Musings 15..."Extraordinary rendition"

It is definitely not the country that I thought I lived in...anymore. America, the home of the free and the brave, is fast becoming like every other nation in the world.

The best thing about being an American was that we were definitely above everybody else. We were accused of thinking that we were better than everybody else--and it was true, because we were. We were polite and always said we weren't, but, really down deep, we knew we were, and that was a good thing.

Now, however, we have shown the world that we are not better than them. We can wage preemptive war and lie about why we did it. Much lesser nations have been doing that for centuries. We can now torture and deprive individuals of their rights simply because we feel that they are threats to us. It sounds kind of like old Russia. It is nice to know we finally caught up to them on that score.

Mr. President stated before the world that we do not believe in torture nor do we allow torture of any prisoners. Howsoever, how does he explain "extraordinary rendition?" That's the new term for the week. It simply means snatching suspected terrorists from one country and shipping them to another country to interrogate them. Why would we do this? Because, other countries we are friendly with do not have our same ideals. Torture is okay. Thus, we don't torture prisoners--we have others do it for us. As I'm fond of saying, "if it walks like a duck, if it talks like a duck, then it must be a..."

It just makes me sad that we cannot uphold the moral basics of our beliefs--even though we lost 3,000 people to terrorists. Maybe we never were the good guys, but I thought we were. Now, we're just the guys that want to win...anyway possible. We've finally become like the rest of the world. You'd think they would like us. But, alas, they hate us all the more. I liked it better when we could look down our respective noses at everyone else. At least, then, we were holding to higher standards.

"Extraordinary rendition," remember it. It's a phrase we'll likely hear a lot about in the years to come.