also complained about not being given the information he needed. “Here I am,” Taguba recalled Rumsfeld saying, “just a Secretary of Defense, and we have not seen a copy of your report. I have not seen the photographs, and I have to testify to Congress tomorrow and talk about this.” As Rumsfeld spoke, Taguba said, “He’s looking at me. It was a statement.”

At best, Taguba said, “Rumsfeld was in denial.” Taguba had submitted more than a dozen copies of his report through several channels at the Pentagon and to the Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, which ran the war in Iraq. By the time he walked into Rumsfeld’s conference room, he had spent weeks briefing senior military leaders on the report, but he received no indication that any of them, with the exception of General Schoomaker, had actually read it. (Schoomaker later sent Taguba a note praising his honesty and leadership.) When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

Taguba also knew that senior officials in Rumsfeld’s office and elsewhere in the Pentagon had been given a graphic account of the pictures from Abu Ghraib, and told of their potential strategic significance, within days of the first complaint. On January 13, 2004, a military policeman named Joseph Darby gave the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (C.I.D.) a CD full of images of abuse. Two days later, General Craddock and Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, the director of the Joint Staff of the J.C.S., were e-mailed a summary of the abuses depicted on the CD. It said that approximately ten soldiers were shown, involved in acts that included:

Having male detainees pose nude while female guards pointed at their genitals; having female detainees exposing themselves to the guards; having detainees perform indecent acts with each other; and guards physically assaulting detainees by beating and dragging them with choker chains.

Taguba said, “You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything -- just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value.”

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. “It’s bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties,” Taguba said.

On January 20th, the chief of staff at Central Command sent another e-mail to Admiral Keating, copied to General Craddock and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq. The chief of staff wrote, “Sir: update on alleged detainee abuse per our discussion. DID IT REALLY HAPPEN? Yes, currently have 4 confessions implicating perhaps 10 soldiers. DO PHOTOS EXIST? Yes. A CD with approx 100 photos and a video—CID has these in their possession.”

In subsequent testimony, General Myers, the J.C.S. chairman, acknowledged, without mentioning the e-mails, that in January information about the photographs had been given “to me and the Secretary up through the chain of command. . . . And the general nature of the photos, about nudity, some mock sexual acts and other abuse, was described.”

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld, in his appearances before the Senate and the House Armed Services Committees on May 7th, claimed to have had no idea of the extensive abuse. “It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something,’ ” Rumsfeld told the congressmen. “I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t.”

Rumsfeld told the legislators that, when stories about the Taguba report appeared, “it was not yet in the Pentagon, to my knowledge.” As for the photographs, Rumsfeld told the senators, “I say no one in the Pentagon had seen them”; at the House hearing, he said, “I didn’t see them until last night at 7:30.” Asked specifically when he had been made aware of the photographs, Rumsfeld said:

There were rumors of photographs in a criminal prosecution chain back sometime after January 13th . . . I don’t remember precisely when, but sometime in that period of January, February, March. . . . The legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the President didn’t know, and you didn’t know, and I didn’t know.

“And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S. -- Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

(snip)

Richard Armitage, a former Navy counter-insurgency officer who served as Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush term, recalled meeting Taguba, then a lieutenant colonel, in South Korea in the early nineteen-nineties. “I was told to keep an eye on this young guy—‘He’s going to be a general,’ ” Armitage said. “Taguba was discreet and low key—not a sprinter but a marathoner.”

At the time, Taguba was working for Major General Mike Myatt, a marine who was the officer in charge of strategic talks with the South Koreans, on behalf of the American military. “I needed an executive assistant with brains and integrity,” Myatt, who is now retired and living in San Francisco, told me. After interviewing a number of young officers, he chose Taguba. “He was ethical and he knew his stuff,” Myatt said. “We really became close, and I’d trust him with my life. We talked about military strategy and policy, and the moral aspect of war—the importance of not losing the moral high ground.” Myatt followed Taguba’s involvement in the Abu Ghraib inquiry, and said, “I was so proud of him. I told him, ‘Tony, you’ve maintained yourself, and your integrity.’ ”

Taguba got a different message, however, from other officers, among them General John Abizaid, then the head of Central Command. A few weeks after his report became public, Taguba, who was still in Kuwait, was in the back seat of a Mercedes sedan with Abizaid. Abizaid’s driver and his interpreter, who also served as a bodyguard, were in front. Abizaid turned to Taguba and issued a quiet warning: “You and your report will be investigated.”

