New Quaker Notebook

Tonight Jay Leno joked that we've seen Dick Cheney more in the past eight days than we got to see him during his entire eight years in office. Of course Cheney's been out and about making speeches, typically critical of the Obama administration.

His latest speech, presented today at the American Enterprise Institute, continued the Bushevik's clever use of language to cloak the real meaning of what can be easily conveyed in simple English for the nondelusional. For example, he says:

"The administration has found that it's easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it's tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America's national security. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently, because 1 in 7 cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East. I think the President will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come."

We keep letting him and his cohorts get away with this abuse of language. It is easier to talk about the detainess at Guantánamo as "terrorists" than to state the facts of their status. Perhaps they are terrorists, but this is neither obvious nor proved. Putting aside the issue of Cheney's credibility (we know that most of the detainees never posed any threat to the US), the remaining detainees have not been convicted of any crime and the evidence against them (possibly gathered through torture or, in the parlance of the euphemism du jour, "enhanced interrogation techniques") has not been properly examined by impartial judicial bodies. So to call them the "the worst of the worst terrorists," as Cheney does here and as Donald Rumsfeld did before him, is to state and, under these circumstances, to perpetuate what is in fact a lie.

Frog and Rain

It's been raining steadily for two days straight. Today was especially bleak with only a few minutes of bright sky. Before turning in for the night, I noticed a tree frog sitting casually on the porch rail in the carport, possibly to escape the rain. It looks like it might be a Cuban Tree Frog, but I didn't handle it and have only this photo to use in identifying it. I thought it was a toad at first, but the adhesive pads clearly suggest otherwise. It moved on after a half hour of this attention.

I snapped this photo using my Nikon P50 digital camera and reduced it for web presentation with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

Cheney and the Endless Lie

Frog and Rain