Hear, Hear
From The Memphis Flyer:
The conservative movement is wobbling like a punch-drunk boxer in the wake of Barack Obama’s knockout victory and widespread public eagerness to say farewell to President Bush and his disaster of a presidency. It is grasping at the thinnest of straws. (I’m still getting e-mails saying Obama was born in Kenya and therefore unqualified to be president.)
The thing is, we need strong, smart conservative voices in the U.S. (Paul Craig Roberts comes to mind.) Democrats are just as capable of screwing up the country as the Republicans and, as we know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.* The last eight years have made that quite clear. But as long as the public face of conservatism consists only of clowns and Bush sycophants — Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, Joe the Plumber, et al. — the movement is doomed to prolong its temporary irrelevance.
*Or, as Countertop would say, pigs get slaughtered.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Well it doesn’t help that our corner men, Bush and McCain, were slipping mickeys into our water bottle and snapping us with the towel instead of mopping up the sweat.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Yes, nothing says reasonable discussion like calling Joe the Plumber a “Bush sycophant” or “clown”.
Do you even know who Paul Craig Roberts is? Do you honestly think a “strong, smart… voice” is a 9/11 “Truther” and called for impeachment, or do you like copy-pasting idiots in an elegant display of false arguments?
I mean, it’s nice to hear you advocate a pro-gun individual — this is the first time in my memory you’ve done so, CCW-permit and all — but could you pick one of the 99% that’s smarter than Rosie O’Donnell and bread mold?
January 15th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
t; That’s so mixed up and full of incorrect assumptions hardly worth a reply.
Where the Republicans have been going horribly wrong for 8 years is in their adoption of leftist tenets– their hypocrisy in talking up free-market capitalism while piling on with the socialist spending, market meddling and entitlements. They’re saying the era of Reagan is over, when they should trying to put an end to the era of FDR.
Yes; Republicans suck. They suck exactly to the extent that they’re embracing the ideas of the Left, trying to get along and show us they’re “nice people”, instead of fighting like hell to defeat the Left.
And BTW; Hannity and Limbaugh were both saying the exact same thing just this morning, but you would know anything about that. Mark Levin was saying it yesterday, and I wrote a blog post about it a few days ago. Coulter’s been saying it for 8 years. O’Riely’s just in his usual state of confusion.
But I’m sure you’re not trying to give the Republican leadership any tips on how to win, so what’s your point? And I have a problem with the “comservative movement” being associated with the Republican Party. There is no conservative movement within the Republican leadership (if “leadership” and “Republican” can be used in the same sentence), and there hasn’t been since the 1980s. Hence the problem.
January 15th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I certainly don’t endorse the Paul Craig Roberts part (I honestly didn’t know anything about him, and couldn’t think of a strong, smart conservative voice off the top of my head, so I didn’t bother to edit the original author’s example), but I think “clown” is a pretty fair description of how JTP has been behaving himself; and if the rest of the bunch aren’t Bush sycophants, then there’s simply no such thing.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:01 pm
So you copied a discussion stating that conservative America needs a strong, smart voice leading it, and didn’t bother knowing anything about a man the discussion believes would be a good example of who should be voicing between a third and half of the ideological discussions within the United States.
-.-
No, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. The American population does not need some single “strong, smart” mystery man to pop out of nowhere and beat your or his or her definition of willpower and intelligence into the world. The conservative movement does not need a few impressive voices to stand up and — at best — maliciously edited or carefully turned into toys or strawmen.
We’ve seen more than a share of “strong” voices like Nixon, or “smart” voices like Carter. A damn impressive messenger doesn’t change the message, and no sane movement wants to become a cult of personality to the sort of insular idiocy intelligence breeds in the man that knows everything, nor the sort of insufferable prideful arrogance that’s the sister of strength of will.
That’s not how the game works, and a man that quotes Terry Pratchett on his front page should know better. An argument is right because it is right, not because
KiCaptain Carrot says so.January 15th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
so… the Republicans are now supposed to take their cues from some Memphis Editor who gets his panties in a bunch because Joe the plumber points out that a lot of irresponsible journalists regularly reveal important tactical and strategic intel to the enemy? Conservatives are supposed to listen to this loon who’s all upset because Ann Coulter points out that using tax dollars to subsidize dysfunction is a BAD thing? Conservatives are supposed to listen to this guy who then proceeds with the standard liberal ad hominem attack on Coulter rather than counter her point? Really, tgrish, you expect us to listen to this guy? You expect us to listen to you?
Meanwhile the ‘lightbringer’ wants us to believe that a tax cheat is the best guy he could get for Treasury Secretary? But it’s A-O-Kay! because it was an ‘honest’ mistake, which then means that his choice for Treasury Secretary can’t even manage to get his own taxes straight?
It is to larf.
January 15th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
gatt:
That’s not my blog, any more than this one is. I’m a guest everywhere I write. The Pratchett quote isn’t mine.
And, of course, you still haven’t addressed the actual substance of the argument. You’ve taken issue with the specific example of an ostensibly “good” conservative, but have said nothing about the fact that the Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter/O’Reilly crowd is doing far more to harm American conservatism than to help it.
