On my Facebook news feed a little while ago I saw a link to an article called “Three Myths about the Detention Bill.” I thought, Oh, good, it’ll turn out I was wrong and worrying for nothing.

No such luck. Glenn Greenwald lays out these three myths put forth by supporters of the bill, and knocks them down with no difficulty and no ambiguity. (What still amazes me is that this bill has supporters. It’s such a piece of poxy anti-American fuckery, just on the face of it.)

You can go read for yourself if you have a strong stomach, but in a nutshell:

• Before now, we indefinitely detained foreign terror suspects just ’cause we thought we could. Now when this bill becomes law, we’ll have to.
• Before now, the war on terror was supposed to be limited to operatives responsible for 9/11 (though of course it wasn’t really so limited in practice). Now when this bill becomes law, it could be anyone, anywhere.
• Before now, we figured we could probably detain domestic terror suspects if we wanted (not to mention have them assassinated). Now, when this bill becomes law, sure as shootin’ we will. (We just don’t have to, the way we do with non-citizens.)

As I was saying the other day:

This is a substantial statutory escalation of the War on Terror and the President’s powers under it, and it occurs more than ten years after 9/11, with Osama bin Laden dead, and with the U.S. Government boasting that virtually all Al Qaeda leaders have been eliminated and the original organization (the one accused of perpetrating 9/11 attack) rendered inoperable.

And if you’re not depressed enough just yet, here, let me help you out:

What’s particularly ironic (and revealing) about all of this is that former White House counsel Greg Craig assured The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer back in February, 2009 that it’s “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” Four months later, President Obama proposed exactly such a law — one that The New York Times described as “a departure from the way this country sees itself, as a place where people in the grip of the government either face criminal charges or walk free” — and now he will sign such a scheme into law.

Now contrast that with this:

I can’t stand the cognitive dissonance. Someone for fuck’s sake fix it.

I’m not usually a gloom-and-doom sort of fellow. Well, okay, I totally am, but it usually concerns my weight. On larger movements and trends in the world at large, I usually manage to remain positive. I maintain perspective by reminding myself that the middle of the 20th century was a major suckfest: Great Depression, Hitler, World War II, Holocaust. Really, seriously, just chill, because Prop 8 in comparison is just an unfortunate blip.

Plus (I tell myself) don’t forget that before the 20th century, life was no picnic. I’m pretty sure if any one of us got dropped without warning into the 14th century, the horrifying things the GOP presidential candidates have said at their 4,000 debates wouldn’t seem nearly so awful.

But now there’s this: On Bill of Rights Day, the Senate passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act which allows for indefinite detention of terrorism suspects. There is some question concerning whether this measure includes U.S. citizens. It does. It doesn’t. It does.

Who the fuck even knows at this point?

And that’s exactly the problem. If it’s open to interpretation, even a little bit, then you know what’ll happen. Someone will inevitably run with the interpretation that allows for someone to be locked away on suspicion of colluding with terrorists.

This is what you get when you barter your rights for safety. Check it out:

Supporters of the bill argued that current U.S. law is a combination of rulings and precedents that already allow indefinite detention of Americans. But they say that granting the military explicit authority to investigate and detain terrorism suspects–including Americans–is vital to ensuring the nation can keep up with an adaptable and changing enemy threat.

That’s utter bullshit. What enemy? Back in 2010–before the death of Osama bin Laden–Foreign Policy demonstrated that al Qaeda had lost much of its support in the Muslim world, that the group had failed in most of its aims, and that the size of the core group had shrunk to, maybe, a couple of hundred trained fighters. (It’s not that we won the war on terror, by the way, but rather that al Qaeda lost its hold on the Muslim imagination.)

This is not to say that al Qaeda has been neutralized, yay us, and we can just move on like nothing happened. It does mean that we can and should return to a law-enforcement approach to fighting terrorism. We can and should call off the forever war. We can and should recognize that if George W. Bush had read and acted on a fucking memo as he fucking should have, instead of clearing brush in Crawford, we would never have had to start the forever war in the first place.

