Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Bush...

So Long, It's Been Good to Know Ya

Ellis Weiner at Huffington Post:

From the N.Y. Times of 9/29: The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include non-citizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.

Italics, of course, added. Why? Why go to all the bother of adding italics? Because I'm leaving it as a clue for Stabler and Benson, or Goren and Eames, or Benson and Hedges, or whomever the cops send to find us after we've been disappeared.

Like you, I dislike using "disappear" as a transitive verb. (I'm also not crazy about the phrase "grow the economy.") But the honorable men and women of Congress leave us no choice. They've empowered the most mendacious and destructive president in history to do exactly what the military juntas in Argentina and Brazil used to do. Note, too, that--as the italicized quote explains--he can do it, not just to Islamic evildoers, but to anythingdoers, anywhere in the country, at all.