Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by John Cole| 29 Comments
This post is in: Politics, War on Terror aka GSAVE®
Glenn Greenwald has a follow-up on the McCain torture piece, and outlines what is to come from those who support a policy of torture, to include labelling opponents ‘torture hysterics,’ insisting that ‘torture works’ despite the evidence to the contrary, and painting anyone who opposes torture as weak or ‘unpatriotic.’
Read the whole thing.
Think he is wrong? Check the comments here.
And when you are done, check out this piece by Cathy Young.
Comments are closed.
[…] John Cole’s take: Furthermore, I do not like the idea of having foreign governments and despotic regimes to similarly be allowed to torture, because it will be, in many cases, our guys they are now LEGALLY torturing. And spare me the ‘they are going to abuse and our torture our guys anyway, if they want to.’ Again, no shit. […]
[…] More on Torture […]
Krista
Plus ca change…
Don’t forget that they’ll probably also be painted as “soft on terror”. We should just trot out all of those talking points now to try to pre-empt things a bit.
Brad R.
Awesome. I can’t wait to hear Hannity dish out the pro-torture talking points.
There’s a certain brand of conservative (Hannity, Rush, Malkin, Powerline, LGF, everyone at WorldNetDaily and NewsMax) that reminds me distinctly of the ’60s New Left, except that the stinky hippies at least had psychedelic drugs to blame for making them so divorced from reality. When the wingnuts come down from their self-induced acid trip (likely some time after Bush is gone), will they feel regret, like many of the deranged bastards who were in the Weather Underground? Will they pull a David Horowitz, doing a complete political 180 and becoming crazy left-wingers? Or will they just fade away into obscurity, dying lonely and bitter a la Abbie Hoffman? Time will tell.
MI
It might not feel like it cause we’re living it, but if you take a step back, this is really a profoundly important time in American history regarding this kind of thing..torture, patriot act, the domestic spy agency deal, ect.
I think our best hope, and of course I’m partisan, is the kind of Hackett-esque Libertarian Democrat that’s beginning to emerge on the political landscape.
ppGaz
I agree completely. And when you hear the amoral apologists on the right shrieking about how people “hate Bush”, remember this thought. This is what we hate. These guys are screwing up our country. Bad.
I desperately hope that you are right.
Matt F.
Not to put too fine a point on it, or create a false analogy, but if memory serves those of us who opposed the invasion of Iraq circa summer 2002 to spring 2003 because we believed it would be counterproductive (1) were derisively labeled “hysterical” Bush-haters; (2) heard that the invasion would “work” and “was necessary” despite plenty of evidence to the contrary; and (3) were painted as “weak,” “unpatriotic,” and “pro-terrorist.”
I mean, these are old tactics. Welcome to the club.
Bill-Syracuse
Thanks for the link to that Greenwald post and for your cogent posts, too. Greenwald hit the nail on the head: we’re now going to be told that anyone who is patriotic and wants to win the war on terrorism has to support American torture. We need to resist that pressure.
Lines
I’m welcoming the onslaught of slurs and barbs from the radical right wing. I’m hoping that by becoming so extreme they will force a backlash against the party, therefore becoming more moderate and realistic, focusing again on Conservative issues and not neo-Con ones.
I’d like to have a choice in voting again and maybe the near death of the Republican party by their own hand will do just that.
Jorge
I’m a commercial producer so I tend to think of things in term of the way they’d work in a :30 second spot.
Can you imagine some group putting out an AD showing an American soldier being water boarded and then ending it with, “Thanks to current administration, the US now considers it legal and moral for this to be done to our fighting men and women?” It would work just as well as a print ad.
ppGaz
I’d like to think — I don’t, but I’d like to — that John McCain will really stand up to these assholes and help create the split in the GOP over this issue that would lead to a collapse of neocon power and influence and a resurgence of traditional conservative politics in that party.
Unfortunately, what I think will happen is that McCain will modulate his voice because he is the most ambitious man in politics today, maybe alongside Joe Biden, and he’ll try to walk some sort of fine line that he figures will lose him the smallest number of votes. I hope I’m wrong.
I hope we get McCain the fighter pilot and not McCain the 2000 GOP primary candidate, or McCain the 2004 smokescreen for the cowardly president who four years earlier had his thugs kick McCain in the groin in order to save his own candidacy.
Lines
Are there any Democrats or Liberals that are pro-torture? How about the faux-Democrat with the greatest Joementum? Its beginning to appear that all pro-torture people are Republican. But I’m not yet to the point to believe that all Republican’s are pro-torture, but given the amount of backstabbing they’ve endured lately, to just smile and take it, maybe thats where its going.
Is Zell into torture? Or just self mutilation and dueling?
Steve S
These guys are at their very hearts cowards. That’s why they use these attacks.
Remember that… the base of the Republican party is composed of yellow bellied slack-jawed cowards.
Perry Como
Oh, so now our soldiers are terrorists. Why do you hate Freedom?
Stormy70
30 second counter add: “Twin towers falling, cut to terrorist standing behind a kneeling prisoner about to be beheaded: “Why do the Democrats believe the word of a terrorist over the word of a US soldier? Why do the Democrats believe these terrorists deserve the protection of the US courts? Why do they treat our enemies as criminals, and want our National Security secrets provided to their lawyers?”
We’ll see which one is more effective.
