The thing I find most disturbing about the debate over torture is that it's happening at all. There was a time when torture was unthinkable, when there wouldn't have been any debate -- or even a second thought -- about prosecuting people who resorted to torture. But the Bush administration's fearmongering blew the threat of terrorism out of all proportion. Yes, 9/11 was the worst terror attack in American history, but had the Bush administration been on the ball, it probably never would've happened. All the information that the White House and the president ignored was gained without torture -- or even illegal wiretaps -- and it would've been enough shut those nineteen hijackers down.But the administration, in their zeal to draw attention away from their own incompetence, turned Al Qaeda -- a loose-knit handful of theocratic cultists -- into an even greater threat to the United States than the Soviet Union's entire nuclear arsenal. Al Qaeda, we were told, wanted to destroy America -- never mind that there was no way they possibly could -- and we had to stop at nothing, give up any rights the administration demanded, and throw any antiquated systems of morality or ethics out the window. If we didn't, we would all die. Guaranteed. It strikes me as a measure of the insanity of those remaining rightwingers that universal access to healthcare is tyranny, but torture and wiretaps and the abandonment of the right of habeas corpus are triumphs of freakin' liberty. I'm sorry, but if you're reading this and this describes you, you're an idiot. Hate to break it to you like this, but there's no easy way to tell someone they're stupid. You are astonishingly dumb.
Now would be a good time to segue into calling Dick Cheney dumb. But Cheney's foolishness isn't in believing any of this, because he doesn't. Cheney's stupidity is in believing that his own skin is worth more than the country he was once elected to serve. That and in thinking you can torture people and not have anyone call you on it -- ever. That's dumb. Or delusional. I suppose, in the end, the results are the same... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