Of course, you’re a knee-jerk contrarian, so leave it to you to vehemently disagree with the [ought-to-be] wholly uncontroversial proposition that a strong, smart opposition would actually be a good thing.
anon:
Oh, heavens, no. As a matter of fact, I hope conservatives (of the current prominent crop, anyway) don’t take his advice, don’t start behaving like adults, and don’t make themselves worth taking seriously, for at least as long as it takes to undo the damage they’ve done over the last six or eight years.
Then again, if any of them have intelligent, defensible arguments as to why torturing people, warrantless surveillance, and unending wars of choice are good things, I’d actually be interested to hear them.
[As for Coulter, well, I don’t think she’s ever written a full page without at least one egregious factual error or distortion, so you’ll forgive me if I can’t take her seriously.]
January 15th, 2009 at 9:06 pm
So what is your point? You want to be Republican lite, like McCain? Wow, that worked well, didn’t it? If he hadn’t had Palin on board, he would have lost by 50 points. More RINO like, like say, Schwartneger? Yah. He’s doing a bang up job in Kalifornia. Rush and Coulter are RIGHT AND CORRECT. Rush puts more religion into things sometimes and harps on abortion more than I like, but I’m the only I am behind 100% of the time.
Or are you saying “give obamy a chance”??? Well, obamy is HARD CORE SOCIALIST. I don’t need to have Stalin or HO Chi Minh sworn in as President to know what they are going to do. IF we survive for 2 years, MAYBE enough people will come forward with a CONSERVATIVE point of view to rescue this country from multi-TRILLION dollar vote buying exercizes, socialized medicine and allah knows what else.
But trying to out liberal a liberal AIN’T A WAY TO DO IT!
January 15th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Another useless post, pretending to give conservatives advice when all it does is expose the ignorance of liberalism. If he was correct in his post, than how did Obama get elected? Obviously, the conservative approach of using reason, logic, and principles are no match for frenzied emotion, popular conformity, and downright stupidity.
Oh yeah, even without an education on the subject, I would trust Joe the Plumber’s reporting more than someone like Dan Rather or Jason Blair any day of the week.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
It was posted on a blog you post to regularly, and reveals a rather interesting and universal truth. I think the point stands.
I reiterate, you do not need a strong, smart voice for such things, and strong, smart voices present far more problems than they’re worth.
I’m not a fan of Coulter, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, the lgf folks, anyone on television on FOX, and a thousand other conservatives. If you think they’re doing more harm than good, though, you seem to misunderstand how supply and demand works. The people that watch them don’t need an argument, they want to hear what they want to hear. The people making fun of those twits either would make fun of any conservative no matter how smart or strong (:coughKTKcough:) or are wise enough themselves to see the message itself.
The conservative movement needs people to stand up and think, not someone stepping up to the podium thinking for them. I’d argue the same for the progressive.
I’ve got no problem with strong, smart opposition, although I’ll admit I encounter is rarely enough as is. As my contrarian nature indicates, opposition is good.
My issue is the belief that conservatives need to rally behind some figureheads based on your (or the Memphis jackass) definition of intelligence and strength.
Love the pointed questions. Here’s one for you : could you imagine any argument that you’d accept, given how bundled up into your own view of the world you are, tgirsch?
If a deity (or rough equivalent, for those whose religions have no interacting god-like beings or do not believe) fell out of the sky and said, to your face in a voice of truth, that ten or twenty or a hundred or a thousand lives had been saved by dunking a man’s head in water, and that those involved in beating a bad man up for good reasons would not go on to beat good men up for bad ones later, would that sate your morality?
I find either answer entertaining, and I’d particularly like to know if and where your cutoff point is.
January 15th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
tgirsh–it is true that a conservative could have said the same things about liberals during the ’04 elections.
The question that needs to be asked is, how much of America fits evenly on one side or the other of the big partisan divide that splits the political junkies?
Secondly, if a leader gives immediate gains for the electorate, at the sacrifice of long-term good for the country, will the intellectuals of the nation be able to remind that leader of the problem?
As an aside:
when you say torturing people, warrantless surveillance, and unending wars of choice, you are forgetting a few things.
Torturing whom? Under what definition of torture?
Warantless surveillance of whom? Of citizens of what nation? Under what conditions?
Whose unending war of choice?
Once I know the answers to those questions, I can agree or disagree with you. But until I do, I suspect that you are using catch-phrases as a substitute for thinking.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Paul Craig Roberts is a loon. Anyone who says that we should be using him as an example of what a good Republican should act like is either a Radical Leftist or an Idiot.
President Bush did a lot wrong. But he did a lot better than either Gore or Kerry would have done.
Coulter and Rush are polemicists and we need more of them not less of them. My goodness look at the damage that was done to the country by all the polemicists on the left. We need the left’s tactics with the right’s end state in mind. We don’t need to act like gentlemen. We need to remember that the left is deadly serious about destroying this country. We have given them an excellent chance by allowing those clowns to win.
For that I will never forgive McCain.
January 15th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
“…intelligent, defensible arguments as to why torturing people, warrantless surveillance, and…wars…are good things, i’d actually be interested to hear them.”
well…your silly ass hasn’t been bombed into oblivion by those who would, now has it?
but we gotta take the bad with the good, i guess.
jtc
January 15th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Ok, anon, I gotta ask where you have been for the last “6 to 8 years”. It wasn’t here in the USA if you think what we had was conservatives in power in the Congress or the White House. They may have been Republicans, but they sure as Hell weren’t conservatives.
