"When a barrier falls for one it falls for all." he said . . .
Bush and his ilk seem intent on forcing these kiss-ass members of some ethnic group or another that don't represent the majority of their own group in words, deeds, or actions. They find joy and a perverse justification of their own bigotry in standing next to these 'Toms' and elevating them above their peers who have deeply rooted, experience guided, decidedly opposing views that are representative of the vast majority of their own communities.
Hard fought for liberalism, for example, has been a hallmark of the African American community for decades throughout times of slavery and the era of Jim Crow and segregation. Bush I took joy in replacing a stalwart defender of civil rights and civil liberties, Thurgood Marshall, with the kiss-ass upstart, Clarence Thomas, who had spent his public career standing in the way of the mountains of discrimination complaints in his role as Civil Rights Commissioner.
Thomas said of those who rightly called him an Uncle Tom, "I'm not an Uncle Tom. I'm going to be here for 40 years. For those who don't like it, get over it." Well, over a decade later, Thomas has repeatedly used the militant boots he once wore as a youth to try and stomp out any last vestige of remedy for the blight of racism and bigotry that his predecessors and ancestors fought for, and in some cases died for.
Alberto R. Gonzales (born August 4, 1955 in San Antonio, Texas, USA) is a Mexican-American. In his native land, Mexicans have not always enjoyed full rights of citizenship and have suffered decades of discrimination and abuse. In fact, during segregation, it was feared that Mexicans might invade America and join with southern blacks to end white supremacy. The abuse of Mexican immigrants and workers in this country is well documented and involves assaults and murders that have gone un-investigated and un-addressed. Mr.Gonzales should be well aware, as well, of the widespread problems in his ethnic ancestral home.
“Torture has been Mexico’s open, shameful secret for decades,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. “After years of merely treating the symptoms of the problem, Mexico now has a reform proposal that attacks the main factors behind torture.”
Some 588 cases of torture—many involving more than one victim—were documented by the state and national human rights ombudsmen between 1990 and 2003, according to a recent study published by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, or CNDH).
Moreover, there are good reasons to believe that the documented cases represent only a fraction of the total number. One is the fact that torture is often extremely difficult to document. There are usually no witnesses to the crime, and it often leaves no physical scars on the victim. Consequently, the only evidence of torture is likely to be the word of the victim, which is often insufficient to prove that the crime took place. And even this evidence may never emerge, since a principal effect of the torture—and often its main objective—is to intimidate the victim into silence.
Another reason to suspect that the use of torture is widespread in Mexico is the fact—demonstrated by the cases that have been documented—that torture currently fulfills a special function within the Mexican criminal justice system: it generates confessions. According to the CNDH study, in 83 percent of the torture cases documented by the commission, the abuse served to force a confession from the victim.(
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/12/08/mexico9811.htm)
Mr. Gonzales' advocacy of torture points up his reluctance to align himself with the plights of the majority of those who share his ethnic ancestry, in this country and abroad, and makes any celebration of his advancement as a boon for those who share his ethnicity a hollow and contradictory expression. Lieberman's crowing about falling barriers rings as false as it would for Jews who collaborated with Nazis in their oppression of minorities during the war.
It's a sad day for Americans with the Senate approval of Gonzales, the torture general, and it's an even sadder day for Mexican Americans who fight, advocate, and die to oppose the very policies that he has recommended and approved.
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