“I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me,” Taguba said. “I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”

(snip)

Taguba eventually concluded that there was a reason for the evasions and stonewalling by Rumsfeld and his aides. At the time he filed his report, in March of 2004, Taguba said, “I knew there was C.I.A. involvement, but I was oblivious of what else was happening” in terms of covert military-intelligence operations. Later that summer, however, he learned that the C.I.A. had serious concerns about the abusive interrogation techniques that military-intelligence operatives were using on high-value detainees. In one secret memorandum, dated June 2, 2003, General George Casey, Jr., then the director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, issued a warning to General Michael DeLong, at the Central Command:

CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . . . are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs.

DeLong replied to Casey that the techniques in use were “doctrinally appropriate techniques,” in accordance with Army regulations and Rumsfeld’s direction.

Abu Ghraib had opened the door on the issue of the treatment of detainees, and from the beginning the Administration feared that the publicity would expose more secret operations and practices. Shortly after September 11th, Rumsfeld, with the support of President Bush, had set up military task forces whose main target was the senior leadership of Al Qaeda. Their essential tactic was seizing and interrogating terrorists and suspected terrorists; they also had authority from the President to kill certain high-value targets on sight. The most secret task-force operations were categorized as Special Access Programs, or S.A.P.s.

The military task forces were under the control of the Joint Special Operations Command, the branch of the Special Operations Command that is responsible for counterterrorism. One of Miller’s unacknowledged missions had been to bring the J.S.O.C.’s “strategic interrogation” techniques to Abu Ghraib. In special cases, the task forces could bypass the chain of command and deal directly with Rumsfeld’s office. A former senior intelligence official told me that the White House was also briefed on task-force operations.

The former senior intelligence official said that when the images of Abu Ghraib were published, there were some in the Pentagon and the White House who “didn’t think the photographs were that bad”—in that they put the focus on enlisted soldiers, rather than on secret task-force operations. Referring to the task-force members, he said, “Guys on the inside ask me, ‘What’s the difference between shooting a guy on the street, or in his bed, or in a prison?’ ” A Pentagon consultant on the war on terror also said that the “basic strategy was ‘prosecute the kids in the photographs but protect the big picture.’”
(snip)

An aggressive congressional inquiry into Abu Ghraib could have provoked unwanted questions about what the Pentagon was doing, in Iraq and elsewhere, and under what authority. By law, the President must make a formal finding authorizing a C.I.A. covert operation, and inform the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. However, the Bush Administration unilaterally determined after 9/11 that intelligence operations conducted by the military—including the Pentagon’s covert task forces—for the purposes of “preparing the battlefield” could be authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, without telling Congress.

There was coördination between the C.I.A. and the task forces, but also tension. The C.I.A. officers, who were under pressure to produce better intelligence in the field, wanted explicit legal authority before aggressively interrogating high-value targets. A finding would give operatives some legal protection for questionable actions, but the White House was reluctant to put what it wanted in writing.

A recently retired high-level C.I.A. official, who served during this period and was involved in the drafting of findings, described to me the bitter disagreements between the White House and the agency over the issue. “The problem is what constituted approval,” the retired C.I.A. official said. “My people fought about this all the time. Why should we put our people on the firing line somewhere down the road? If you want me to kill Joe Smith, just tell me to kill Joe Smith. If I was the Vice-President or the President, I’d say, ‘This guy Smith is a bad guy and it’s in the interest of the United States for this guy to be killed.’ They don’t say that. Instead, George”—George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A. until mid-2004—“goes to the White House and is told, ‘You guys are professionals. You know how important it is. We know you’ll get the intelligence.’ George would come back and say to us, ‘Do what you gotta do.’ ”

(snip)

Rumsfeld was vague, in his appearances before Congress, about when he had informed the President about Abu Ghraib, saying that it could have been late January or early February. He explained that he routinely met with the President “once or twice a week . . . and I don’t keep notes about what I do.” He did remember that in mid-March he and General Myers were “meeting with the President and discussed the reports that we had obviously heard” about Abu Ghraib.