And Dan, we can’t really say that using logic, reason and principle failed in the face of frenzied emotion, etc. Nobody tried it, except Palin and she wasn’t at the top of the ticket and because she had no national creds the mainstream media savaged her and managed to lose her argument in the noise.
McCain would not have been enough better, if at all, than Obama to matter. We had two liberal “promisers” running and one of them was smoother and promised better. We haven’t seen a viable conservative in either party in a very long time. The few we have seen couldn’t get their party’s endorsement.
Nobody could reasonably accused Bush of being a conservative. And before him we had Clinton. So where are all these conservatives that are being blamed for the sorry state of affairs we are in?
January 16th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Lyle:
Yeah, yeah, I know, no true Scotsman, and all that…
Dan:
Obviously, the “conservative” approach of using reason, logic, and principles are no match for frenzied emotion, popular conformity, and downright stupidity.
[Scare quotes mine.] Yes, because conservatives would never resort to scare tactics or demagoguery. For once, we simply beat them at their own game.
gatt:
I’m not a fan of Coulter, O’Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, the lgf folks, anyone on television on FOX, and a thousand other conservatives.
You’re not a fan of anyone or anything, except maybe guns. You really are Mikey: You hate everything. 🙂
The conservative movement needs people to stand up and think, not someone stepping up to the podium thinking for them.
That won’t start until the Reagan worship stops, I’m afraid. And yes, I realize that Obama has already shown signs of becoming the Democratic Reagan in that respect.
could you imagine any argument that you’d accept
For torture, probably not. I simply can’t imagine a plausible scenario in which it would be acceptable. As I’m sure I’ve told you before, if we have to become more like our enemies in order to win, then we deserve to lose.
For the war, even the tiniest shred of evidence that it’s done more good than harm would go an awfully long way. If we’d have found meaningful connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 hijackers, for example, I’d have had some crow to eat. If we’d have found credible evidence that Hussein’s regime was giving material support to al-Qaeda, I’d have had a LOT of crow to eat.
For surveillance, actual terror plots foiled would go a long way, but instead we get eavesdropping on phone sex, and intelligence officers complaining that the primary result has been a much worse signal-to-noise ratio.
If a deity (or rough equivalent, for those whose religions have no interacting god-like beings or do not believe) fell out of the sky and said, to your face in a voice of truth, that ten or twenty or a hundred or a thousand lives had been saved by dunking a man’s head in water, and that those involved in beating a bad man up for good reasons would not go on to beat good men up for bad ones later, would that sate your morality?
Sure, and if pigs had wings, better aerodynamics, and enough strength to generate lift, they could fly!
More seriously, said deity would have to assure me that no innocent people had their heads dunked in water. Look, the world is a dangerous place, and that danger is an inherent part of the cost of freedom. Just how much of your soul are you willing to sell for the illusion of safety? If you beat up a few brown-skinned people and sic the dogs on them, does it make you feel better to think that maybe a few lives were saved by what you have done, even when all of the evidence points to your tactics being counterproductive?
We don’t live in 24-land. Jack Bauer is a fictional character. Real life doesn’t work that way. If torture really were an effective way of getting useful information, I’d still have serious moral reservations about it. But fortunately I don’t have to deal with that moral dilemma, because it’s well documented that torture simply doesn’t work, unless, say, false confessions are what you’re after.
karrde:
how much of America fits evenly on one side or the other of the big partisan divide that splits the political junkies
Depends whether or not you count the divisive “wedge” issues that seem to get all the attention in most election cycles. Frankly, I suspect most of America isn’t sufficiently well-informed enough to take an educated position on most issues, which is part of why you have plumbers going to Israel and pining for the days when the only coverage of war that the American people ever saw was a spate of government-produced propaganda films.
Torturing whom?
“Enemy combatants,” a fancy way of saying, “whoever the president wants to.”
Under what definition of torture?
The legal one, as recent news stories are pointing out.
Warantless surveillance of whom?
Unless you trust the FBI and CIA, you have no way of knowing, because there’s no meaningful oversight. Which is (or ought to be) a huge problem for “true” conservatives. You don’t trust them to regulate guns, but you DO trust them to decide who to listen to, for what reason, and without telling anyone? There’s a wee bit of cognitive dissonance there.
All we do know for sure is that they were listening in on the private conversations of aid workers abroad phoning home, and mocking their conversations, especially when they turned to phone sex. Something tells me that’s not exactly productive wrt fighting terrorism.
Whose unending war of choice?
From what I can tell, Cheney’s. But a whole bunch of spineless members of both parties were complicit in the deal. Now’s not the time to ask questions, after all — now’s the time to go blow shit up and ask questions later.
Pierre:
…is either a Radical Leftist or an Idiot.
I suspect probably the latter, based on other editorials. But again, I still think the strong opposition point is a good one.
We need to remember that the left is deadly serious about destroying this country.
Trying your hand at the polemic yourself, eh? 🙂 Actually, I think “demagoguery” would be a better word.
pawnbroker:
well…your silly ass hasn’t been bombed into oblivion by those who would, now has it?
