The Torture Party

Thanks to President Cheney and Co-Presidente Bush, and the emasculating lock-step loyalty the Republican Party leaders feel they have to maintain with their crime-ridden Administration, every GOP candidate on stage at Tuesday night's South Carolina debate except for John McCain came out proudly for torture as an American military interrogation policy, reversing two hundred thirty years of U.S. policy, reinforcing our newly minted image as villains to the world, and laying bare the willful self-bankrupting of morality in hysterical pursuit of desperate political advantage.

Check out this terrifying segment, commencing with a hypothetical concoction that plays like a plug for Fox's own 24 series, how odd considering they were co-sponsors broadcasting the debate. The undead Brit Hume intones that "the questions in this round with be predicated on a fictional but we think plausible" multiple shopping mall bombed terrorism on U.S. soil scenario.

That's right; this supposedly serious GOP debate descends into a network consumer products spin-off product -- 24: The Party Game.

McCain leads off the question of how hard much you'll unleash your thug class in Guantanamo, like that prison has always been a standard institution of our country, like the question isn't how you get the information, it's just how quickly and completely you are willing to shed your scruples. As a criteria for President, no less. As criteria for manliness, in some berserk Sin City America 2007.

McCain, to his credit and an absolutely silent response in the hall, lays out a simple and moral opposition to torture:

"When I was in Vietnam one of the things that sustained us as we underwent torture ourselves was the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them.

How odd that suddenly no soldier can be sure of this from his government. To hear these commandantettes speak, no soldier could doubt that somewhere else we are torturing a suspected enemy. Think of our three soldiers still held in an unknown location by Al Queda. Now that we're a torturing country, what's to hold any of these three together when their thumbs are shoved under the screws?

Giuliani, Tancredo and Romney all handle their Dantesque embrace of fascism with different flavors. Former mayor Rudy goes for repressing the thought, giving carte blanche to whatever thugs and turning back to the dinner party as if nothing is happen, ignore the screams in the cellar:

In the hypothetical that you gave me, which assumes that we know there is going to be another attack and these people know about it, I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they can think of. Shouldn’t be torture, but every method they can think of.

Nicely equivocated, revealing an empty vessel of a man. At least Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) goes for the crazy:

You say that nuclear devices have gone off in the United States, more are planned, and we are wondering about whether waterboarding would a bad thing to do? I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.

Fox must love this. Another plug! Unsolicited!

But the medal for most brazenly hollow, a man who's sole driving ambition appears to be the picture in Webster's when you look up the word "pandering," is moral midget former Governor Mitt Romney:

Now you said the person's going to be at Guantanamo. I'm glad they're at Guantanamo. I don't want them on our soil, I want them on Guantanamo where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil. I don't want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we oughtta double Guantanamo.

Double Guantanamo. To the most wildly enthusiastic applause of the night. It even sounds rehearsed, his poor, doomed soul.

And here Mitt is explaining why we have a gulag of ex-Soviet republics we have sent prisoners through in hiding. Because to him and his kind Guantanamo isn't America, it's a kind of way station America. It's a protectorate, a Guam, a place that we don't have to behave morally because he's demarcating it as a twilight zone of American moral principle. Oh, it's the American military operating on American-owned soil. But you don't get your right to legal representation there, you don't get treated like a citizen even if you are one. You are in Bush's, Cheney's and, he can almost taste it, Romney-directed thugland.

Double Guantanamo. Did he intend for that moniker to stick? Is it a badge he hopes to ride to the election?

Judging by the response of the GOP stalwarts and elites in the room, they want to be the Torture Party. They've already sold their soles, a Tony Soprano breaking out in every one of them. Their sense of their own rightness is their new religion, and it justifies inflicting anything on another human, guilty upon capture, if they're just dropped in the twilight zone and the fiction is allowed to usurp true reality.

Here's the scoop: the ends don't automatically justify the means. They didn't for Nixon with Watergate and don't for George Bush or Dick Cheney when they willfully deceived America into their misbegotten war. The means themselves quickly metastasize into Original Sin, the shit you can't wipe off your shoe, no matter how hard you try to mask the stink with misleading, self-hypnotizing rhetoric.

McCain is right. Only when you actually have the moral high ground through your actions, not your exceptionalism, can you ever find peace, no matter what you might be forced to endure. America won't be at peace with itself until these men and their medieval ways are banished to the dustbin of history.

The alternative can only be the decline and fall of our very own civilization.