Oppositional headbanging

These are dark days in American politics. Disgusting people run the country with disgusting deeds and disgusting words. Nothing I can do about it and I don't have much that's fresh to say, so concentrate on other things. But permit a small cry of pain on the subject of 'torture'. I wholly approve what the Bush administration did in relation to Al Quaeda detainees, except that they may not have done enough of it. This thought suffices: imagine you're Pinch Sulzberger, who runs the New York Times. The government believes a detainee may have actionable intelligence of a suicide attack against your skyscraper in Manhattan. But the detainee won't talk. He sniggers. So each day you watch your employees come to work and you know and they don't know that each day may be their last. You see their family photos on their desks, you talk about the future. So Obama rings you up and the call goes like this:

Obama: Hey thanks for all the help. I know you endorsed Hillary, but I understand the ethnic scene in NYT. Hey, Pinch, my people can lean on the terrorist COO a little. Maybe we can tickle him bad enough to to make him squawk. No bruises, we'll call it "processing". But we might save hundreds of lives, your people.

Pinch : It's torture, sir. It's unAmerican. Banning the use of torture would not jeopardize American lives; experts in these matters generally agree that torture produces false confessions.

Obama: The CIA tells me that we averted a specific attack on an LA building by waterboarding a terrorist COO. My DNI says we obtained valuable intelligence by scaring the bejesus out of a couple of these guys. What should I do?

Pinch: Sir, it's better that my staff die than that we 'torture' people who want to destroy America. We are men of principle, aren't we?

Obama: Fine. Let's see how that plays. I'll leave open the possibility of prosecuting the lawyers who justified the waterboarding. So long and tell your staff how much this administration values them.

Me: Among all the disgusting, luxurious, infantile attitudes adopted by liberals these days, this attitudinizing about coercion is the most depraved. It's good that the real effects of voting liberal are being so starkly played out. It's clarifying. Now back to escapism.

Update: I add Liz Cheney's fine refutation of the liberal mythology:

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