weak becomes heroes
MSNBC gives us all a lesson in cognitive dissonance - check out the top two headlines in the "related stories" box.
While I'm in agreement with the right about the overall repugnance of Clinton time, I diverge over the reasons (I recall a time when the debate over what the meaning of is is launched a thousand bumper stickers, though nary a word spoken about the Iraqi Holocaust. Clinton? That was about the lying, and Woodstock. Or something. Priorities, sweetie, priorities).
But screwing around with reality's one thing - you gotta do your homework when you start messing with the English language. People don't care much for reality - I know I don't - but you use words like 'is' and 'that' and the alphabet and shit to watch game shows and check box scores.
Anywho, rather than fuck around with "it depends on what the meaning of torture is," the President just had his lawyer go and change the definition of the word:
As White House counsel Mr. Gonzales served as "point man" directing the administration's policies on interrogation, and presided in particular over two major decisions. First, he strongly advised the President to withhold Geneva Convention protection from prisoners taken in Afghan- istan, an unprecedented position that the Bush administration, after considerable debate, adopted. Second, he solicited a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice that, as Mr. Rivkin says, declares that the president, under his war powers as commander in chief, can "legally" order torture to be applied. The memo, which is dated August 2002, also "redefines" the meaning of the word "torture" as it appeared in domestic statutes and international treaties which commit the United States to prohibit its use.
By defining torture very narrowly—as an activity that causes pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death"—this memo, by a kind of repellent verbal sleight of hand, makes it possible to treat many practices that plainly are torture, and are so recognized throughout the world, as something less than that. Thus "waterboarding," for example—the practice of stripping prisoners and submerging them until they have nearly drowned— which is a favorite of torturers around the world and which, as I discussed in my article, Americans have used on al-Qaeda prisoners, could be considered under this memorandum to be a legal practice.
One of the stupidest things ever to get passed off as political wisdom was the idea that people'd vote for Bush because they'd want to have a beer with him; apparently, none of the people who believed that gibberish considered that he might be an evil-mean drunk.
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