Decadent America

Forget the gay boys.

If you want evidence of serious moral decline, then how about torturing prisoners of war, not to find any ticking bombs, but to help manufacture a false link between Iraq and Al Qaida in order to justify a predetermined decision to invade Iraq. 

Then there's the previous Administration planting military "experts," who were nothing of the kind, but spokesmen for military contractors, to spread Administration talking points through a compliant broadcast media.

Now, everyone in Washington wants to forgive and forget.  The Republicans want to "walk on" for obvious reasons.  The press wants to forget its complicity in all the Iraq mess (that cost thousands of Iraqi and American lives), and in the economic mess (cheerleading the looters, and bamboozling the suckers, er, public).  The Obama Administration wants to move forward on its agenda by trying to get us to look forward rather than look backward.  However, the past is always there for us to trip over, especially if it is full of skeletons rattling in closets.  There is an understandable reluctance to set a precedent of prosecuting preceding administrations.  That might not be such a problem if we still had the pre-Nixon independence of the Attorney General and the Justice Department.

And then there is all the lying and complex duplicity in the financial industry.  Executives went on a pillaging spree through the economy and left the rest of us holding the bag.  The current rate of foreclosures and evictions on private homes is now the greatest since the Great Depression.

Curiously, I've not heard one word about any of these moral lapses from the sex-fixated religious right here in the USA, and internationally.  As far as I'm concerned, these professional moral scolds have no legitimacy to be preaching to anyone about anything.

UPDATE:

Speaking of things that are morally offensive, read Robert Draper's account of Donald Rumsfeld beginning each top secret briefing for the President with Biblical quotations deliberately invoking the idea of a religious crusade.

Don't forget to check out the slide show of the covers of those memos for the President's eyes only.