Nor had it been for decades before 9/11, nor even on 9/11. I am at exponentially greater risk of being killed by a CO leak, or being hit by a car while crossing the street, or tripping and falling down the stairs at work, or any number of completely mundane methods of dying, than I am of being killed by a terrorist. And frankly, I don’t support the torture of my HVAC service guy, or of a random car driver, or of my building’s office manager, in the name of preventing those extremely unlikely outcomes, either.
straightarrow:
They may have been Republicans, but they sure as Hell weren’t conservatives.
About that aforementioned True Scotsman thing…
Nobody tried [using logic, reason, and principle], except Palin
Ahahaha! Thanks, that’s the best laugh I’ve had all day, and I really needed it!
We haven’t seen a viable conservative in either party in a very long time. The few we have seen couldn’t get their party’s endorsement.
And why is that? Because despite what you might hear to the contrary, most Americans are simply not conservative. Certainly not by the standard you’ve set which excludes pretty much every Republican since Newt Gingrich gave us the Contract On America.
Nobody could reasonably accused Bush of being a conservative.
Well he sure as fuck wasn’t liberal! So what the hell was he? You may not want to own him, but he’s a hell of a lot more of your making than of mine.
January 16th, 2009 at 2:30 am
“[Scare quotes mine.] Yes, because conservatives would never resort to scare tactics or demagoguery. For once, we simply beat them at their own game.”
– Yeah, because we know terrorism is just some made up Bush fantasy perpetrated by his masters in Israel. With Obamer being elected, it is pretty clear liberals really do believe that.
January 16th, 2009 at 3:48 am
I’m a soulless animal; I have very little to tarnish. I do have rules that I have to follow, and that means making a good effort to protect good people.
The legal definition and appeals process apparently vanishing in a cloud of dust, MCA itself be-damned?
Standing up and thinking includes the option of thinking like little clones. It just needs to be a choice, not the side effect of a particularly verbose speaker. And it dates back well before Obama, the Socialists for Nixon, Reagan, Kennedy, or even Lincoln.
And as I’ve said before, there’s a very big difference between anything we can do, and what our enemies do. We stop.
I don’t believe that Saddam-9/11 was the administration’s claim. The claim was about ties to Al-Qaeda, and the closest matter was avoiding addition terrorist attacks on a similar method or source.
The former is highly questionable. It was not Saddam’s control freak style, for starters, and the evidence of events like Salmon Pak (other than the mass graves) could have other explanations.
The existence of some material support between Iraq’s regime and Al-Qaeda’s a duh, though. To borrow a phrase from the (signed by 8 democracts and only 2 republicans) 2008 Senate Intelligence report, “Statements that Iraq provided safe haven for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qa’ida-related terrorist members were substantiated by the intelligence assessments. Intelligence assessments noted Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq and his ability to travel and operate within the country. The intelligence community generally believed that Iraqi intelligence must have known about, and therefore at least tolerated, Zarqawi’s presence in the country”, including medical treatment. Everyone paying attention knew Iraq’s state-run television was willing to broadcast at Al-Qaeda request.
It’s not much — there’s a lot of hemming and hawing and confusion on the meatier bits of discussion — but federal law does include safe havens and safehouses, as well as arguably use of telecommunications services, as “material support”.
Interesting. You can’t imagine a scenario in which it would be acceptable to torture someone? Even the mildest tortures, and the greatest possibility of gain? To take a recent news example, what you call the legal definition (and I’d say is pretty close to the minimum end, if not under), with the whole shebang of nudity, isolation, exposure to cold temperatures that induce shivers, and a few fists to the head, applied to a man caught red-handed trying to murder dozens. My moral system, if it’s the only method left it’s worth it for even a small chance of saving one life. How strong are your reservations? Hefty at a chance of saving one? Minor at a hundred?
May I ask what degree of moral reservations you’d hold for, say, imprisoning individuals based on crimes we don’t have eyewitness evidence of, and done merely to make it hard for them to become recidivist?
Very, very few things work like they do on television. Practically, everything works under some situations; you wouldn’t see an evolutionary movement toward torture if there were no practical purpose.
Torture for the point of confessions is pointless with how the American legal system (and yes, even the MCA) work, and there’s little purpose for it ethically there. If you found someone you’re damned sure is guilty, there’s still a good chance of getting false information… but the method has gotten information, even good information, where normally there’s no reason to not shut up and hold the mouth closed. The ticking timebomb is a cliche, although not a meaningless one given the tendency of Iraqi insurgents to use explosives, and it’s a case where false information is pretty quickly verifiable as such.
Torture doesn’t work well. There’s a reason even the Evil Fascist Bushmonkeyhitler folk in Iraq don’t use even the Evil Waterboarding of Doom process much — other methods are preferable, especially psychological. But you can break a man like McCain, and you can get people to tell you anything until the only anything left is the Truth.
Everyone’s open to having their own system of morals. Mine forbid inaction.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Dan:
because we know terrorism is just some made up Bush fantasy
Way to go all Ray Bolger on me. I have no idea how you got that out of anything I wrote.
Of course terrorism is real. That doesn’t excuse using it as a bully stick to cast aside fundamental rights, to start using the tactics of hated enemies, to crap all over the constitution, or to try to marginalize any and all dissent — all of which are precisely what the Bush administration did in response to it.
