Doing The Moral Limbo: How Low Will They Go?

[Totally Committed]

Doing The Moral Limbo

This is hardly the first time that the American political right (whichever party it inhabited at the time) has argued for casting off such inconvenient notions as justice, freedom, democracy or the rule of law because they quavered with fear at external threats. Nor will it be the last. But every time history has judged them wrong, and this time will be no different.

by *Paul Waldman
September 20, 2006

Before we hail Colin Powell, John McCain, Lindsay Graham and their Republican colleagues as some kind of heroes of liberty for standing up to President Bush’s proposals for interrogating terrorist suspects, let’s recall what their brave position on this issue is: The United States of America shouldn’t torture people. It is a testament to how ethically diseased today’s GOP—those guardians of “moral values,” remember—has become that this is a minority position within their party.

Bush’s September 15 soliloquy on “flawed logic”—a topic he knows something about—was prompted by the willingness of the former secretary of state and the two prominent Republican senators (as well as at least six other Republican senators and another former secretary of state) to oppose him on a matter of national security. “If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic. I simply can't accept that,” Bush said. “It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.” In other words, if you object to kangaroo courts and the use of “alternative interrogation methods,” you must think we’re no better than terrorists, a logical double-twisting back flip worthy of Greg Louganis.

Bush and most of his followers continue to dance their moral limbo, their backs arched as they descend lower every time the chorus begins again. They would turn America into a country that tortures prisoners on the off chance that doing so might yield some useful information (even though it almost never does). They excused the abuse of innocent Iraqis and Afghans in detention facilities on the grounds that, well, at least our soldiers didn’t behead anyone. They enthusiastically embrace the administration’s argument that the president can pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore, simply because he’s the commander in chief. Call me crazy, but I doubt that if the president making that argument was Bill Clinton, they’d feel quite the same way. And they now rally around Bush’s effort to set up modern star chambers in which people can be tried, convicted and eventually executed without ever being permitted to see the evidence against them.

The justification is always that we’re dealing with terrorists, who are really, really bad people. So why should they deserve due process? The answer that the twisted conservative mind seems incapable of grasping is that a nation committed to liberty, justice and the rule of law does not have one set of procedures for nice people and another set for mean people. It sets up procedures that reflect its values. That’s called “principle,” and it is something that Bush’s supporters don’t talk much about these days. For them it is always about good guys and bad guys, and if we’re dealing with bad guys, then nothing we do can be wrong. Their spinning has grown so desperate that any appreciation of even the most rudimentary facts of history has, from the sheer centrifugal force, flown off from their brains.

Entire Article:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/20/doing_the_moral_limbo.php

*Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, just released by John Wiley & Sons.

TC

[Freedom_from_Chains]

1. They have already gone lower than what I thought was possible

Just because you pissed your pants on 9-11 doesn't mean I have to give up my rights.

[Totally Committed]

2. Giving up our rights is one thing, indeed.......

But, I am so ashamed at what this governmment is doing to the rest of the world in our name! Who would ever have thought we'd have a President of the United States telling us that torturing people is an imperative? --- And, trying to have crimes he committed in waging an illegal war retroactively made lawful???

I weep for this country!

TC