So much for impeachment.

I had originally hoped to inaugurate starting a new blog - one divorced from the tediously emotional, confessional-style journals I tend to lapse into (in my defense, I was raised a Catholic. Kilt and all. Devoid of my confessional booth and its requisite pedophile and cross, I feel compelled to baptize my readers with a good dose of sexual repression, twisted guilt, and a martyr complex that would rival St. Stephen's. He was the one who got stoned (the painful way), right?) - with a celebratory, rather than condemnatory, post.

Alas. One day too late.

Yesterday I was overjoyed about the results of the election, after staying up till three a.m. on election night, refusing to hop abed until we won the House. Nine a.m. Civil Procedure be damned, I was determined to see it through.

(By 'we', I mean people with that somewhat lost and foreign thing known as human decency, not 'we' in any partisan shape or form, as I am Canadian and my only party allegiance is to one led by the Great and Noble Beaver.)

Anyway. We won the House. Today we won the Senate, which made me unspeakably happy, since the race that decided it was also the race that decided Senator Macaca's fate. (For those not familiar with obscure but potent racial slurs, a macaca is a monkey. A herpes-carrying monkey. If you wanted to say it the more elegant-sounding (and by elegant, I mean, frog-gargle) French way, it's macaque. From the Bantu. And yes, this is what I do in Torts while my professor gallops around the room on an imaginary horse to demonstrate trespass to land. What, your Torts professor doesn't do this? How else could you possibly understand the meaning of 'intent' if s/he doesn't show you what happens when you get pushed by a make-believe person and break the make-believe close? And yes, still on the bloody horse, damnit.)

But of course, this being the land of the free, all this heady political ecstasy has its inevitable, breath-taking and vomit-inducing comedown, notably future-Speaker-of-the-House Nancy Pelosi's sudden commitment to bipartisanship, mending ties, having lunch with the President, and otherwise making nice with the administration that stripped us (and by 'us', I mean all legal and not-so-much aliens in this country) of habeas corpus rights, trampled on the Constitution, tortured innocents, sent people to secret prisons, detained hundreds of people without charge or trial, killed 600,000 people in Iraq - the list goes on.

And why, Jim Webb, would you want to have lunch (fucking lunch. Lunch is the source of all this bullshit. I say we abolish lunch.) with the man who called your aide a macaca, who accused you of being a pedophile for your fiction, who dropped the n-bomb when all the black people weren't in listening distance (well, who knows, really), who is ashamed of being part-Jewish? For social grace? For mending ties? If a reincarnated Eichmann ran for Senator, should we wine and dine with him and let him sing songs with our children? If Kim Jong Il ran for Congressman, should we bake him cookies in a show of we're-not-petty?

Have I lost it? Has the better part of a semester of Contracts (Otherwise known as the Follow-up to History Honours: What do Words Mean, Part II) addled my brain? Is there not something patently absurd about this 'healing of divisions', this uniting of a government?

What betrayal, now that the sweet golden shower of incumbency has rained down on the Dems and they can bask at the golf courses along with their defeated Republican enemies. What betrayal, now that they have been voted in and cannot yet be deposed.

I had the opportunity to watch a panel composed of military lawyers, including Col. Dwight Sullivan, Chief Military Defense Counsel for the Guantanamo Military Commissions, and Lt. Charles Swift, Defense Counsel for Hamdan in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Col. Sullivan described the real torture that goes on behind the scenes, describing an incident where a hot needle with stuck into someone's eyes to get a written statement, and one where a razorblade was applied to a suspect's penis. But no, this country does not torture. No, this country abides by those pesky Geneva Conventions.

Of course, there's all those people who agree with Mr. Faceshooter Cheney that waterboarding is a no-brainer (clearly, none of these people have ever been close to drowning. I have. It's on my top ten list of favourite things ever.). Of course, in Vietnam and in Cambodia, when it was done to US troops, it was a war crime. Here it's just a 'dunk in the water' for shits and giggles.

I want to believe this blue wave of victory results in something. In pulling out US troops from beleagured, occupied Iraq; in drawing, quartering, castrating the utterly abysmal, shameful Military Commissions Act (MCA), in, you know, at least an ATTEMPT to abide by the Constitution (a law professor said something along the lines of, 'The Iraqis can have our Constitution. After all, we're not using it.'), a restoration of habeas rights before it is too late, an end to the torture, hearings into all the abuses and atrocities perpetuated in the name of the American people, permitting detainees access to counsel (not just under condition of pleading guilty) - etc, etc ad nauseum.

But this bald-faced, shameless rejection of the will of the people - Dean and Pelosi saying they know what the people want, and refusing to do it - what a contemptuous turn on the people that put you where you are. They may as well be sobbing tearfully into the camera, renouncing all divisions and saying we are all one big happy family. Time to hold hands and snuggle, children.

He made jokes about not finding any WMDs in Iraq. He made jokes while every single family saw the violent death of at least one family member over the past few years.

Almost comical, isn't it? The absurdity of this country, like the fall of Rome. Our Nero playing his fiddle while the city burns.

Without impeachment, this country owns what it has done. It embraces it.

Once upon a time, representatives, you know, represented. A utterly novel concept, I know. I realize that representatives are not the direct reflection of the will of the people; that they reflect the core values and concerns of their constituents but are vessels in which the ideas and whims of the unwashed masses are allegedly distilled and refined. But it seems that this principle is just an excuse to avoid doing what is not politically expedient. How does the core value of outrage against the corruption of this administration translate into giving the head gangster a pass? Where is there even the slightest sliver of representation here?

Once upon a time, people placed their moral values over social niceties and false, idiotic ideas of national unity and healing. The woman who called him out as the emperor with no clothes is now his new best friend. If that doesn't feel like a shank in the back, I don't know what does.

There's this sense of unreality in America, that things are not as bad as they seem. They don't realize that other countries view them kind of the way they view Kim Jong Il and South Korea - dangerous, unstable, unfathomably corrupt. People say, the real human rights abuses occur elsewhere. They do, of course. In the places America carves out in foreign nations and ships people off to for no reason at all, other than the fact that they look Middle Eastern. Of course, they can't always tell.

For example: my best friend, who is Jewish/Hispanic/a bunch of other things, gets stopped all the time for looking 'Middle-Eastern'. Another friend of mine, who is East Indian, gets hassled and searched much the same way. It reminds me of when I was back in high school, and some of my more gang-oriented friends used to get stopped and detained because they resembled black suspects. The problem is, these friends of mine where East Indians. The cops denied it. (Yes, you read that right. The cops denied my friends were the race they purported to be. Because the cops knew better. Duh.)

Unfathomable. This country has always been divided. Unity is not what we need. Social graces are not we need to fix an illegal war, to fix the horrors committed in this country's name. Judgement is. Resounding, unequivocal, furious condemnation. Not tea parties. Not BFF picnics. Not shopping for Christmas presents together at Saks.

But I guess that is too much to ask, as the drug of incumbency settles like an blossoming opiate haze around Washington.

May history shame them all.