Well, reporters can go work on their tans as the “trial” at Gitmo winds its way down a legal toilet. All the secrecy of banana republic justice is a-whirl there as Osama bin Laden’s driver is tried for being a big bad terrorist. Soviet show trials had nothing on this piece of sorry-assed theater. We couldn’t catch any real big fat cat bad-asses, so we are putting a chauffeur on trial. And get this, what is the hot scoop on how we know he was a terrible horrible murderous guilty bastard? He swore a LOYALTY OATH to bin Laden:

“He said he pledged bayat to Osama bin Laden,” Robert McFadden, an agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said at the terrorism trial of the driver, Salim Hamdan, 37, of Yemen.”

Oh, my Gods, the horror. My eyes rolled right on under the desk here on that one. Let me see, what DOES that remind me of, anyhow—hard to think on a Friday and one cup of coffee, but there was definitely SOMEthing similar pinging round my brain. It was THIS:

“Republican National Committee took that desire to a new level last week, requiring supporters to sign an oath of loyalty before receiving tickets to Saturday’s New Mexico rally featuring Vice President Cheney.” (http://tinyurl.com/56oun )

And then, wasn’t there this little chat about whether Monica Goodling only hired folks at the Justice Dept. if she knew they were “loyal” to the Grand Old Patriarchs?

And don’t all members of the military service take an oath that could be construed as a “loyalty” oath….the country, Constitution AND the Commander in Chief?

Wow, I better tell my son to look out. He was military (twice!) and took said oath, and guess what? He took the final step of perfidy…he was somebody’s driver occasionally! OMG…..I am harboring a criminally vowed driver in my house and didn’t know it? I guess, being a vet who took that same oath, all that saves me is I never drove anybody anywhere?

This stuff is so mind-cloggingly stupid that I feel a need to blaspheme to deal with the moronic avalanche of it; but being pagan it hardly seems fair to verbally post Christ to that cracker again, so I will have to content myself with wondering how anyone involved in this star chamber bullshit sleeps at night. Oh, and one more thing, the driver in Gitmo—that terrible, frightening boogyman of doom? He DENIES having taken said oath.

And that is the most frightening thing of all, that he is frightened enough to deny having said words that likely were almost as ordinary as signing a piece of paper to see a political candidate lie without questioning him about it. It reminds me too much of a German friend, who, as a teen in 1945, watched her neighbors burn their German flags in the back gardens before rushing out the front doors to shower advancing Americans with flowers. “I salute no flag,” she told me, “It’s just a damned piece of cloth and people die over it and lie over it.”

We’ve fallen down a bit since then, I fear. Now, men are being tried, men die and lie, over a few relatively insignificant WORDS. Even when they don’t differ much from ones being said by OUR side to our feckless leaders, too. We better watch this closely, because some of these legal knives just might cut BOTH ways some day.