And what, exactly, have we gotten for it? Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are still alive, al-Qaeda is as strong as ever, the Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Iran and Iraq — once hated rivals — are dangerously close to becoming allies as a direct result of our meddling in the region.
Now, you’ll doubtless tout the fact that we haven’t had a major foreign terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11, but what exactly does that prove? Before 9/11, we went eight and a half years without such an attack, and even managed to thwart another attack without selling out the fourth, fifth, sixth, and eighth amendments, without torturing anybody, without subverting the separation of powers, and without accusing anyone who disagreed with the president of treason.
gatt:
I’m a soulless animal
Me, too, actually, but there’s this thing called a “figure of speech.” Perhaps you’ve heard of it…
I have very little to tarnish.
Do soulless animals not have integrity or a sense of right and wrong? I still say those things CAN be tarnished, even in heathen bastards like you and em.
I do have rules that I have to follow, and that means making a good effort to protect good people.
Since you’ve ducked the allegorical soul-searching question, I’ll put it more bluntly: How many innocent people are you willing to detain, spy on, and torture, in the name of “protecting good people?” Does it not also give you pause that virtually every interrogation expert agrees that torture doesn’t work, and worse, is counterproductive? Does it not give you pause that the 20th hijacker — almost certainly a legitimately guilty man — may now go free because the evidence collected against him was tainted by torture, so much so that prosecutors are uncomfortable with using it?
Or make it more personal: suppose someone innocent that you love and care about were grabbed by the government, held for years without charge or access to counsel, and tortured. Would you feel okay about that because they were “making a good effort to protect good people?” Somehow I don’t think you’d take that as very much consolation.
That, then, is the question: just how far is too far? If you confiscated every gun and every bullet (currently-legal or otherwise) in the US, you would almost certainly prevent more deaths than you’d enable, but you’d fight tooth and nail against any such thing, and rightly so. Any possible increase in safety is still simply too small to justify the encroachment upon basic rights that would be needed to accomplish it. What I’m saying is that this is even more true of the outgoing administration’s counter-terror tactics.
Standing up and thinking includes the option of thinking like little clones.
Uhh, okay, but I still don’t see what your point is. Sure it’d be great if everyone used critical thinking all the time, and didn’t look to prominent leaders. Just because that would be nice doesn’t mean that we get to ignore group psychology and pretend that the world looks differently. People will always be drawn to charismatic leaders, and will always rely to a certain extent on authority figures. It make sense, then, to do what we can to ensure that we get good charismatic leaders, and good authority figures — and, through oversight, checks, and balances, keep them honest.
And as I’ve said before, there’s a very big difference between anything we can do, and what our enemies do.
I disagree about its size. Heck, we’ve even been operating from the same playbook, using “enhanced interrogation techniques” that we learned from the Soviets and the Communist Chinese. Your “we stop” defense is rather like saying “sure, I raped her, but at least I pulled out before I risked impregnating her!”
I don’t believe that Saddam-9/11 was the administration’s claim.
Oh, it was never an explicit claim, unless you count the oft-repeated and thoroughly-debunked “Mohammed Atta/Iraqi Intelligence/Prague” tidbit. They may have maintained plausible deniability, but the administration clearly fomented and took advantage of public opinion that Hussein’s Iraq was in some way responsible for 9/11 in order to sell that war. Look at Bush’s speeches from late 2002 and early 2003, and see how many times Hussein, WMDs, al-Qaeda, and 9/11 are mentioned in very close proximity to one another, as if they’re all somehow inter-related. If you think that’s an honest mistake/coincidence, then you think W and his crew are even dumber than I do.
As for the more generalized “Iraq/al-Qaeda” connections, I’ve been through it all in great detail before, and have no interest in going through it all again. Virtually no one in the intelligence community (US or otherwise) believes there was ever a meaningful connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. That belief is largely held by a bunch of non-critical-thinking keyboard warriors. Hell, Kevin Bacon is more closely tied to al-Qaeda than pre-invasion Iraq was!
You can’t imagine a scenario in which it would be acceptable to torture someone?
Notice how you changed my words there? You left out an important one. I said that I couldn’t think of a plausible scenario, and I stand by that.
My moral system, if it’s the only method left it’s worth it for even a small chance of saving one life.
Even setting aside all my other objections, and setting aside the question of how many INNOCENT people you’re willing to do it to, you’re still assuming a great deal not in evidence. How can you be so sure that it’s the “only method left?” By many accounts, it’s what they led off with? And even if the victim really is an “evil terrorist,” how can you be so confident that they even have the information you’re looking for? If you’re missing any of those key elements, you’re left without a moral leg to stand on.
May I ask what degree of moral reservations you’d hold for, say, imprisoning individuals based on crimes we don’t have eyewitness evidence of, and done merely to make it hard for them to become recidivist?
Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable. In the presence of compelling physical evidence or a mountain of circumstantial evidence, I’d say you’ve got to let them go.
The ticking timebomb is a cliche, although not a meaningless one
Not so much a meaningless one, as a useless one. As has been pointed out before, it assumes that the victim even knows about the ticking timebomb, and if it really is that imminent, you simply don’t have the time to chase down the false leads, even if they are quickly verified or falsified.
