Yes, their civic ignorance and major-label hypocrisy are both easy and fun to mock, but they still knew how to jam, and guitarist Tom Morello achieved some truly awe-inspiring results in his sonic experimentation. Regardless of his politics, I could always respect him as a human and as a musician.

But oh, how the mighty have fallen. Here’s Morello before performing at Occupy Wall Street last Friday:

The crimes committed by Wall Street are just that–crimes. And if Barack Obama doesn’t have the courage to shut down Guantanamo Bay, then perhaps he can fill some of those animal cages with the Wall Street criminals who torpedoed our economy. And if Barack Obama doesn’t have the courage to do that, we may have to drag those sons of bitches off to jail ourselves. Perhaps we’ll put ‘em in those little orange jumpsuits with the black hoods over their heads and crank Rage Against the Machine 24 hours a day.

To the left, there’s nothing worse than getting a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay. Even terrorists don’t deserve such a fate. Yet bankers sure do, because some animals deserve cages more equally than others.

The suggestion for mob justice isn’t the worst part of this. Look at the flash of glee that comes across his face at the thought of imprisoning and humiliating people who make their living through voluntary transactions. And that’s not even the worst part of it; listen to the song he plays after his little fascist fantasy… if you can.

Morello could have outright called for the head of every last Republican in the country, but if he had then launched into some melt-your-face-off rawk, I would gladly shake his hand and step up to the guillotine. But this–this, at best, half-sung fizzling dirge performed under Morello’s solo moniker, ‘The Nightwatchman,’ is just embarrassing.

The man has devolved from one of the world’s premier rock guitarists to your local state college’s most famous acoustic singer-songwriter–and one that has to use a human microphone, at that. It’s no wonder, then, his leftism’s become increasingly bitter and violent.

Finally, what this really means for me is that Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum performing for OWS is a double heartbreak; not only is he an economic and moral dunce, but he’s now in the company of has-beens. Excuse me while I go cry in a corner and sing “Two-Headed Boy” to myself.

Note: No Iguana’s were actually shown on camera without their expressed written consent.

So many of us in the business know people who have been overseas to help entertain the troops, and the luckiest among us have actually had the experience ourselves. I’m proud to have moved from Category A to category B this last week, when I was able to spend five days down at Guantanamo Bay.

There’s a lot to talk about. But the thing that struck me hardest was the fact that even though I expected to be blown away by our men and women in uniform, I really had no idea of just how far my high expectations would be exceeded. The competence and discipline I took for granted going in. It was the soldier’s generosity that kept knocking me on my butt.

So here are the remarks I was privileged to have been able to give. I hope that it in some small way captures not just what I feel, but what all we civilians feel, and not just about the men and women stationed at Guantanamo Bay, but rather about every single one of them: past, present and future.

Anyone who has read Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Cucullu’s fascinating and meticulously documented book “Inside Gitmo: The True Story Behind The Myths Of Guantanamo Bay” easily understands the merits of keeping Gitmo open.   In fact, Lieutenant Colonel Cucullu makes a compelling case for expanding Gitmo so as to house convicted terrorists like Jose Padilla and Zacharias Moussaoui, (currently in maximum security prisons here in the US) since they are privy to a vast trove of vital intelligence information, presently unavailable because convicts in American prisons cannot be interrogated.

Be that as it may, the lopsided Senate vote against President Obama’s request for $80 million to fund his wish-upon-a-star fantasy that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay simply vanish, gives me hope that in the end cooler heads than those at MoveOn.org will prevail in this debate. 

Of course, the problem now arises of where future funding will come from to keep Gitmo in operation while Democrats spin their wheels debating what to do with it.  If they refuse to allocate the necessary funds to keep it up and running, it seems they will have painted themselves into a rather embarrassing corner: no money to fund its operation, no money to close it down, and no place to put the terrorists. 

Certainly, in these troubled economic times, intelligent people should all agree that fiscal responsibility mandates some sort of well-thought-out financial husbandry.  In light of that, there seems to be only one alternative left to the Democrats hell-bent on closing Gitmo.  Once all the money runs out, the obvious thing will be to simply shut it down.  Lock all the gates, turn out the lights, pack up, and leave.  No muss.  No fuss.  Let the terrorists fend for themselves and in a few days or weeks, nature will take its course and solve the problem of what to do with them.  Awhile later, Nancy Pelosi can declare Gitmo a National Treasure (like Alcatraz) and, now that travel restrictions to Cuba are being relaxed, MoveOn.org can begin organizing “Bash Bush” tourist excursions.  In the end, it will result in millions of dollars saved and possibly even a net financial gain. 

I think this approach to Gitmo is what Vice President Biden must have been referring to in his commencement address at Wake Forest last week when he so astutely stated, “There’s not a single issue on this President’s plate that will not yield a change.  Just merely by ignoring it, it will change.”   Ignoring the detention center at Guantanamo Bay may be the only option left.  It is heartening that a coherent policy is finally beginning to emerge from this Administration

Whether anyone chooses to notice or not, President Obama put himself out on the very edge of a very long and fragile limb on the issue of how to handle terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.  For a guy who is a master at not taking any real position at all (or, when he is really at his “best” taking all possible sides to an issue simultaneously) , Obama showed an absolutely unbelievable recklessness in his response to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of his closing of the prison camp.

In fact, if it turns out that we do have another 9/11 and there is even a shred of evidence that the closing of Guantanamo had anything to do with our inability to prevent it,  I don’t think that Obama could have closed off any more of his plausible escape hatches if he had actually tried to do so.