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career.

In January of 2006, Taguba received a telephone call from General Richard Cody, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff. “This is your Vice,” he told Taguba. “I need you to retire by January of 2007.” No pleasantries were exchanged, although the two generals had known each other for years, and, Taguba said, “He offered no reason.” (A spokesperson for Cody said, “Conversations regarding general officer management are considered private personnel discussions. General Cody has great respect for Major General Taguba as an officer, leader, and American patriot.”)

“They always shoot the messenger,” Taguba told me. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.”

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff” -- the explicit images -- “was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

READ THOSE WORDS AGAIN. Read them, and weep for your nation, for your military and for all of us. Read them, and weep for Iraq. For what we have done to Iraq. Read them for, as Longfellow wrote, "God is not dead, nor doth He sleep. . . ."

Here is the "money graf" again:

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.

THE WAR ON TERROR is over. The United States has defected to the terrorist camp.

We invaded Iraq to -- allegedly -- bring that country freedom and security. It has neither.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Long live Saddam Hussein. He lives on in the disorder we have exacerbated in the Middle East. He lives on in every IED. He lives on in every American interrogator who stoops to torture "for the greater good."

Saddam lives. Saddam is victorious. A part of him lives on at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Allahu akbar, y'all.

Trump's Amerika . . . prophesied by ABC?

A fascistic American president goes rogue, decides to nuke Pakistan.

Just because. And does.

Sounds like great TV. (It was.) Sounds like a nightmare reality. (It could be.)

Now watch as prime-time TV of a few years ago meets a superpower that's going absolutely mad right now -- just in time to turn a roomful of television writers, circa 2012, into postmodern Nostradamuses, circa 2016.  

From Wikipedia:

When the crew of the U.S. Navy Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, the USS Colorado (SSBN-753), pick up a U.S. Navy SEAL team off Pakistan's coast, the Colorado receives an order to launch nuclear ballistic missiles at Pakistan.

Colorado's Commanding Officer, Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher), asks for confirmation of the firing order because the orders were received through a legacy Cold War secondary communication channel, only to be used in the event that Washington, D.C. has already been destroyed. After confirming Washington's continued existence and refusing to fire the missiles until the command is sent through the proper system, Chaplin is relieved of command by the Deputy Secretary of Defense William Curry, and the Colorado's second in command, Lieutenant Commander Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), is given command instead. When Kendal also questions the orders and asks for confirmation, the vessel is fired upon by the Virginia-class submarine USS Illinois (SSN-786). Two nuclear missile strikes are subsequently made on Pakistan by other U.S. forces.

Realizing they've been declared enemies of their own country, the Colorado seeks refuge on the island of Sainte Marina (a fictional French island located in the Indian Ocean) and commandeer a NATO communications and missile warning facility. When a pair of B-1 bombers is sent to attack the submarine and island, Chaplin launches a Trident nuclear missile towards Washington, D.C. to impress upon the national leadership that he's serious. The B-1s turn away at the last minute, but Chaplin (who has altered the missile's final target coordinates) allows the missile to visibly overfly Washington, D.C. and explode 200 miles beyond in the open Atlantic, the explosion clearly visible from both Washington and New York City. Via a television feed to the media, he then declares a 200-mile exclusion zone around Sainte Marina.

Now, the crew must find a way to prove their innocence and find out who in the U.S. government has set them up, so they can finally return home.

OURS IS an age of signs and wonders. Mostly signs, and prophecy can turn up in unlikely places. Like prime-time network TV.

Last Resort, which ran for just one season, was one of my favorite TV shows -- never missed it, and every episode kept you on the edge of your seat. And every episode, I kept thinking "This could happen. We are so close to this really happening."

Now that crypto-fascist, loose-cannon Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president, we are close enough to TV-show-as-prophetic-voice that I am getting nervous.

No, that's a lie.

I am scared s***less. Donald Trump is a racist, unhinged, authoritarian thug -- one who has repeatedly espoused violence at home and abroad, advocates torture and other war crimes, and who says he just might go nuclear in the Middle East and maybe even Europe -- and that's just fine by about half of America. The United States as a constitutional, democratic republic is dying before our eyes, and it is not shaping up to be a peaceful end.

