A Duck a Duck

And yet Buchanan is right that almost every prime-time convention speaker has behaved as though President Bush's greatest crimes of the past eight years have involved lost jobs and climbing oil prices. On the streets of Denver, they are protesting Guantanamo, wiretapping, and water-boarding. But inside the hall, you'd think it was just another recession year.

-Dahlia Lithwick in Slate

Individuals arrested at the Democratic National Convention will be processed at an industrial warehouse with chain-link cells topped by razor wire, a facility some have compared to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Groups planning marches, concerts and other events during the Aug. 25-28 convention dub the center "Gitmo on the Platte," for the nearby South Platte River...Video footage of the north Denver warehouse on Denver's KCNC-TV showed coils of razor wire topping chain-link cells. A sign read: "Electric stun devices used here."

-via Chris Floyd

Dahlia Lithwick is one of those smart, witty writers whose inability to grasp the nature of the country in which she lives, despite all the evidence splayed (flayed?) before her eyes, ears, and intellect persists. The Democratic Convention, just for instance, has locked down the affected portions of the city as if under martial law, complete with circling helicopters, as well as your favorite and mine, "free-speech zones." Razor wire, blast barriers, and more than four dozen "agencies" coordinating "security." The people protesting illegal detention are being illegally detained at the behest of the people Lithwick expects to address illegal detention. Must we point out again that when a gulf appears between talk and act, the acts reveal the true belief? Yes? Yes.