I know I’m hardly alone in saying this, but Senator (and Dr.) Bill Frist is a total buffoon. Yesterday, His Buffoonery publicly stated that he’s actually less interested in what our government is doing inside secret prisons than he is in the fact that the public now knows about the existence of those prisons; he then went on to clarify that he’s entirely uninterested in what goes on behind the doors of the prisons, and worries that now that the secret’s out, our nation’s security is in even graver danger. (You know, because all the other bad shit our government is now known to have done to detainees wasn’t enough to drive people to hate us, and the secret prisons really are the tipping point.) Given that the second-in-charge of his party recently lobbied John McCain — the man who was tortured as a prisoner of war for the better part of a half-decade in Vietnam — to give up on his bill calling for a universal ban on the torture of people in U.S. custody, it’s not hard to see where Frist’s ethical roots get their nourishment. It makes me nauseated; I can only hope that it disgusts enough other people to bring about real change in the government of this country.

Update: oh, great, our Senate yesterday voted to strip detainees at Guantánamo Bay of their right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a right which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush last year. So not only does our government want the right to toture the shit out of the people we’re detaining in the war on terror, it also wants to remove their right to question their detention in the first place. How far can this country stray from its founding principles before the voting public decides to notice?