For some dozen years now I have communicated with a freeper and in essence he is acting as my agent in keeping me informed of what the RW think and say. What makes him so valuable as an agent inside the RW mind is his prodigious cut and past posting...he actually says little himself, so I just presume he has a lazy mind or just interested in seeing the GOP in office to get a tax cut.
So here is my report to my fellow DUers that may be interested in what the lattes RWNM is saying. And an indication of just how desperate they are.
His full cut and paste is below and I hope none of you click on any links that may appear.
13523.12 in reply to 13523.4
a tortured tale
So the story goes something like this:
Once upon a time, when Clinton was president, torture was good. Especially when done by someone else.
But nothing happened to the bad people which made the pants-wetters in the media and amongst the luvvies very happy. As long as nothing happened to them.
This too made Clinton very happy.
"See," he said, "I'm a pants-wetter like you, which is why I take mine off so often."
"So that's the trick!", the pants-wetters thought, "no stain on your honour, if you just leave yourself exposed".
And then Clinton finally left. Which was also good. Because by that time even the pantie manufacturers were going broke.
And the pants-wearing Bush entered the Oval Office.
Then one day, something bad happened - not that something bad hadn't happened before - but not this bad, at home.
And everyone thought: the torture might have been good, but intelligence was a failure
That failure was rooted in a range of miscalculations over time. There was the public belief that the end of the Cold War meant the United States didn’t need a major intelligence effort, a point made by the late Sen. Daniel Moynihan. There were the intelligence people who regarded Afghanistan as old news. There was the Torricelli amendment that made recruiting people with ties to terrorist groups illegal without special approval. There were the Middle East experts who could not understand that al Qaeda was fundamentally different from anything seen before. The list of the guilty is endless, and ultimately includes the American people, who always seem to believe that the view of the world as a dangerous place is something made up by contractors and bureaucrats.
Bush was handed an impossible situation on Sept. 11, after just nine months in office. The country demanded protection, and given the intelligence shambles he inherited, he reacted about as well or badly as anyone else might have in the situation. He used the tools he had, and hoped they were good enough.
And the pants-wetters thought the tools were good enough too.
I mean, they had figured that these weren't really evil people. They were just poor and dirty - stained if you will - and if some were really dirty, it was OK to give them an occasional wash. Even if involuntary. After all, government knows best.
But when they later heard they also played them Red Hot Chili Peppers, the pants-wetter's knees began to quiver, until they finally locked. "Why, isn't that...torture?" they whispered.
Oh my...
The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator’s tool kit.
If you thought that meant the pants-wetters had conceded Bush won the war against terrorism, they would deny it. And if you then asked if they therefore agreed that there was an ongoing threat of terrorism, they would tell you there wasn't. But don't ask for coherence. Just follow the narrative dear reader.
At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn’t.
Which in pants-wetter terms is: "The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Torture has been institutionalised, torture has become rou...
And my reply to this post:
Who wrote the Machiavellian piece?
I don't want to click on any links in this post for fear of getting some disease. besides I just took a shower.
But to whomever wrote it I would just say go on and tell us more.
Because you are reveling the own evil in your heart and most people will see it. And if the GOP adopts this as their own they will go the way of the Whig party. and to not let the door hit them on the way out.
Torture has never been good to all but the sociopaths of our society.
Torture puts our own military at risk of great harm if they are captured.
Torture bludgeons our morality to death and shames us in the eyes of the world.
And is the greatest and most egregious assault on liberty and freedom that exist.
So let the light shine on it and lets see who cares.
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