As I’m writing this we are in the midst of another very bad bout of ugly news. We just found out that the CIA tortured every bit as much as we knew they did, only now we’ve been told by Congress.
Now we’re waiting to find out, once again, if the government can be bothered to pay its bills.
How old-fashioned am I? I pay my bills.
In my day we took Business Principles in school and we learned how to write checks. We learned to date them and learned how if you wrote the wrong date, you could go to jail. So you changed the date and you initialed it, because you took responsibility for the little change you made in the date. And then you wrote the name of the payee in cursive because printing was disrespectful, and you wrote the amount in cursive so there’d be no mistaking how much it was just because your ones looked like sevens and your sixes looked like zeros. Then you signed it, and you were happy, because you had paid your stupid bills until next month and had a right to be happy.
Nowadays these idiot congresspeople think they can write laws making the government spend all the money there is in the world including money that actually belongs to China, and then when the bill is due act like they’re patriots for refusing to pay it.
But I got away from myself there. I don’t want to talk about how congresspeople are wastes of human DNA. Let’s return to torture.
Torture. This country tortures. Let’s all just let that sink in.
OK. Now. What are we trying to do here? Who knows? Hands? Can anyone tell me what we are trying to do in this space?
We’re trying to write a damn humor column, that’s what! And our country tortures. How do you think that makes me feel? I feel like my CIA, the CIA I pay taxes to keep it going, so that it doesn’t go belly up like the U.S. Post Office — yes, that CIA — is seriously not working with me. They are not helping me do my job of finding the slap-happy, bright side of things.
I wish I could thank the occasional torturer who thought to torture Guantanamo Bay inmates with the “Barney & Friends” song, “I Love You.” That was a good try at humor, reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s choice of “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” in his Cold War comedy “One, Two, Three.” However in the movie the volume wasn’t turned up to levels that could break eardrums and induce nausea. So no comedy award.
If there’s anything funny about the whole thing it’s probably the hilarious fact that in return for undermining our moral standing in the world and making us more of a target of hatred than before, it now is clear that what we suspected all along is true, namely that no actionable information was gleaned as a result of any of the torture. The CIA lied to us about all that.
CIA folks did not actually learn anything through torture that prevented any terrorist attacks. All the actionable intelligence came from other means.
D’oh!