The Crossed Pond

Granted, Elisabeth Hasslebeck is not quite one of the right’s elite thinkers, but still, Jesse body slams. And he’s also been very effective on this issue of cutting through the bs.

One of my favorite points is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The goalposts have been moved so far that the Cheney 1% doctrine is pretty well the foundation of the pro-torture argumentation. Namely, if there’s a 1% chance that torture would stop something awful (used to be nuclear holocaust, now it’s just “save a life”), then it’s justified.

Ventura’s tack:

If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

Well, I can. The first person to be tortured (that we know of) was, in fact, a white boy, and an American citizen to boot—John Walker Lindh—but that’s very rarely mentioned and by and large I think so much of the right’s comfort with torture is based on the idea that it’s Arab muslims on the receiving end. I’m actually starting to be much more inclined to the position, which I might have poo-poohed four years ago, that much of this torture debate, like much of the anti-Jihadist debate, is borne of straight up racism, a charge I certainly don’t throw around very often. It’s worth noting that Guilt or innocence clearly matters less than race and to a lesser (much lesser) extent nationality. But take Ventura’s point. Can you imagine a Krauthammer arguing that we ought to bring these tactics into our criminal justice system? Well why not? Police conduct tens of thousands of interrogations every day, and at least some of those have lives on the line (usually civilian lives at that).

Of course I ought to be careful what I wish for, I suppose.

Oh, and on this Nancy Pelosi talking point, I have no idea who on the right is in charge of message management, but I could kiss them at this point. Every day that the right’s argument is at least partially centered on trying to suck the majority leaders in with them is a day closer to a truth commission. Yglesias makes the by-now obvious point:

…in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.

And I’d also add that the tenor of the attacks on Pelosi grant a certain air of unseemliness to torture that isn’t granted in other lines of attack. The message is muddled between just a plain charge of hypocrisy and trying to spread the taint around—as far as the latter goes, in so doing, they’re more or less advancing the notion that there is indeed a taint.

On both counts, I’ve been getting fairly optimistic in terms of the torture debate. The pro-torture arguments have been losing credibility left and right, each new bit of information casts that period in American history in an increasingly vile and petty light, and while it’s certainly disheartening that this has become a partisan issue, if an increasingly small minority Republican party wants to embrace itself as the party of torture, they’ll get what’s coming to them.