But again, the whole argument is rendered moot by the fact that there’s near-universal agreement within the intelligence community not just that torture doesn’t work (it doesn’t get them to tell you what they know — it gets them to tell you whatever they think you want to hear, whether or not it’s true), but that other methods of interrogation (e.g., rapport-based interrogation) work far, far better. That’s a crucial point in this debate.
[My morals] forbid inaction.
In favor of knee-jerk, counterproductive action? I’m thinking you might want to revise those morals.
January 16th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
[My morals] forbid inaction.
You know, the more I think about that trite little statement, the more it pisses me off. Who, exactly, is arguing for inaction? Just because somebody doesn’t agree with your idea of what sort of action should be taken doesn’t mean they support inaction. That’s precisely the kind of dishonest bullshit that the Hannitys and Coulters and Limbaughs of the world are perpetually guilty of, and why the conservative movement is hindered rather than helped by them.
January 17th, 2009 at 2:06 am
TGirsch:
I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect that an overwhelming majority of Americans could settle on some number well north of … oh, I don’t know …. THREE. And even that figure is on the generous side, as it assumes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri all fit your definition of “innocent.” They certainly don’t fit mine.
No, it doesn’t. The only reason “virtually every” interrogation “expert” thinks “torture” doesn’t “work” is because each of these loaded words or phrases gets semantically parsed to death by everyone with an axe to grind. Take waterboarding, for example. Personally, I consider it proof that torture can work, if done right, as it certainly was in KSM’s case. But few are comfortable saying that out loud, so instead, waterboarding proponents waterboard the definition of “torture” while opponents do the same to “works,” and both sides rest easier believing the lie that “torture” never “works.”
No, because if the evidence was indeed “tainted by torture,” as you claim, that means that prosecutors are unable to convince the court that they would have found the evidence anyway if the guy had not been tortured. If they hadn’t tortured him and hadn’t found the evidence, he still would have gone free, probably years ago. On the flip side, does it not give you pause that you just disproved your own premise that torture supposedly doesn’t work? If it didn’t, we’d never find ourselves in that predicament, as any evidence “tainted by torture” would be so unreliable as to be scarcely worth having, anyway. Obviously you don’t believe that yourself, else you wouldn’t have described him as “almost certainly a legitimately guilty man” rather than a “who the hell knows if he’s guilty or not man.”
January 17th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Xrlq:
You’ll forgive me if I don’t take you too seriously on this matter. After all, you’re on record saying you don’t mind executing innocent people if it gives the illusion of keeping the crime rate down…
I will say this, though: that was an overuse of scare quotes, even for you.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
P.S. If they would have found the evidence anyway, then the torture wasn’t necessary, now was it?
And I defy you to tell me with a straight face that if they did to OUR men and women what we did to them, you would refrain from calling it torture. Not only would you not hesitate to call it torture, you’d demagogue the holy shit out of it. But double-standards have never exactly been a problem for you, now have they?
January 17th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
TGirsch, you seem to be having a bad reading comprehension day. Go back and read my comment again. Twice if necessary. I did not refrain from calling waterboarding torture. Quite the contrary, I said that it is torture, and that it also works. Your pretending it doesn’t “work” is every bit as lame as others pretending it isn’t “torture.” Both are playing silly semantic games just to preserve the lie that “torture never works,” when under any common sense definition of the words, it’s plain as day that it does.
Of course not, but then again, if they can persuade the judge that they would have found the evidence in question anyway, then the evidence will be admissible, and your fears of this “almost certainly … legitimately guilty” guy going free on that basis are misplaced.
Now that you’ve established to a mathematical certainty that you are full of crap, perhaps you could do us all a favor and fess up as to which type of crap it is you are full of. Were you full of crap when you said that torture never produces credible evidence, or were you full of crap in concluding this guy was “almost certainly … legitimately guilty” based on evidence you knew wasn’t credible? You may well be full of both kinds of crap, of course, but as a matter of logic, you must be full of at least one. [And your gross misrepresentation of my position on the death penalty brings it to two, and counting.]
January 17th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Why? Each of the words or phrases I scare quoted is routinely tortured to mean what it doesn’t mean in the context of this debate. Think waterboarding has its place, but feel yucky endorsing “torture” under any circumstances? No problem, just re-define “torture” to exclude it. Hate waterboarding because it is torture, but feel equally bad admitting to yourself that your own noble desire to be better than the terrorists can be used to their advantage? No problem, just redefine “works” any way you have to in order to rationalize that a flat out ban on torture, the death penalty, or anything else that makes liberals cry won’t really cost us anything, anyway. Not comfortable with either of these semantic games? No problem, you can always find some hack who is, label him an “expert,” and use that as an excuse to rubber stamp his conclusions rather than thinking for yourself. But wait, some other experts disagree? No problem, just redefine “expert” further to exclude almost everyone who disagrees, and when you’re left with only a handful who even you can’t persuade yourself not to be experts, well the rest of the “experts” left standing constitute “virtually all.”
In other words, I used exactly the right amount of scare quotes here. The reason there were so many is that you had just used so many loaded terms, apparently without even noticing that you were doing it.