We have enough nuclear warheads and bombs to end life on Earth several times over . . . and a petulant, unstable know-nothing has an even shot at winning the "nuclear briefcase." 

IF YOU want to do some election-year political research, buy the 13 episodes of Last Resort. They may well be one of the most prescient previews of a Trump administration that you'll find.

Make sure you have extra underwear.

We're all Sunnis and Shiites now

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Ilario Pantano
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The basics of the would-be congressman's resumé were clear enough.

Former Goldman-Sachs guy joins the Marines after 9/11, eventually ends up in Iraq as a second lieutenant.

His men stop a car seen leaving a house they were searching. Found some garden-variety weapons in the house, find nothing in the car or on the driver and passenger.

Marines search the car again, search the occupants again. Still nothing.

The would-be congressman smashes up the car. He sends the rest of his men off, has the unarmed Iraqi civilians search their own vehicle again. For some reason, he empties two clips of M-16 ammo into their backs at close range. They slump into the car.

The one which contained no weapons.

Afterward, the lieutenant slashes the tires on a car full of Iraqi house painters. After that, he places a handmade sign on the car with the two bodies inside: "No better friend, no worse enemy."

MONTHS LATER, the Marines investigate. Prosecutors charge him with murder, which could have meant the death penalty. A hearing determines there's not enough evidence to court-martial him.

The presiding officer, however, recommended a non-judicial punishment for "extremely poor judgment." He said the lieutenant, by desecrating the Iraqis' corpses with the sign, had disgraced the Marine Corps.

Then he sheds his uniform, finds Jesus, paints himself as a red-white-and-blue hero of the Iraq War, writes a book to that effect . . . then puts himself forth as a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina.

And that, friends, is how Ilario Pantano became a Tea Party darling and got 46 percent of the vote against a conservative, pro-life Democrat who voted against ObamaCare.

That's how he went from staring a murder rap and the death penalty in the face . . . to almost getting elected to Congress. With the backing of a whole, big bunch of Republicans, including Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani.

That such a character as Pantano has gotten so far in politics is no testimony to the civic heath of North Carolina. You have to wonder what the hell is wrong with those people, frankly.

In Pantano's native New York, however, old friends and acquaintances wonder what's become of the man they once knew. These deep misgivings about the would-be congressman reverberate through the pages of New York magazine:

But to some of his old New York friends, the new Pantano is not the one they thought they knew. “Is this obviously a new and different phase in Ilario’s life? Yes. Has he made major changes in his life? Yes. Is this the guy I’ve known before? No,” said Noah Shachtman, a contributing editor to Wired magazine and a non-resident fellow of the Brookings Institution. He met Pantano at Horace Mann. “As a politico turned musician turned reporter,” Schactman added, ”I don’t begrudge anyone the right to reinvent themselves.”

Though Pantano moved to North Carolina about ten years ago, Schactman, like other New York friends who’ve kept in touch, believed Pantano a New Yorker through and through. His mother was a New York literary agent, though she now raises horses in North Carolina; his wife was a Jewish New Yorker and onetime model who posed for photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Pantano never did drugs, but he loved to dance and loved the hot nightclubs of the nineties. “He went to Mars, the Palladium, Disco 2000. “He couldn’t have gone there and possibly have had any issue with gay people,” said Alex Roy, who runs Europe by Car, a family business, and who held a fund-raiser for Pantano when he was accused of murder. “He’s changed a lot. I am pretty surprised to hear that he’s against gay marriage, considering that we have gay friends in common. He’s 180 degrees away from the person I grew up with. Maybe it’s a function of where he lives, or having served in the military. If you’re running for office it sure pays to agree with people in your district.”

Vlad Edelman, who was Pantano’s partner in a digital media business for half a dozen years, called Pantano after his New York speech against the proposed mosque. “What’s going on with your politics? I don’t recognize them,” Edelman asked. Shachtman also worried about Pantano’s fearmongering — the candidate fears a Chinese attack via Cuba, as he told Schachtman in an interview for Wired.

THERE YOU GO. Being against gay marriage is a big, big concern. Alleged war crimes? Not so much.