Let’s go through just some of the highlights of what could end up one day serving as Obama’s political obituary (one so strong that even his many cheerleaders in the news media may have a tough time dismissing it).

Obama told Steve Kroft, “I mean, the fact of the matter is, after all these years how many convictions actually came out of Guantanamo? How many– how many terrorists have actually been brought to justice under the philosophy that is being promoted by Vice President Cheney? It hasn’t made us safer.”

Was this really the President of the United States speaking?

Since Guantanamo was opened we have a 100% record in fending off terrorist attacks in this country. Do we know that the way we have dealt with terror suspects is the reason for this success rate, or even a main cause for it? No.  But would you really wager your entire Presidency (not to mention the safety of the American people) that it isn’t, especially when the only people who will benefit are likely to be dregs of humanity who have evil intent towards the United States?

Of course this is the same Obama who made a heavy bet against the surge in Iraq and was never forced by the media or the McCain campaign to pay up on that, so perhaps he is not irrational to think he could get away with such a risky and ill-conceived gambit.

Then Obama dropped this little number on the nation, “What it has been is a great advertisement for anti-American sentiment. Which means that there is constant effective recruitment of– Arab fighters and Muslim fighters against U.S. interests all around the world.”

Did Obama really just correlate being Arab and Muslim with being a terrorist? I thought that was the exact kind of politically incorrect Bush-ism that supposedly got Arabs and Muslims to hate us in the first place and which, rather ironically, Obama was decrying while making that statement. It should also be pointed out that Mr. “Citizen of the World” doesn’t seem to know or care that many who belong to Al Qaeda consider themselves Asian or African and not Arab.

But then, in typical Obama style, when confronted on what to actually do about the problem that some terror suspects who have been let go even by the draconian Bush Administration have gone right back to the battlefield, the President immediately took refuge in a position that is only possible in the utopia that is Obamaland.

Obama pontificated, “Well there is no doubt that– we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals that we’ve got to– make sure are not a threat to us, who are folks that we just swept up.”

Really? So if we were already being way too hard on these suspects (many of whom obviously just found themselves in Guantanamo by mere accident) before the Messiah got to call the shots, how exactly is it that we are going to finally do a “particularly effective job” of weeding out the truly bad guys when the holes in the filter are going to get demonstratively larger?  

Obama continued, “Do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter– down the block? Of course not.”

Kroft, suddenly remembering for a moment that he is supposed to play the role of a “journalist” (a vocation now usually only seen in museums), asked the obvious question, “What do you do with those people?” Obama responded, “Well, I think we’re going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they’re not released and do us harm.”

You mean like the one we already had before you took office?

In case you are one of those who just has faith that Obama simply knows what he’s doing because he’s so smart, knowledgeable and well-spoken, let me let you in on a little secret. He doesn’t even understand the basic facts of the situation.

No one noticed during the campaign, but just after he secured the nomination Obama revealed how incredibly ignorant he really is on this issue of the history leading up to 9/11 and the terror camp at Guantanamo.  

I know this because I produced a film called “Blocking the Path to 9/11″ which detailed Obama’s massive factual blunder on this issue in the scene below.

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So, instead of any of this “trivia,” the only thing negative most Americans got out of Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview was about his laughter over the economy. Well, if this wasn’t so serious it certainly would be funny. Right now I guess it still is. Let’s hope Obama’s incredible luck helps keeps it that way. Before long, we may not have much more on which to rely to keep us safe.

Hey, according to the Pentagon, only 11 percent of them do that! (Though I hear that estimate has a margin of error of about 89%.)

One released detainee detonated himself in Iraq a couple months ago. And our liberals are worried about us dripping water on their faces. The guy just blew himself up! Clearly, our interrogation techniques are not extreme enough. They prefer to lose a limb or two before giving us information. No wonder Gitmo and Abu Ghraib were torture for these sado-masochists.

U.S. troops undressed a prisoner and put underwear on his head? So what — that’s where his ass is gonna end up after he explodes himself, anyway.

Seriously, though, I think we can reach a compromise with the human rights folks. I say torture should be allowed, as long as your attorney is present.

Shutting down Gitmo isn’t the answer. In fact, such a move should have the environmentalists up in arms. Just think about all the free radicals this will release into the environment.

However, that the Guantanamo camp is the “gulag of our time,” as several Democratic politicians have called it, may be true. We’ve all heard the stories: people not having access to showers for weeks after arrival, then having rocks, urine and feces hurled at them, plus getting spat in the face and even ear-bitten — all while being powerless to do anything in response. And I’m talking about the U.S. soldiers stationed there. The prisoners? They get cake and Koran. (They don’t even have cake in the Middle East!)

And still Obama’s priority is to end military trials, including that of a U.S.S. Cole bomber. Which means that all this time they were saying “Vote or Die,” what they meant was “Vote to Die.”

At least Saudi Arabia has been helping us out. The Saudis have taken some of the released detainees into their rehabilitation program. Which is like sending a sex offender for rehabilitation to NAMBLA.

Finally, Crowder correctly points out that several prisoners have actually gained weight at the facility. Tarek el-Sawah was one of them:

A portion of Guantánamo detainee medical charts released by the Pentagon indicate Sawah arrived at this Navy base in May 2002 measuring five-feet-eight-inches and weighing 215 pounds and that his weight has careened wildly. In August 2006, according to the Defense Department, his weight dipped as low as 124 pounds, and then hit a recorded high of 408 pounds three months later.

I’m telling you — it’s the cake!