Infinitive Splitter

Many weblogs have weekly traditions. TBogg and others have the Friday Random Ten. Kos has Science Friday. Michael Bérubé has Arbitrary But Fun Friday (and Theory Tuesday and Rhetorical/Liberal Thursday — the man is a machine). All the cool kids do it.

Well, now I’ve got mine.** Several weeks ago, I published a one-off feature called “Thursday Copy-Paste Blogging.” In the interest of blogospheric conformity, I have moved the segment to Friday.

(You may have noticed that I also changed the name. There’s no good reason for this, so leave a comment if you prefer one or the other, or if you have a better idea.)

This week’s stolen content comes from TAP’s Charles P. Pierce:

You worthless passel of cowards. They’re laughing at you. You know that, right?

The national Democratic Party is no longer worth the cement needed to sink it to the bottom of the sea. For an entire week, it allowed a debate on changing the soul of the country to be conducted intramurally between the Torture Porn and Useful Idiot wings of the Republican Party, the latter best exemplified by John McCain, who keeps fashioning his apparently fathomless ambition into a pair of clown shoes with which he can do the monkey dance across the national stage. They’re laughing at him, too.

The New York Times has the right of it here, limning the pathetic gullibility at the heart of the “compromise.” There is nothing in this bill that President Thumbscrews can’t ignore. There is nothing in this bill that reins in his feckless and dangerous reinterpretation of the powers of his office. There is nothing in this bill that requires him to take it — or its congressional authors — seriously. Two weeks ago, John Yoo set down in The New York Times the precise philosophical basis on which the administration will sign this bill and then ignore it. The president will decide what a “lesser breach” of the Geneva Conventions is? How can anyone over the age of five give this president that power? And wait until you see the atrocity that I guarantee you is coming down the tracks concerning the fact that the president committed at least 40 impeachable offenses with regard to illegal wiretapping.

And the Democratic Party was nowhere in this debate. It contributed nothing. On the question of whether or not the United States will reconfigure itself as a nation which tortures its purported enemies and then grants itself absolution through adjectives — “Aggressive interrogation techniques” — the Democratic Party had…no opinion. On the issue of allowing a demonstrably incompetent president as many of the de facto powers of a despot that you could wedge into a bill without having the Constitution spontaneously combust in the Archives, well, the Democratic Party was more pissed off at Hugo Chavez.

Go ahead and click the link to read the last couple of paragraphs.

*If you absolutely must get something from me today, here it is: the Pittsburgh Pirates need to win just three of their last nine games to finish the season with a better record than last year’s.

**This probably won’t really be a weekly feature.