January 17th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I can’t beleive it took me this long to notice that Uncly-Wuncly forgot to “fall back.”
January 17th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Egad, you’re right. See, my problem is, I keep assuming that you have a shred of human decency, so some part of my brain I can’t control just assumed that you can’t possibly be defending the use of torture. Silly me.
But on what basis do you claim that torture works? Because the government says so? They say that gun control works, and yet you don’t buy that for a second. But you’re willing to believe everything the government tells you, apparently, when it suits you. Which is why you’re convinced that the three people the government has admitted to torturing — well, they haven’t admitted that it’s actually torture, even if you do — are the only ones. Also, they have a bridge to sell you, if you’re interested. It connects these two prime Alaskan islands…
P.S. I’m “sorry” about my “use” of “loaded” “terms.”
January 17th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
As to the question of whether torture works, I’m afraid the facts are on my side. Of course, you’ve already taken your own advice and redefined “experts” and “works” to avoid that conclusion.
Can I say that torture has never, ever produced a piece of actionable intelligence? No, I cannot. But then, Sylvia Browne has made correct predictions in the past, and that doesn’t mean that her “psychic powers” — appropriate use of scare quotes — work, either.
Torture is largely ineffective, often counterproductive according to the overwhelming majority of bona fide experts with no scare quotes needed, and it greatly undermines our moral standing in the world. But it’s A-OK with Xrlq, apparently. As long as the victim is a Muslim, of course…
January 17th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Silly you, indeed. There is no “human decency” in denying cold, hard facts. It may make you feel better to believe that life is simpler than it is, but there’s nothing human or decent about that. The only way to be truly decent or human is to count the costs of every potential action or inaction first, and then decide which course of action will cause the most good / prevent the most harm for the most people. You can’t do that if you decide first what the “right” answer to everything is supposed to be, and then craft your theories around that desired conclusion.
Partly, but also because YOU say so. You haven’t admitted (yet?) to being full of crap in saying that that guy was (1) almost certainly guilty and (2) the evidence to prove his guilt was derived from torture. Unless both of those propositions are false, your claim that torture doesn’t work, must be.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Well la-de-frickin’ da. It’s never easy to prove a negative, of course, but with all the screaming liberals whining about the evil Bush Administration’s flagrant violations of suspected terrorists’ precious civil liberties, don’t you think that if there were more than 3, somebody would be reporting on it by now? The NYT ran a front page story on John McCain’s nonexistent affair with a lobbyist based on almost nothing. How much evidence do you really think they would require to go forward with a story on wide-scale waterboarding, if only one anonymous federal employee who probably didn’t vote for Bush would just step up and tell them such a thing existed?
January 17th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
The more I think about it, the more that “human decency” bit really pissed me off. On what fucking planet does any amount of human decency tell you whether torture does or does not work? Not whether we should forgo the practice even though it works, mind you, but whether we should hide our heads in the sand and pretend it doesn’t work? If it truly doesn’t, then giving it up costs nothing, and therefore requires no human decency at all; in that case, a mere desire not to waste one’s time would suffice. It’s only if you think torture does work (as you yourself seem to, having refused to admit being full of crap on that “obviously guilty” whose “obvious guilt” you deduce from torture-induced evidence that supposedly doesn’t prove anything, anyway), but choose to forgo it anyway on moral grounds, that the human decency issue comes into play.
January 18th, 2009 at 1:03 am
Xriq – You keep forgetting that libs think that feelings trump logic. And that anything the DNC and its media pimps write/say is TRUTH.
January 18th, 2009 at 2:53 am
“For the war, even the tiniest shred of evidence that it’s done more good than harm would go an awfully long way. If we’d have found meaningful connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 hijackers, for example, I’d have had some crow to eat. If we’d have found credible evidence that Hussein’s regime was giving material support to al-Qaeda, I’d have had a LOT of crow to eat.”tgirsch the terminal twit
I will send you some recipes for crow.
As usual you think refusing to admit a fact means it doesn’t exist.
January 18th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Xrlq:
Good thing I’m neither doing that nor asking anyone else to do so. You pretend as if these are questions that are somehow new and different thanks to the so-called GWOT, rather than things that have been around for most of human history.
Of course, it might help if I understood what YOU meant by “works.” You seem to be applying a standard by which if any valid piece of information is ever obtained using torture, then torture “works,” whether or not the information could have been obtained by other methods, and indeed, whether or not the torture even had any bearing at all on whether the information was given. By that standard, I suppose Enzyte “works,” too…
Take it up with your beloved military tribunal.
Nice false dilemma. I’d expect a lawyer to understand that being reasonably certain of something, and being able to prove it in a court of law — or even a military tribunal — is something else altogether. And, of course, you rule out option #3 — how we know he’s almost certainly guilty has nothing to do with what we learned when we tortured him, but may not be admissible in court for other reasons.
The “human decency” isn’t about whether or not torture works, it’s about whether or not you think it matters if it works. Human eugenics “works,” at least as well as you claim torture does, and yet I don’t see you defending or advocating for that — and with good reason, as far as I’m concerned. (Though maybe I’m wrong; maybe you think we should be pursuing that, too…)
But hey, let’s assume for the moment that torture does work, as you seem to believe it does. What ticking time bomb was found and defused because we tortured KSM and two others? How many human lives can you say, with even a modest degree of certainty, were saved as a result of it? Even if saving American lives is a sufficient justification for using torture, there’s still no evidence that I’m aware of that its use was so justified in this specific case. All you got was after-the-fact confessions, and no actionable intelligence to prevent future attacks.
