Seriously, Folks: Why I have been mocking Rice

It's clear by now I rely on humor to focus on the absurdity of the administration's "stands" on certain policies, but from time to time a real gut check is needed. What galls me the most about what has been taking place is that, in reaction to falling poll numbers, we see the president and other members of his administration mount a charm offensive that more often obscures the facts rather than elucidates them.

When I see our president on the road, day in, day out, selling his policies, I can't help but wonder who's setting his policies. Is he the first truly puppet president? If he is, is Lawrence Dickerson right that there's a cabal running war policy and that the president seems excluded from it except as a PR man?

In the last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been flogging Europe trying to convince our allies that the U.S. does not condone torture. The problem is that the trip was necessitated by growing outrage in Europe that we've been using the continent as our own personal gulag. It's no wonder Europe is not amused even while attempting to tone down the rhetoric. Then, Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter pumps the volume back up with his attack on both the U.S. and Britain.

It's a growing, indisputable fact that under Bush, Cheney and Rice the U.S. has threatened, perhaps for sometime to come, the very integrity of the West's human rights stand. The U.S. has weakened our international standing and Europe, much to its chagrin, may have become complicit.

Imagine an America in which the focus of debate is not on the power and moral clarity of our shining beacon of freedom but instead is on how we get out of the mess we've created? How far have we fallen that our president is viewed as having caved because he is being forced to weaken his pro-torture policy by a decorated war hero his political operatives once swiftboated with claims of fathering a black child?

No, Bush and Rice can't go on the road to sell corrupt and failed policies and get a free pass. They should be hounded mercilessly until they begin to see we won't be fooled again. We want good and moral policy, not dog-and-pony shows.