Author: Common Dreams

Recently, there have been troubling revelations about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a leading 2024 GOP presidential aspirant, concerning his conduct as a Navy JAG officer at Guantanamo Bay. His responsibilities at the detention facility apparently included responding to claims of mistreatment from the war-on-terror prisoners there. Relatively few of these detainees had any connection with al Qaeda, and many had simply been handed over to US forces in exchange for bounty payments. But DeSantis seemingly viewed them all as wily and unrepentant terrorists. Of particular note, DeSantis was at Guantanamo in 2006 during the brutal forced-feeding of prisoners engaged...

Politics has always been cruel. Political candidates can be brutal in trying to discredit, or even destroy, their political opponents. Congressional leaders will at times act harshly when trying to whip party members into line. And as is true in any profession, there will always be politicians who mistreat subordinates simply because they are jerks. But the cruelty of the far right is something different. This is cruelty as the defining characteristic of a movement. To the far right, cruelty is more than a means to achieving a policy goal — it is often the goal itself. Cruelty for...

You can learn a lot about the people who make up a political party by identifying their heroes. So, who are the heroes of today’s Republicans? If your first thought was Ronald Reagan, you’re showing your age. Reagan was the answer of an earlier time, when we had a different, although not wholly dissimilar, Republican Party. Saint Ronnie, as he was sometimes called back then, was the patron saint of the GOP. Their answer to every question. Republicans were very effective in pushing this sanctification, or perhaps whitewashing would be better term, of Reagan’s record in office — a...

In an effort to fill in what they say are critical gaps in the U.S. House select committee’s report on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, faith leaders are pushing the corporate media and the American public to confront the role Christian nationalism played in the insurrection, warning that ignoring the link could make similar violence more likely in the future. The committee’s report, released at the end of December, laid out extensive evidence showing that former President Donald Trump was the driving force behind the attack aimed at stopping lawmakers from certifying the 2020 presidential...