Skank

In the vast library of blues songs there is at least one blues song for every occasion. Today we go back to Charley Patton, The Father of the Delta Blues. In recognition of heavy rains and flooding in Maryland we nominate two songs of Patton’s written in response to the huge floods in the Delta in 1921: “High Water Everywhere, Take 1″ and “Devil Sent The Rain Blues.”

Runner-up blues is “Floating Bridge Blues” by Sleepy John Estes which recounts his near drowning after falling into deep water.

In The Washington Monthly Kevin Drum shares the following. What a sick bunch of arrogant fools are running our government!
The story of Abu Zubaydah, hailed as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations when he was captured in March 2002:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be….Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics….And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

[Other unrelated bungling described, all of which is worth clicking the link to read.]

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. “I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

This is not the way to protect the national security of the United States. It is not the way to make us safer. It is not the way to defeat jihadist terrorism.

It is not, in fact, the way to do much of anything.

I am always reminded on this august occasion of the time I saw Dick Cavett interviewing Groucho Marx (1969). Since Father’s Day was coming up Cavett asked Groucho an open ended question about the holiday. Groucho went off on how many songs there are about mothers–thousands! But only two songs for fathers: “Dear Old Granddad” and “Pop! Goes the Weasel.”

Guess I’m feeling lonesome today.

Stay the Course? What Course? Eugene Robinson has a comment on Gitmo today in the Post:

This is a “war” in which three men held for years without due process at the Guantanamo Bay prison kill themselves by hanging, and their jailers are so unnerved and self-absorbed that they see the suicides as an attack. Rear Adm. Harry Harris’s all-about-me lament — “I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us” — was worthy of delivery from Oprah’s couch.

I’ll be gone for a month starting June 11.