But even so, here we are, ten years after 9/11, dropping our rights like they’re hot.

What the fuck is wrong with us?

Oh, but wait. I’m not even done yet.

The IMF warns that we’re heading for a second Great Depression after all. Paul Krugman has already issued the same warning. Right-wingers everywhere are using economic woes to seize and solidify power. Here in the U.S., we have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, and only about a quarter of people are identifying as Republican–but the right-wingers are clearly in charge. They set the tone, they command the agenda, and they rule the media.

(I fully recognize that I’m part of the problem here. I’m constantly leaping on some outlandish thing a Republican has said and adding my snarky two cents to it. Righteous outrage can be a lot of fun, but it also gives more airplay to whatever the outlandish thing was.)

Look, y’all, here’s what it comes down to. I’m scared. And I’m more than a little broken-hearted. I feel betrayed by my president and my country.

I’ve never been one of those “American, fuck yeah!” dudes. I try not to be one of those dudes, because I know we’re not always right and we haven’t always done the right thing and our system–made up as it is of people–is flawed. Most of the time when we mess up, I think our hearts are genuinely in the right place. Sometimes, of course, we’re just belligerent dumbasses, and now, my friends, is one of those times. We are being 24-karat gold-plated belligerent dumbasses (along with most of the industrialized nations, so at least we’re in good company). If our dumbassery goes unchecked long enough, I’m terrified that some bad shit’s gonna go down.

I’ve been wrong before. (For example, Bush’s reelection in 2004 did not, in fact, lead to the end of civilization.) I hope I’m wrong now. But I can’t help thinking that we got through World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Watergate, the oil crisis and stagflation of the 70s, AIDS, the Cold War, the impeachment of Clinton, 9/11, and Bush’s eight miserable years in office. We narrowly averted a second Great Depression. And yet, after all of that, we’re making the same mistakes we’ve always made. Austerity instead of stimulus. Sabres instead of plowshares. Free-market free-for-all instead of economic justice. And now, yay us, Guantanamo Bay, that hideous, indefensible blot on our history and our national conscience, will likely never be closed. The “Yes, We Can!” guy who campaigned on closing it is now set to sign a law that will make it almost impossible to close–and may make it possible to send U.S. citizens there, just ’cause.

Again. I ask you. What the fuck is wrong with us?

P.S. About the title of this post… It refers to another lovely piece of legislation which will probably soon become law. You can read more here, but here’s the nutshell:

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) … is a clever name for an Internet censorship bill straight out of an Orwellian nightmare….

Within a few days, your freedom of speech will be gone — post something controversial online, and the government can legally “disappear” it.

This is a brave new world. Watch what you say. Be mindful of who you associate with. You may criticize your government within the privacy of your own home, amongst close family or friends, but do not post negative comments online. Do not assemble. Do not protest. Do not agitate. Do not give “comfort” to the “enemy.”

P.P.S. Yes, I said I felt betrayed by Obama. Please do not tell me that I was naive to vote for him or trust him in the first place. And please do not call me an O-bot. Because:

• I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary and supported Obama in the general election. I have not agreed with everything he’s done. I’ve felt that he’s mostly made appropriate compromises when needed, even when I would have done things differently. There have been times when I really disagreed with his choices, but have come to see that things kinda-sorta worked out okay anyway. I understand why he might feel he needs to sign the NDAA, though I would certainly veto it. It may yet turn out okay. But I’m finding it almost impossible to defend or explain.
• Yes, yes, any intelligent person should be coolly cynical about everything and never trust anyone ever, but how do you live like that? And yes, yes, the system is rotten to the core, and we need a viable third party like yesterday, but good luck with that.
• “O-bot” is a convenient, one-word way of saying “person who doesn’t think Obama is the anti-Christ,” but at the end of the day, that’s not very useful, is it?