This will confuse the conservatives so much! Hannity, your hero was a leftie! Bwhahaha!
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/01/shifts/Glenn Greenwald
Friday May 1, 2009 07:39 EDT
Ronald Reagan: vengeful, score-settling, Hard Left ideologue
snip//
The views that Ronald Reagan not only advocated, but signed a treaty compelling the U.S. to adhere to, are ones that are now -- in the view of our dominant media narrative -- the hallmarks of The Hard Left: torture is never justified; there are "no exceptional circumstances" justifying it; it must be declared to be a serious criminal offense ; and -- most of all -- the U.S., as Ronald Regan put it, "is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution." Reagan's explicit view that the concept of "universal jurisdiction" permits signatory nations (such as Spain) to prosecute torturers from other countries (such as the U.S.) is now considered so fringe that it's almost impossible to find someone in mainstream American debates willing to advocate it.
If you now believe about torture and prosecutions exactly what Ronald Reagan advocated in 1988 -- or what Israel today advocates -- then, according to our establishment narrative, you are, by definition, a member of the Hard Left. And nobody who believes what Reagan advocated could possibly, in Krauthammer's words today, be entrusted with national security decisions. We've gone from Reagan's "no exceptional circumstances whatsoever . . . may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "Each State Party is required [] to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory" to the moral depravity of the Charles Krauthammers' explicit endorsement of torture and the virtually unanimous view of political and media elites that advocating criminal prosecutions for those who torture is confined to the vengeful, leftist masses.
It's certainly true, of course, that Ronald Reagan was very pre-9/11, but the concept of uniquely scary Islamic Terrorists was hardly unknown. Our client-tyrant in Iran was overthrown by them in 1979; we funded and supported them in Afghanistan in the early 1980s; U.S. Marines occupying Lebanon were attacked by them in 1982; Jewish community centers in Argentina were exploded by them in 1984; and Reagan himself invoked their Grave Threat in order to justify the American bombing of Libya in 1986 and the killing of the adopted infant daughter of its leader. We were bombing, occupying, interfering in and trying to control Muslim countries way back then, too. Yet even with all those Islamic Terrorists running around, Reagan insisted that torture could never be justified under any circumstances and that those who do it must be criminally prosecuted.
It's certainly true that Reagan, like most leaders, regularly violated the principles he espoused and sought to impose on others, but still, there is an important difference between (a) affirming core principles of the civilized world but then violating them and (b) explicitly rejecting those principles. Doing (a) makes you a hypocrite; doing (b) makes you a morally depraved barbarian. We're now a country where the leading "intellectuals" of the conservative movement expressly advocate torture on the pages of The Washington Post, and where most of the political and media class mocks as Far Leftism what Ronald Reagan explicitly advocated and bound the U.S. by treaty to do: namely, "prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution."
It's literally true that if you say today verbatim what Ronald Reagan said in 1988 about torture and the need to prosecute those who do it, then you are immediately and by definition a rabid score-settler from the Hard Left who is unfit to be trusted with national security decisions. Conversely, the views that Reagan vehemently rejected by words and by treaty -- that torture can be justified in some circumstances; that torturers should be shielded from prosecution; that other countries have no right to prosecute the torturers from other countries under "universal jurisdiction" -- are now not merely acceptable, but are required views in order to be not only a conservative, but to be a centrist. That's how severely the political spectrum and our elite consensus on these questions have shifted -- descended -- even from the time of the right-wing Reagan era when American exceptionalism and military aggression thrived.
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