"Outraged, embarrassed, and disgusted"

Responding to the New York Times coverage of the heinous mistreatment of Maher Arar, a Canadian computer engineer who was "seized on Sept. 26, 2002, after he landed at Kennedy Airport in New York on his way home from a holiday in Tunisia," then removed to Syria "where he says he was held for 10 months in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly with a metal cable," only to be "freed in October 2003, after Syrian officials concluded that he had no connection to terrorism and returned him to Canada," Glenn Greenwald says, bluntly, "Here is the 'moral authority' of the U.S. under the Bush administration."

[O]n top of operating secret torture gulags in Eastern Europe, we also kidnap people, charge them with no crime, give them no opportunity to defend themselves, deny them contact with their consulate in violation of international treaties (as the Canadian report complained about), send them off to be tortured for months, and then when it turns out that they are completely inncoent, we block them from obtaining compensation in our courts because our Government claims that national security would be jeopardized if they were held accountable for their behavior.

How can you be an American citizen and not be completely outraged, embarrassed, and disgusted by this conduct?

I can't. And frankly, my freedom is worth nothing to me if it must come at such a steep price.

Bush and his supporters are nothing more than lazy thieves, who erroneously substitute what they steal from others as their spoils. They steal the liberties of others and claim it makes them more free. They withhold the right of marriage from others and claim it makes their marriages sacred. They marginalize the religious practices of others and claim it makes theirs right and just. They legislate control over others' bodies and choices and claim it makes them the protectors of life. They demonize and scapegoat and disenfranchise, only to claim that the resulting privilege they enjoy is a result of their innate superiority.

They achieve nothing on their own merits. Only in their zero-sum game where they make the rules do they win, and only because they compare their own fortunes to those whom they have stripped of their basic rights and freedoms.

Yes, I'm outraged and embarrassed and disgusted. And I'm tired to my very bones of living in a nation run by pathetic, thieving bullies.

(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)