He Man Torture Lovers Club
Last week, the White House released a new set of memo's from the Bush Administration detailing the approval and use of torture around the world. While the memos themselves are evidence of an Adminstration morally askew, they have one amusing spinoff: the birth of the Pain Impervious Right Wing Pundit.
From Detroit's own Paul W. Smith to Rush, the red/white/ black and blue crowd have been extolling their virility and claiming that none of the practices enumerated in the memos constitute torture. Forced nudity, sleep deprivation and waterboarding are just so much hijinks to this macho crowd. They actually want us to believe that any one of these methods applied for a short time would not leave each of them crying in a puddle of their own excrement bleating out the passwords to their internet porn accounts and the balance of their wife's trust fund.
While the simple moral repugnance of defending torture is one thing, the more practical riduculousness of this message is even more disheartening. I mean, can anyone really take this seriously? Here we are, our (supposedly god fearing) nation doing those things we usually associate with third world military juntas or the old Kremlin, and the best some of our brightest lights can come up with is "oh thats not so bad..."
UPDATE
Christopher Buckley writes in the Daily Beast that we should just "get over" our torturing past and not be "too sanctimonious," because:
What Mr. Buckley fails to mention is that -- at best -- a handful of the folks we tortured had anything to do with the events of 9/11. But that is a simple fact when you are running hard to avoid moral accountability. Also, it strikes me that the mark of a civilized nation is that it does not simply react to whatever barbarism is perpetrated against it with more barbarism. You see, because all you have done then is raise the barbarism index. Did they mention that a prep school... or at church....
From Detroit's own Paul W. Smith to Rush, the red/white/ black and blue crowd have been extolling their virility and claiming that none of the practices enumerated in the memos constitute torture. Forced nudity, sleep deprivation and waterboarding are just so much hijinks to this macho crowd. They actually want us to believe that any one of these methods applied for a short time would not leave each of them crying in a puddle of their own excrement bleating out the passwords to their internet porn accounts and the balance of their wife's trust fund.
While the simple moral repugnance of defending torture is one thing, the more practical riduculousness of this message is even more disheartening. I mean, can anyone really take this seriously? Here we are, our (supposedly god fearing) nation doing those things we usually associate with third world military juntas or the old Kremlin, and the best some of our brightest lights can come up with is "oh thats not so bad..."
UPDATE
Christopher Buckley writes in the Daily Beast that we should just "get over" our torturing past and not be "too sanctimonious," because:
we indulged in these techniques after watching nearly 3000 innocent Americans endure god-awful deaths at the hands of religious fanatics who would happily have detonated a nuclear bomb if they had gotten their mitts on one.
What Mr. Buckley fails to mention is that -- at best -- a handful of the folks we tortured had anything to do with the events of 9/11. But that is a simple fact when you are running hard to avoid moral accountability. Also, it strikes me that the mark of a civilized nation is that it does not simply react to whatever barbarism is perpetrated against it with more barbarism. You see, because all you have done then is raise the barbarism index. Did they mention that a prep school... or at church....
posted by Jack Reed at 9:56 AM
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