Likewise, giving a speech against the "Ground Zero mosque" is some kind of major faux pas, but gunning down actual Iraqi Muslims in cold blood . . . not so much.

"What's going on with your politics?" As if there were no red flags in 2004, in some God-forsaken corner of Iraq?

Screw it. You want to know what America stands for today? Nothing. Not a damn thing apart from self-righteousness, nada apart from talking a good -- albeit hypocritical -- game. That's who we are, what we're all about.

Left or right, Bohemian or Bubba, there's only one unforgivable sin in contemporary American society today -- being politically incorrect. I guess what they say is true . . . you are what you invade.

We go on hurting each other, tearing each other apart

The United States has suffered -- yet again -- a horrible mass shooting. Another mind-numbing, soul-killing episode of domestic terrorism.

This latest, early Sunday morning, came as some madman of Afghan heritage and a Muslim upbringing shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 and wounding more than 50 others in the deadliest mass shooting in American history before an Orlando SWAT team gunned him down. The mass-murderer -- the terrorist who aimed to deal with homosexuals the same way Adolf Hitler did -- pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in a phone call to 911 dispatchers.

The atrocity's aftermath, unsurprisingly in these times, has been one of scapegoating, recriminations and outright mau-mauing on all sides. Unsurprisingly, our country's angry-ideologue class, along with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have been in the middle of the national freakout.

Take your pick on whom to blame, because everybody's getting tarred so far. Our battered, crumbling American society is in a bad patch of its ongoing nervous breakdown, and American Conservative senior editor and blogger Rod Dreher ain't feeling so good himself:

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:

Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.

“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”

Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.

SO . . . what we're hearing is that, for fear that Hillary Clinton will open up a can of politically correct WhoopAss on believing Christians, it is somehow understandable and legitimate that allegedly believing Christians would cast their votes for a candidate who:

• Actively and unequivocally encouraged violence against protesters at his campaign events


• Clearly stated his support of torture — acts that not only are profoundly immoral but also are defined as war crimes in both domestic and international law


• Differs not a whit from Hillary Clinton on abortion, based on his record and not his multiple campaign positions on the subject


• Has reiterated his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, an act of religious bigotry that flies in the face of U.S. constitutional law and would, soon enough, be used against Christians once the forest of the law had been cut down and we had nowhere left to hide


• Has called for the retributive mass murder of terrorists’ wives, children and families because “We gotta be tough.


• Has used blatant bigotry and stereotyping to scapegoat and engender hatred toward Mexicans as a whole


• Sought to bully a federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a lawsuit against him, deploying outrageously racist arguments in the process


• Refused to immediately repudiate the support of onetime neo-Nazi and KKK grand dragon David Duke, and who regularly sends out rhetorical dog whistles to skinheads, Kluxers and all other ilks of alt-right refuse


• Has refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in the Middle East and even Europe. Europe! 


• Is a well-known moral degenerate who routinely denigrates women, this in addition to his entire adult lifetime of sexually using and objectifying them. (We are supposed to elect this as president of the United States because we’re freaked out over gays and the tragically gender-confused? Really?)


• Has built a long “business resumé” of shady dealings, crackpot schemes, failed ventures born of sheer narcissism and, finally, alleged out-and-out fraud


• Routinely bullies his political opponents


• Routinely threatens his political opponents


• Routinely makes slanderous and outrageous accusations against his political opponents, the latest being against the president of the United States when he insinuated Barack Obama was somehow in cahoots with Islamist extremists.

St. Maximilian Kolbe

I AM SORRY, but even thinking of voting for such a candidate won’t fly — not on grounds of one’s faith in Jesus Christ . . . not on grounds of one’s support of the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

That may mean that Christians are just f***ed in this election but this is the real world, and f***ed happens.

As for myself, I’d rather be honorably martyred under Hillary Clinton than live in dishonor under President Trump, effectively repudiating my Catholic beliefs as I shoveled moral excrement upon my Savior and my faith.

Head-case nation

I wish to associate myself with Mitch Albom's remarks in the Detroit Free Press:

Note to journalism students. When we celebrate investigative reporting, it's for issues like war crimes, nursing home scandals or police corruption. It's not to report that LeBron James has opened a Twitter account.

