I don’t enjoy following the douche-baggery we call our political system as it tends to upset me. And generally there’s no reason for me to comment on anything our government tools say or do, as my one and only reader most often agrees with me anyway. However, this morning, as I was scanning the MSNBC news headlines, one in particular caught my attention: Perry: Marines in video are ‘kids’, not criminals.

If you haven’t heard about it, read about it, or worse yet, watched the video of it — we have among our military a few guys who thought it would be funny to piss on human corpses. There are many words to describe that sort of behavior: disgusting, disrespectful, stupid, and criminal. Take your pick. (The correct answer is: Technically, all of the above.)

As stated in the MSNBC article by Anne Flaherty, “A military criminal investigation and an internal Marine Corps review are under way. The Geneva Conventions forbid the desecration of the dead.”

With all the atrocities being committed in these horrible wars, why should we care about this one in particular? The guys are dead, so they don’t even know about it. The peeing Marines don’t care because they’ve been trained not to. And apparently Perry doesn’t care because he believes boys will be boys — what’s the big deal?

“Obviously, 18-, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often. And that’s what’s occurred here… What’s really disturbing to me is the kind of over-the-top rhetoric from this administration and their disdain for the military.” –Texas Governor Rick Perry on CNN’s, State of the Union.

Seriously? Marines piss on dead combatants, but what really disturbs Perry is the fact that this administration is critical of them? What is really fucking disturbing to me is that our military trained those “kids” to be brutal and heartless. Who would even think of doing something like that?! Who would think of doing that are young men whom our government have brain-washed into seeing “the enemy” as sub-human. Stupid mistakes are drinking too much, cheating on an exam, taking the car without permission, or being videotaped desecrating a corpse. Seeing another human being lying dead on the ground and choosing to piss on him was not a mistake: it was a choice and a statement that said, “We are Americans and you are worthless pieces of shit.”

I am so very sorry for the families of the men whose bodies were treated with such disrespect. But I’m also sorry for those Marines. They will have to live with the memory of that act, and of undoubtedly far worse affronts to human life and dignity, for the rest of their lives. They are going to come home damaged and deeply scarred by the things they’ve seen and done while draped in a flag that made them less human.

While I am ashamed of those men and their actions, I do agree with Perry on one thing: these men aren’t criminals. However it is hardly “over-the-top rhetoric” to call the behavior of these Marines “deplorable” — over-the-top rhetoric is to say they were just boys being boys.

I am not an investigative journalist and the Geneva Conventions is a very long and complex document; that said this is what I found: “Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field. Geneva, 6 July 1906. Chapter I: Article 3. After every engagement the belligerent who remains in possession of the field of battle shall take measures to search for the wounded and to protect the wounded and dead from robbery and ill treatment.”

This picture is probably more responsible for turning the tide against the Vietnam War than any other, including the infamous photo of Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation.[1] Like most people, I’m not too fond of guns. True: I would rather be killed by a bullet in the head than flames covering my body. Also true: guns don’t kill people, bullets kill people. But it is a whole lot harder to set someone on fire than to shot them. Similarly, a bullet thrown is relatively harmless.

In order to buy a gun in the United States, you must submit to a background check. The FBI performs those checks, so they know how many people are buying guns. Well, kind of. There are three things that complicate matters:

1. Not all background checks pass. A whopping 1.3% of checks fail. Only 98.7% of gun buyers are allowed! What an outrage!
2. The background check only applies to the person, who may buy more than a single gun. Many more.
3. Many people buy guns at gun shows where background checks are not performed

All this means that the total number of background checks is a fair estimate of the number of guns sold in the United States. But if it is wrong, it is low; there are almost certainly more guns sold than background checks requested. So how many guns are Americans buying? According to Opposing Views, last year (2010), the FBI processed a record-breaking 14,409,616 background checks. This year? With a week left, the FBI processed a new record-breaking 1,534,414 requests!

Why is this? Could it be that crime is on the rise? Not according to the FBI:

The issue seems to be gift giving. The two days with the most gun sales were both this year (again with a week left in 2011, so who knows). On December 23, there were 102,222 background checks processed. But that’s nothing compared to Black Friday this year when there were 129,166. “Merry Christmas! Now go honor of Price of Peace by killing something!”

Americans are just crazy.

[1] For those interested, here is the photo. Be warned: it is horrific. I first saw the picture over 30 years ago and it still haunts me. The great and unfortunately late (he died a couple miles from me due to the bad driving of a graduate student) David Halberstam wrote:

[2] Halberstam was a great man, but he is wrong. Human beings who have been doused with gasoline burn surprisingly quickly. In general, human beings burn rather poorly because of their high water content.

After Friday’s police spraying of non-violent protesters at U.C. Davis, I—like any reasonable person—am very angry and sad. Right now, I’d like to talk about part of my anger: the firestorm of apologia for the police. Only the most evil of people are defending the specific police and their actions. You know, people like Bill O’Reilly. (Even Megyn Kelly seems to be reticent to go that far, even if, you know, pepper spray is “a food product, essentially.”) But even people I normally agree with—for example, Ed Schultz—are going out of their way to protect police, even though they deserve no such thing. Have not the police all along done exactly what the installed powers have asked of them? Have they ever, with the one exception discussed below, broken with the Nuremberg defense of just following orders regardless of how heinous the orders they are following?

