My heart's just not in it

You know, I thought we'd sunk to the bottom of the muck when Alberto Gonzales, the architect of the Bush administration's liberal torture policy, was confirmed for Attorney General. Of course, I was wrong. Now, Bush has nominated John Negroponte to serve as the nation's first National Intelligence Director. You probably know Mr. Negroponte from his recent stint as the head U.S. administrator in Iraq, or perhaps from his days as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. But for those of us who cut our political teeth during the long nightmare that was Ronald Reagan's foreign policy in Central America during the 1980's, John Dimitri Negroponte is infamously remembered as the point-man in the covert war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, turning Honduras into a murderous dictatorship in the process. I don't really have the stomach to go into detail, but here's a brief glimpse of the horrors he orchestrated.

I give up. Our nation's top cop advocates the use of torture, and the head of our new centralized intelligence agency ran a covert war that transformed Central America into the western hemisphere's version of the killing fields. Fucking fantastic. There was a time when the folks with these kinds of resumes were too tainted for visible political office. Now they occupy the top spots in the Bush administration. This is grotesque. Absurd and grotesque. And it's leading me to seriously reconsider the utility of venting. It's not making me feel any better, and it's clearly not making a difference. I think my time is better spent hammering out the remains of my dissertation, blogging about the baby, or working on fiction.

Adios.