But that was a "major" headline Wednesday. And James' first Tweet was Hello World, the Real King James is in the Building "Finally."

Honestly, who calls himself "King"?

Which brings me back to the man himself, who, after a few years of relative humility, now seems, at 25, to be stepping onto some assumed throne atop the world, like that "Airbender" kid, as if the rest of the planet naturally should step aside.

Excuse me if I turn my back. I no longer care less where LeBron James plays. I'm sick of the whole story. The number of supposedly respectable people tripping over themselves to hand him $100 million should make all of them and many of us ashamed.

In a country where people are out of work or out in the streets, LeBron's basketball home was never important. But spilling money on his head is downright insulting.

(snip)

Still, the final cherry on this ego sundae is the televised event tonight, an hour-long ESPN special at 9 o'clock (an hour?) in which James will announce who wins the right to wrap its money around his arrogance.

Only in America could we keep inventing reality TV that fantastically outshames the previous low mark. A prime-time event? To announce a free-agent signing? And don't point out that some proceeds go to charity. You want to give to charity, quietly write a check. Don't get a network to do it for you so it gets to pump its shows and you get to shower yourself in international coverage -- while calling it philanthropy.

The NBA has embarrassed itself here. The media have embarrassed themselves. And a guy who calls himself "King" may be beyond embarrassment, which is truly embarrassing.

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSA

I don't know how to beat a dead horse with any degree of panache, nor do I have the inclination to try, but the dead horse of America's present proto-fascist torture regime -- alas -- does still require more flogging.

And it needs to be kept up until the impeachment proceedings and criminal trials begin -- or until the war-crimes trials begin in the Hague, Netherlands. Whichever comes first.

That is the ugly business of democracy which, unfortunately, we have no stomach for at present. Along this present path lay tyranny.

I really have nothing else to add. I'll just let MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and law professor Jonathan Turley fill you in on the particulars.

HAT TIP: Catholic and Enjoying It.

About to give it up for Ron Paul? Don't.

Rule No. 1: Never, ever vote for a libertarian.

Rule No. 2: Rule No. 1 goes double for libertarians from Texas.

JUST WHEN the American media was about to anoint a genuine American eccentric -- that's what polite folks call a bigoted nut -- as the "straight-talking candidate" of the 2008 election cycle, a writer for The New Republic actually engages in some actual journalism and digs years back into the Ron Paul archives.

What James Kirchick pulls from the fever-swamp muck is not pretty:

If you are a critic of the Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the ideological spectrum. Antiwar conservatives, disaffected centrists, even young liberal activists have all flocked to Paul, hailing him as a throwback to an earlier age, when politicians were less mealy-mouthed and American government was more modest in its ambitions, both at home and abroad. In The New York Times Magazine, conservative writer Christopher Caldwell gushed that Paul is a "formidable stander on constitutional principle," while The Nation praised "his full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq." Former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan endorsed Paul for the GOP nomination, and ABC's Jack Tapper described the candidate as "the one true straight-talker in this race." Even The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the elite bankers whom Paul detests, recently advised other Republican presidential contenders not to "dismiss the passion he's tapped."

(snip)

Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.

But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

(snip)

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute--including Paul--may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, "There are too many libertarians in this country ... who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, ... find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought."

Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."

This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals who "want to keep white America from taking action against black crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."

Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending "South African Holocaust."

Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently, often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration."

While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor, telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on his website.

SO WHILE MANY OF US have delighted in Paul's blistering attacks on the Bush Administration and its Dirty Little War, we need to take a step back and examine where that opposition is coming from. It's not coming from a good place.

And not only do you not want to give hateful cranks your hard-earned money or your precious vote, you also don't want to give anyone affiliated with the kind of hateful agitprop unearthed by The New Republic something just as important -- credibility.

It's bad enough that Paul and his hangers-on have been demonstrated to be race-baiters. But nooooooo. . . .