Below are four police myths that I am getting tired of hearing. These are evil people, doing evil work, for even more evil people. And if there are police out there who don’t like my characterization, I suggest they start refusing some of these orders. The reckoning is coming. And if they think the 1% will hesitate to throw them under the bus at the first sign of trouble, then they are even stupider than the IQ tests they must fail to join the force would indicate.

Police need to be better trained.

Police are trained very well. They don’t beat up protesters and pepper spray them because they aren’t well trained. They do it because they are extremely well trained.

Police are part of the 99%.

Police are paid the same as the 99%, but they are part of the protective services of the 1%. You wouldn’t say that the Praetorian Guard were normal Roman citizens. They were what allowed the generally abusive Roman Empire to continue on for so long. The police allow the existing unjust system to continue on. They are leaches of the 1%. They are not the 99%.

Most cops are good.

Again: the ones performing the vile acts are just the ones performing the vile acts. Modern management philosophy holds that you make all workers as interchangeable as possible. The reason the police at the protests in Wisconsin didn’t turn violent was that they saw their fellow off-duty police friends there. If they hadn’t, those protesters would have been victims of the same kind of violence that all the other protesters are receiving.

Police are just like the rest of us.

Perhaps the funniest line I have ever heard (and I have heard it many times from many different people), is the answer to the question, “Why did you go into law enforcement?” The answer: “Because I want to help people.” I used to hear this same line from pre-med students; they too just wanted to help people; the fact that their chosen profession was very lucrative had nothing to do with it. People become police—in all its varied forms—because they are naturally rule-oriented thinkers. They are the kind of people who really do need the idea of a god to behave properly. People who just want to help others become ministers and social workers and even nurses. They don’t become cops or soldiers. And those who do what may be necessary work (I don’t think so, but most people do) are not just like the rest of us.

I would be happy to take back all that I have said, just as soon as I start seeing active duty police pushing back against their orders to brutalize peaceful protesters. I have no expectation of seeing this, however. In the almost five decades of my life, I have rarely seen police act like anything but the evil automatons we are daily witnessing.

On September 7, Brian Williams asked a question of Rick Perry at the Republican presidential campaign debate. It was about the 234 executions that have taken place under Perry’s governorship. The question itself was not widely covered. What really caused a stir was the audience response to that statistic: applause and later cheers; the audience was overjoyed that so many people had been executed.

It is unfortunate that the question did not get more coverage because it is an important one. Williams asked,

Perry brushed off the question, claiming that the state of Texas had a very “thoughtful, a very clear process in place.” He continued on, saying, “If you come into our state… and you kill… one of our citizens… you will be executed.”

That wasn’t the question, though, was it?

To make it perfectly clear to Governor Perry: is it possible that someone who comes into your state might be executed even if he hadn’t murdered anyone?

This is not a question that any death penalty advocate wants to answer. Conservatives like to claim that the government can’t do anything right. Two of their favorite sayings from St. Reagan are, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” and, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”

So are we to believe that the government can’t do anything right except when it comes to guilty decisions on death penalty cases?[1] That is what conservatives are claiming: our judicial system is perfect.[2] Got that?

Since 1973, we have seen 69 people taken off of death row because DNA evidence has proven them to be innocent. That certainly suggests that before DNA evidence was viable, just as many innocent people were executed. What’s more, most death penalty cases have no DNA evidence. These cases, in which no DNA is available that could possibly exonerate the accused, show that it is entirely reasonable that just as many of these people are innocent.

Liberals do not claim that the government is perfect—only that it is useful and necessary. In order to believe in the death penalty, one must believe that in this regard the government is infallible. But the most fervent believers in the death penalty are those who believe that the government is utterly incompetent. In order to hold these opinions, one must ignore all the evidence and believe in some magical place called Government-Can’t-Do-Anything-Right-But-They-Are-Perfect-When-It-Comes-To-The-Death-Penalty-Land.

[1] Many people, include Rick Perry in the video above, make the argument that the appeal process somehow makes the death penalty faultless—that it provides a error-free check to balance a otherwise imperfect judicial system. This is not a compelling argument. For one thing, plenty of people have been proven to be innocent after their appeals have been exhausted (for example, John Thompson). Secondly, only the original trial comes close to being truly fair. Each step in the appeals process puts greater limits on the evidence that can be used. It is not, as is commonly believed, the case that each person accused of murder (or anything else) gets four or five tries to be found not guilty.

[2] There is another brand of conservative who claims that any innocents who are executed are unfortunate casualties in the judicial war against murder, and that it in no way comprises the integrity of the system itself. Such a philosophy is repugnant. Let me only say here that such a system is as guilty of murder as any person who is legitimately put to death by the system. And what do we do to murderers? At the very least, we give them life without the possibility of parole so they cannot hurt any more innocent people.