Instapundit Glenn Reynolds debunks the torture scandal once and for all. In a post entitled “PELOSI LIED, THE WATERBOARDING ISSUE DIED,” Reynolds declares that “the torture issue was mostly a political tool designed to cow right-leaning members of the punditocracy by calling them Nazis. Now that it’s not needed so much, it can be allowed to die.”
I reckon being criticized for being pro-torture is a fate even worse than being head-slapped, kept awake for 11 days, waterboarded dozens of times, and left outside bare and freezing.
Has anyone seen an excellent round-up of jaw-dropping torture apologies or torture defenses by American politicians and pundits since 2004?
[hat tip to TAC]
Whaddya mean “torture”? You got a lot of nerve buster, it aint torture, it’s “defense”.
Anyone who can justify torture has no conscience.
Maybe so, but they could still have a great future as a pundit or a politician.
Glenn Reynolds doesn’t know what he is talking about. I was calling him a nazi long before torture became an issue.
Tom, don’t kid yourself, guys like Beck know exactly what they are talking about….they combine a bit of paranoid delusion with a dash of calculated partisan support and add several large dollops of mercenary showmanship to produce a living that treats them quite well. They’re like PT Barnum without any redeeming qualities and a certain sector of the public loves them for it. Murder and Car Wreck Burlesque is a real profit center…always has been.
A number of years ago a regional radio talk show host sometimes used the ticking bomb argument as a justification for torture. Apparently, millions of American lives might be lost if people of interest were not brutally forced to reveal information. Fortunately, no people within the U.S. were tortured and no bombs have exploded. On the other hand, a good number of people in Iraq were tortured, murdered and disappeared in a futile attempt to link Saddam to terrorist groups and retroactively justify the invasion. http://rightlight-marc.blogspot.com
Just this morning, the outsize fools on the morning cable news shows were talking about Dick Cheney and the old “protecting America ” canard was being bandied about liberally and conservatively, including some truly boorish swell suggesting a “steak knife in the eyeball” method and all concerned seemed to conveniently forget how the entire Iraqi Fiasco was a cooked up chop shop job by some of the biggest nuts and cranks in the history of our Bunkocracy. This government embarked upon the most foolish endeavor of it’s entire history and we want to talk about one of the secondary streams of the farrago instead of going at the morons who got us in this expensive and murderous gambit with a black jack and a blow torch. Iraq was a secular country, hostile to bin Laden and it’s leader, no matter how diabolical was contained and in his last years. We have delivered up a Grade A Rope-a-Dope to the Terrorist cause and the leadership and media….a two-headed snake…wants to keep parsing torture in public. Meanwhile, the public sits on its hands and swallows the biggest load of crap delivered in the history of this nation. Turning the other cheek is becoming like a never-ending merry go round and the Swells of this country keep getting on and off and telling us how great we are for watching them.