Just when you think it's as bad as it can get -- that a lot of Americans have devoted their time and treasure to putting the clinched fist of some pissed-off, antisocial, racist crank firmly on the nuclear launch button -- out come the tinfoil hats:

The newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies, reflecting Paul's obsession with the "industrial-banking-political elite" and promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills. They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations--organizations that conspiracy theorists have long accused of seeking world domination. In 1978, a newsletter blamed David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and "fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests" for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it called "one of the saddest events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sold a video about Waco produced by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson"--as one of the newsletters called her--who maintained that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. As with many of the more outlandish theories the newsletters cited over the years, the video received a qualified endorsement: "I can't vouch for every single judgment by the narrator, but the film does show the depths of government perfidy, and the national police's tricks and crimes," the newsletter said, adding, "Send your check for $24.95 to our Houston office, or charge the tape to your credit card at 1-800-RON-PAUL."

TRULY, THIS IS STUFF from the bowels of the darkest of America's malaria-as-politics swamps. And when the mosquitos occasionally swarm out of the heart of darkness, all kinds of folk -- and the institutions they make up -- can get the fevers that wrack the body and cloud the mind.

I've seen it. Don't go there.

HAT TIP: Boar's Head Tavern.

Abu Ghraib? No, Omaha.

Staff lead a young man into a brightly lit room.

He is barefoot and shirtless.

HIS HANDLERS wear latex surgical gloves.

But what really gets your attention in the bright light are two stainless steel hooks - big enough for deep-sea fishing - pierced into his upper back.

A heavy-duty cord connects to the eyelet on each hook. With a mountaineering rope and four pulleys, a man hoists Dalton off the floor, his hooked skin stretching as he rises.

HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE THINGS happened to Iraqi detainees at the hands of their American interrogators at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. But this, from the pages of the Sunday World-Herald, is not a story of that. Nor is it a tale of some of the more horrific violations of the Geneva Conventions at the U.S. detainee camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The actual scene: A recent Sunday at an Omaha tattoo parlor:

The practice is called suspension, and several dozen people have tried it at a Bellevue tattoo shop, Dr. Jack's Ink Emporium.

Despite potential health risks, including infection, suspension is becoming more common across the country. But it's far from mainstream, and remains a fringe activity.

Suspension is not entirely new; some Native American tribes practiced a form of it in the 1800s and earlier as a rite of passage for young men.

Dalton and others do it to prove they can withstand the pain, giving them a sense of control over body and mind. They like the feel-good kick when their bodies release endorphins - narcotic-like hormones - in response to the pain, as well as the relaxed feeling when they are done.

And some like "performing" for the dozen or more people watching at the tattoo studio.

In an era when soccer moms have tattoos and teens have steel studs in their tongues, suspension is a way to stand out.

On a recent Sunday evening, more than 30 people watched Dalton and three others suspend at Dr. Jack's.

(snip)

Dalton, 34, lay on his stomach on a padded table. Monte Vogel, general manager of the four Omaha-area Dr. Jack's shops, holds one hook. Mike Coons, a Dr. Jack's manager, holds the other.

The hooks gleam.

The sharp end of each hook is inserted into a hollow needle about 2 inches long. Vogel and Coons, wearing black latex gloves, pull up handfuls of Dalton's skin and, with a smooth motion, slip in a needle and hook, one on the right side of his upper back, the other on the left.

He doesn't flinch.

"Like a champ," Coons says.

"Always," says Dalton, who has suspended four times in the past nine months, each time hooked in his upper back.

DEVOTEES OF SUSPENSION pay Dr. Mengele's Dr. Jack's $100 a session for a few minutes of carefree swinging. From massive hooks run through them like a tarpon at the end of a 30-pound test line.

Dalton had it rough as a kid. He says he was physically abused and spent several years in foster homes. The abuse, he says, gave him a tolerance for pain.

He said that after a stint in the Army, he became an electrician and mechanic. He has always loved art and took pottery and painting classes in high school. One of his favorite pieces: a dragon perched atop a mountain.

Dalton tapped that background when he became a Dr. Jack's tattooer about a year ago.

With the wood floors, off-white walls and bright lights, the room where Dalton suspends looks like a small dance studio.

The shop's owners designed it solely for suspension. A wall of glass allows people to watch from padded benches in the shop's main room.

Dalton, wearing long plaid shorts and a black cap, leans slightly forward when it's time.

Vogel attaches parachute cords to the hooks' eyelets, then connects the other end of the cords to a steel bar rigged to the rope and pulleys.