Jorge
Guys,
Let’s remember that the majority of Senate Republicans voted for McCain’s amendment. Hannity, Rush, Coulter, O’Reilly etc tend to side with the POTUS on issues relating to terrorism and Iraq and not with the rank and file Republicans.
Torture is not as much a Republican issue as it is a Neocon/PNAC issue. It is weird marriage of Machiavelli with blind idealism that results in some incredibly twisted and flawed logic.
Jorge
Um,
Stormy, what does your ad have anything to do with the US toruring people? Do you really think that the majority of Americans, who happen to be against torture, have forgotten about 9/11 or somehow believe that terrorists are anything but the scum of the earth? And do you truly believe that people don’t make a clear distinction between the debate about the legal proceedings used to deal with terrorists and US soldiers engaging in tortue?
The reason Bush and Co are losing this argument is because they fail to understand that the torture debate isn’t about the terrorists. It is about us. It is about who we are and what we do. This is a country that has long prided itself on its human rights record. One side – my side – is saying that in fighting the terrorists we won’t become terrorists. Your side is saying that any tactic – including torture – that the US uses against terrorism is justified and moral. You’ll never win that debate.
Perry Como
I say we take it a step further. We can show a terrorist skinning a puppy. Then we can show an image of a Democrat hugging the terrorist. Then the Democrat can slap around a US soldier while the terrorist and Democrat laugh. The shot ends with the terrorist and the Democrat (both male of course) holding hands as they go get married, afterwhich they will raise our taxes.
Clio material.
Lines
If a terrorist ate a baby, would Democrats still love them?
Faux News
Why does torture make Stormy moist?
nyrev
Jorge, you don’t actually expect Stormy to make sense, do you? She’s just a drunken cheerleader for the far right.
Mona
I support Bush’s foreign policy, and at one point did find myself being lulled along into accepting that some activities that should reasonably be defined as torture must be allowed in the case of bad-ass terrorists. Then I pulled back from that and realized nothing is worth becoming the very thing I hate; a policy of actually endorsing and providing for torture is simply unAmerican. Worse, allowing the govt to inflict it in secrecy is just antithetical to every political prescription I adhere to.
But I also believe that there are reasons, noble ones, that some in the GOP are so concerned about a total ban. If I had the architectural plans for the main subway hubs in three major metropolitan American cities on my laptop, along with emails indicating that I was involved in planning an event(s) to take place in them, I would be quite responsive to pain compliance and would tell you everything you wanted to know. But it is said such techniques do not work, or at least, that other interrogation measures are more efficacious. So, in order to protect my moral purity and be able to claim the label of anti-torture, I have made the leap of faith that these assurances are true.
John McCain is a patriot, but I have not always agreed with his political judgment, e.g. McCain-Feingold, which I regard as an anti-free speech abomination. Further, there is ample history to show that the left can be egregiously, hideously wrong about our enemies and the threats they pose. (FDR’s administration and defense industries in the 40s and 50s really were riddled with “Progressive” domestic spies for Stalin, notwithstanding all the denials and the hoopla that fascism was upon us for demanding a strict regimen of security clearances.)
In sum, I don’t trust the left in the area of threats to this nation. But torture is so contrary to the classically liberal values on which the United States is founded that I’d have to see an overwhelming case for it before I could accept it, even for terrorists. That case has not been made.
Geek, Esq.
Having shown great courage in the face of other people’s lives being put in danger, Ace and the pro-torture right now shows great courage in the face of other people’s suffering.
Not surprisingly, it’s these kinds of psychopathic cowards who have been recruited as concentration camp guards and torture specialists.
Seriously, to accuse people who oppose torture of being wimps is about as low as a person can go. The filth that scum scrapes off its shoes, in a manner of speaking.
Mike S
Because the right has been so successfull at protecting us?
Fledermaus
Bush plan for national security:
Phase One: Read memo “Bin Laden determined to attack in US”
Phase Two: Vacation
Mona
Because the right has been so successfull at protecting us?
In part, yes. But also because so much of the American left believes it is living in the belly of a beast that isn’t worth defending. (AmeriKKKa) That anything any genocidial, Marxist tyrant has ever done is really this nation’s fault.
In short, those who think we are the good guys are more likely to protect us from those who are the bad guys, rather than act as if the latter are justified, and maybe even are the actual white hats.
bg
Oh please. Name some liberals who say that. No nutsos on the far left, just mainstream people. If “so much” of the left thinks that, you should be able to come up with quite a list.
Mona
bg —
I can give you many examples. As but one, take William Shawcross’s Vietnam reporting and his late 70s book, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. The central theme of Sideshow is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed millions all because the U.S. lied and misled Prince Siahnouk, and bombed the hell out of Cambodia, creating some sort of fury that caused them to turn on their own people. It was bullshit, but the left ate it up, and this “explanation” for Marxist carnage caught on in organs like the Nation and throughout the left. The Devil U.S. is always to blame for a large swathe of the left.
I could give similar examples in which every ghastly thing Stalin did was either denied, or attributed to his supposedly being treated oh-so-badly by the U.S. Whether Old Left, New Left, or today’s left, the trope continues.
BTW, Shawcross (who is British) has since recanted, apologized to Kissinger, and is an avid supporter of the War in Iraq.
bg
You can give many examples? How about you do that instead of trotting out irrelevance from 75 years ago.