US, circa 2007

One day, when she's old enough, Autumn might look back on this blog. She'll see pictures of us and her and marvel at how young we look, and how little she looked. She'll get a chance to read about some of our struggles, and some of her firsts.

Overall, she'll get a good look at herself. Which is awesome. She'll also note some of the stuff that was happening, in real time, in the country of her birth. One of the biggest things, I think, is that the soul of this country is being challenged. It's a normal thing to occur when something monstrous occurs to a people. We watched the Towers fall, and hoped that our humanity wouldn't fall with them. Those of us who didn't think much of George Bush, hoped that he would be the leader we needed to rally a country.

There was no real evidence from his past that he would be, or could be that man. He is a so-called silver-spoon, private school, gentleman's degree earning rich kid. But while that's the facts of his childhood, that's not a guarantee that he couldn't have been more. He could have been. He wasn't. And even though it's dawning on some talking heads and right-wing commentators that he's not a conservative, and thus not one of them, the simple fact is, he's done an awful job.

His administration has taken the country to a place whereby, the US tortures. This isn't up for debate. However, you will hear Bush say that the US doesn't torture. And he's right, sort of. Because under the law that he signed, he gets to define torture. That, in itself, is spooky on a lot of levels. However, it gets worse.

Recently, US soldiers found an Al Queda handbook on Torture. Guess what, Al Queda, a group of fundamentalist religious terrorists uses torture along with terrorism to achieve its objectives of a god loving middle east.

The news though is that Right leaning publications are up in arms because Amnesty International, the New York Times and the 'liberal Main Stream Media' aren't placing the fact that Al Queda tortures on their front page. This is the headline: "Will Media Report Al Qaeda Torture Manual With Same Zeal as Abu Ghraib?"

My new favorite writer, Glenn Greenwald, said this about it at Salon:

The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures, but not news that Al Qaeda does, is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, whereas the U.S. is supposed to be something different than that. Isn't it amazing that one even needs to point that out?

America is a nation of laws. Al Queda is a terrorist group using a religion to terrorize people. To honestly think that because they torture America should be allowed to torture as well shows just how far down the slope this country has gone since 911. It's not enough that a nation of laws holds people indefinitely in a legal black hole in Cuba. It's not enough that in a nation with a constitution that bans searches without court approval allows the President to perform searches without court approval. In the eyes of Bush supporters, because 'they' torture, 'we' should too.

That's what I mean about America's soul. This is the era into which Autumn was born. For the rest of her life, she'll be born in the Bush 43 years. His presidency might go down as the worse in the history of the republic. With 18 months left in the Bush presidency, the media most likely will do postmortems galore. But here's the other thing, we'll be pounded with the next campaign. Already there have been 2008 Presidential Candidate Debates. In June 2007.

When I look at the Bush presidency and the on-going analysis of the 2008 race, I wonder if 2008 will come fast enough.