A Dr. Jack's employee pulls the rope slightly, and Dalton's hooked skin stretches. As Dalton is gradually pulled up, only the balls of his feet touch the floor; then, only his toe tips.

The employee pulls the rope a little more and Dalton is suspended, his feet dangling a few inches above the floor.

Dalton doesn't scream or moan.

The crowd quietly watches through the window.

Dalton feels the pressure of the hooks pulling his skin and a slight numbness in his upper back. He's feeling high, like a distance runner who is in good stride and past the point of pain.

He's looking forward, his arms dangling. Music from Clutch, a heavy blues-rock band, pumps into his head through earphones.

Dalton pushes off the glass wall with his legs, causing his body to swing. With each push, the arc of his swing increases.

His heart beats faster. He doesn't feel any pain.

He looks like a skateboarder as he zips from one side of the room to the other. He knows the crowd wants to see more than just someone hanging. They want action.

"Getting close to 15 (minutes)," a Dr. Jack's employee calls out.

Dalton swings a while longer before the crew lets him down, to the applause of the crowd. He had suspended about 20 minutes.

WHY IS IT that any "enhanced interrogation" Bush, Cheney & Co. performs on Arab wretches in the name of "freedom" and "security" comes as shock to us at all, here in the American heartland? It's no more than what we do to ourselves . . . for our own "tortured" reasons and to overwhelm a gnawing pain that's worse than any giant fish hook protruding from our flesh.

Or was that a meat hook?

Ryan Schoultz, a 20-year-old cook, is tan and polite and talks with a Southern accent. His wife is there to take pictures.

He has hung once before, from his back. This time, it's from the chest. More of a challenge.

As he's lifted, his skin tears slightly. He doesn't feel pain but he hears his skin rip. The crew lets him down so the skin won't tear more.

Schoultz vows to try it again -- but not this night.

THE BARBARIANS are no longer at the gate. If there's a fundamental difference between us and tattooed Amazon headhunters with bones sticking through their lips and noses, I fail to apprehend what that might be any longer.

On the other hand, I readily grasp the difference between Saddam Hussein and ourselves. Saddam had the good sense never to torture himself. Or at least never pay $100 for the "privilege."

One question: How long before some Bush Administration official dredges up this little story from Omaha, Neb., as a defense exhibit at a war-crimes trial? Is what I'm asking.

Somewhere in Louisiana, it's always 1959

In Louisiana, you're OK, I guess, so long as you're posting stuff critical of the gay-rights movement.

A commenter on my last post had this advice for me: "Please post more like this rather than the anti-Louisiana stuff, okay?"

Not a chance.

Not when there's so much "anti-Louisiana stuff" to choose from. Not when it's so factually irrefutable. Not when the "anti-Louisiana stuff" usually is about things so egregious they take Nebraskans' breath away -- just as they do others unfamiliar with the state's certain reductio ad absurdum je ne sais quoi.

THERE'S NOT a chance in hell I'll quit posting the "anti-Louisiana stuff" so long as, for example, Louisiana vigilantes can kill a man just for being black . . . and Louisianians are OK with that. Naturally, the latest "anti-Louisiana stuff" -- the latest "anti-Louisiana" horror, actually -- has bubbled up from New Orleans like so much swamp gas . . . straight into the pages of the latest edition of The Nation:

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

(snip)

During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help me--I'm shot," Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buckshot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.

"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."

After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."

IN MUCH of this country after a natural disaster, sworn law officers wait to see evidence of looting, take the looters into custody and then read them their Miranda rights.

In New Orleans after a natural disaster, the cops either haul ass or turn into Mad Max, and armed good ol' boys shoot first, then yell "nigger."

But that only happens because Yankees hate Louisiana, right?

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all--white against black--that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful" -- her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

THE PROBLEM with Louisiana is that Louisianians are more upset that their dirty laundry gets aired than they are that their laundry is so dirty in the first place. I don't know how you fix such a culture.

But maybe if I, and others, write about "the anti-Louisiana stuff" enough, someone just might get embarrassed enough to come up with something. But that might take a while because, as I 've written before on this blog, somewhere in Louisiana, it's always 1959.