January 18th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I should clarify. You seem to be 100% certain, but I am not, that “derived from” and “tainted by” are synonymous.
January 18th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Synonymous in the mind of TGirsch? Maybe not. Legally? Absolutely. Either the evidence in question is the fruit of the poisonous tree, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, it can’t be excluded on that basis. It’s really that simple.
I’ll respond to your other points later; this one really needs to be nailed down before we can even discuss the matter intelligently.
January 19th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Alternatively, perhaps you could provide an example of a situation where police may torture someone in captivity, then come across credible, highly probative evidence independently of that torture, and nevertheless have the evidence excluded from trial on the grounds that it is somehow “tainted by” the torture that did not produce it.
January 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Once again, you’re still ignoring the difference between being “almost certain,” and being able to prove it in a court of law / military tribunal. That certainty may have nothing whatsoever to do with the torture-induced confession or whatever, and may still not be admissible in a trial.
Of course, suppose you’re right, and suppose they did get the key piece of evidence via torture. In order to have that be admissible, they’d have to go before the court and tell the court that they could have obtained that key evidence by other means. In other words, they’d have to admit that the torture was unnecessary. I just don’t see them doing that.
I will add a caveat, however, and it has to do with what we mean by the term “works.” When I say that torture “doesn’t work,” I mean that it’s more likely to yield false results than true ones, and that it’s far less effective/reliable than other methods of interrogation. I stand by that claim, and I don’t see how the false dilemma you presented is consistent with that definition.
Has torture ever yielded some true piece of information? Probably. You might say almost certainly. That doesn’t mean that torture works, in the commonly-understood sense of the term, any more than homeopathic “medicines” work because sometimes people who take them report that they feel better after taking them.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I ignored nothing. Your original comment suggested that this guy is almost certainly guilty, but will be acquitted because the evidence against him is tainted by torture, not because it is insufficiently probative to sustain a conviction whether it’s admitted into evidence or not. If the latter is true, the torture is irrelevant.
The only way I can see torture preventing a conviction that would otherwise have occurred is if torture *did* work, and in fact prosecutors would have found the evidence anyway, but the court doesn’t believe that they would have, so they exclude it.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
All seems to hinge on your “homeopathy works” definition of “works,” then. 🙂
January 19th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
No, on yours. You’re the one who said the guy is almost certainly guilty, based on evidence you consider no more reliable than homeopathy. Huh?
January 20th, 2009 at 4:11 am
ok, tgirsch, you would be suprised to know how much I agree with “some” of your positions. especially the more humanitarian positions. I do diverge from you when you treat that “humaneness” requires us to give an automatic pass. But I am not satisfied that all prudent care has been taken in every case. And i am not one who thinks that having it “average out” is acceptable.
I find your position and xrlq’s both to be immature, naive,and self-serving. Even though they oppose
I admit, I lean away from X simply because I believe him to be dishonest, but that’s not relevant here. I hope I never let my opinion of the players influence my opinion of the facts. But here, we are not talking about facts, but our different readings of morality.
Of course, both of you find me…. well, I refuse to say that about myself. The problem? Both of you are wrong! NO!!!!! I don’t mean about me, I may well be an asshole. You’re both wrong because you delete or ignore the parts of truth that don’t please you to repeat and/or admit.
My advice, grow the fuck up.
January 20th, 2009 at 9:03 am
Xrlq:
Well, again, the idea that (A) the guy is almost certainly guilty, and (B) prosecution will be difficult because evidence is tainted by torture, comes from the convening authority of military tribunals, not from me.
straightarrow:
I think our positions probably aren’t too far off here. Even if we can’t agree whether torture is ever justifiable, I think we can agree that we can’t entrust the government with that decision. And I don’t think I’ve ever argued that “‘humaneness’ requires us to give an automatic pass.” I’ve only argued that there are certain lines that I can’t imagine justifiably crossing.
My advice, grow the fuck up.
*waves hand* After you, sir! 🙂
January 20th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
But you pass it along as fact, not as someone else’s opinion. Setting aside the scare quotes for the moment, there is no contradiction in noting that (1) some experts believe torture never produces useful or reliable evidence (and just to keep the terminology clear, stopped clocks are never “reliable,” nor is any method of evidence gathering that cannot be relied on to be right more often than Sylvia Browne) while (2) other experts worry that torture may be too effective, in that it produces genuinely reliable evidence quickly that probably would otherwise have been obtained through legitimate methods eventually, but the judge can’t be convinced of that. There is a huge contradiction, however, in presenting both theories as true, when as a matter of simple logic, there is no way they can be.
Another angle we haven’t discussed yet but should: if torture really doesn’t work on anyone except John McCain (he’s admitted in writing that it did work on him), why haven’t our enemies figured that out yet? I know they are evil, but do not believe they are stupid. Or is the PC view on torture similar to the PC view on guns, i.e., they never work when the good guys use them, but always magically find a way to work after all when the bad guys do?