UPDATED: After you get punched in the face 100 times, you really don’t much worry about #101

I’m over-linking to polizeros lately, and I swear this isn’t quid pro quo, but I happen to feel like commenting on a number of their posts lately.  Just a bit of a streak, is all.

Anyways, they have an embed of a Jack Cafferty segment from CNN’s The Situation Room/Hockey Night in Canada/Whatever it’s Called (what’s the legality of sampling from CNN like that, really?).

Anyways, I’ll just give you the Baskin Robbins little pink spoonful:

Jack says a bill was just passed by the House absolving Bush administration officials for any possible violations of the Geneva Convention post-September 11.  White House Press Secretary, Dana Perino, responded to inquiries regarding the bill by stating that “we are not saying we DID break any laws or commit torture, but you know, Dick got this brand new Bic and we wanted to test it so we though we’d draw up a bill.”)

[Jack was mildly less sarcastic.]

I’m mostly just numb to it all.  I feel like Congress is my two-year-old nephew.  He will do whatever you don’t directly admonish him for.  But then again, my nephew can take a poop without 300 million citizens ending up covered in shit, so maybe the comparison is a bit unfair.

UPDATE: As per the comments from Bob Morris, this bill was actually from last year.  So there’s a good chance it has already had it’s (more or less) final review by the Senate.  Outcome:  Mystery.  But I’ll try to ferret that out.

The Nation magazine seems to have an article discussing a draft of this bill (or a similar one) from 2006!

The Washington Post had this covered in 2006 as well.

“Bush administration officials have considered the law [the 1996 War Crimes Act] a potential threat to U.S. personnel involved in interrogations. While serving as White House legal counsel in 2002, Gonzales helped prepare a Jan. 25 draft memo to Bush — written in large part by David Addington, then Vice President Cheney’s legal counsel and now Cheney’s chief of staff — in which he cited the threat of prosecution under the act as a reason to declare that detainees captured in Afghanistan were not eligible for Geneva Conventions protections.”

Here is a decent blog post that seemingly has lost itself in the same confusion of dates (three, and counting).  Bonus points to the blog for being Canadian and fretting about US policy (I am not familiar with the blog though.  It was just a google hit).

As far as I can tell, the bill that the Senate at one point was considering is bill S. 3930, which passed.  Of course, the bill description there seems to suggest the exact opposite of what we’ve been discussing, however I have enough experience with bill descriptions to know that means absolutely nothing.

A blog post at The Nation seems to clarify that the Senate did pass the bill, and that the bill does absolve those who committed violations to the War Crimes Act of 1996 from prosecution.  The blogger indicates that all that is left is for President Bush to sign it.  I don’t see an update past that in my cursory search, but perhaps the whole Internet unanimously agreed that the possibility of Bush NOT signing a bill that covers his ass into law was not worth wasting scarce bytes on.

*** ADDITIONALLY:  My bad for not catching this error initially, sorry to the four people who read this post in its original form.

… and the cow goes moo