Torture

The blogosphere is poring over the torture documents released by Obama yesterday, so you don't need yet another left-wing pansy like myself bloviating about how evil Bush et al were. One might say that point is inarguable.

Another way to look at it may be to believe that Bush really DID think he was doing the right thing in the name of protecting the country. He didn't THINK he was being evil, he thought he was doing what was necessary in what he thought were extreme circumstances. He allowed himself to believe the consequences were so dire that all bets were off re: following rules or civil rights et al. Think of him as the clueless, malleable white defendant in A Few Good Men.

Which, while acknowledging his best of intentions and lack of "pure evil," reminds us once again that here was a guy who was not smart enough to know that what he was doing was wrong (and, as bad, completely ineffective), and surrounded himself with people that agreed with him, no matter what. Our voting in a guy "like us" to "share a beer with" because he so proudly lacked Al Gore's intellectual elitism led us to have someone in charge who fell for things like "kicking ass!" and "America is never wrong." We elected a guy who honestly thought that the harder you tortured someone, the more likely he was to spout out important information...even if he himself wasn't privy to any information. This does not necessarily mark a man as "evil;" but it does mark him as having run out of ideas. Which voters might wanna think about next time the GOP tries to impress us with their determined idiocy; one candidate trying to show us he is more anti-intellectual than the last. Sometimes being stupid may be as dangerous as being "evil."