Not only is following the law irrelevant to this defender of criminals, Boehner finally used the 'T' word his allies have been tying themselves into verbal pretzels to avoid.
Torture is illegal under American law and international treaties signed by the United States, as well as ALL standards of decency. The techniques Boehner rightly identifies as torture were used by Communist regimes to wring false confessions out of innocent people.
Now comrade Boehner explicitly adopts the Leninist principle "The ends justifies the means."
Believe it or not, after my initial political awakening in the early 60s, I became a conservative, Goldwater style. That was back when pterodactyls still occasionally were seen in the Kansas skies.
A lot has happened since those days, but until the Bushites I still respected conservatives on two issues: the had long argued that the Constitution and rule of law should trump short term political gain. Most liberals had, on balance, a rather looser and potentially more worrisome approach.
Secondly, they reminded everyone the ends did not justify the means. Basic principles of right and wrong took precedence over winning at all costs. To prove the point, conservatives pointed to the horrors of Communist rule, where great crimes were committed in the name of future great gains.
Even as I came to disagree with conservatives on most other points, I still respected them for their sense of ethics, and their reminding the often too pragmatic liberals that the means we used to achieve our ends were a part of the ends themselves.
No more. As a movement, conservatives like the communists before them, subordinate everything, law, constitution, decency itself, to the over-arching goal of winning. Am I too harsh? I predict almost no significant conservative criticism of comrade Boehner. I will be delighted if he is roundly condemned, and also surprised.
Of course they say they are different. But not in the essentials. Like the communists, the God they really worship is power. They just use different incantations to try and serve it.
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Gus, Chris has a point about a registered user function. Is there any way we can get that in place? Whether or not Mike is a troll isn't the point. Trolls ARE out there and sooner or later they're going to find and target this blog to play "Poke the Pagans".
I have little control over who appears here. I do have power to delete the garbage.
I get occasional requests to approve a post. They have always been acceptable. I even got an email asking me to approve one of my own replies! So the system is not optimal.
And like many of you, I hates the captcha! (I also have no access to the emails of people who post here - so if you want to connect with me do so on facebook.)
But at least these methods keep us from being inundated with garbage.
I have occasionally removed posts, and early in my Beliefnet involvement some Watcher removed some eminently removable posts. So garbage and dreck will not be up here long. But I deliberately error on the side of permissiveness, in the chance that someone might be sincere but not very good at expressing themselves. Then I give them a warning if they persist. Then I delete.
One of the most unpleasant things about blogging is having to deal with people so crabbed and bitter that they cannot or will not engage in good faith dialogue. For many years this was on the political and religious right, but now it's reappearing on the political left and will in time appear on the religious left at as well.
I think my favorite atheistic sci fi author, David Brin, has it about right - some people get addicted to the rush of self-righteousness, and it is that rush they seek, rather than genuine communication. He wrote a really fascinating and short piece on this issue: http://www.davidbrin.com/addiction.htm
It's been on the Left in the specter of political correctness for a long time. Don't agree with them, then you are a racist, sexist homophobe -- even if none of those are the topic. And heaven help you if it IS your topic. WIth the conservatives, the issue is some sort of vague "un-Americanism" that doesn't seem to actually mean anything in particular. It also tends to be vaguely theistic, though the theology is also a bit fuzzy. Ignorance is the primary driver of intolerance among conservatives. A conservative's self-righteousness is in a sense more primitive, too. But on the Left, the self-righteous intolerance comes about from their egalitarianism. In the end, both are intolerant of growth, evolution, and excellence.
I had a professor once who proclaimed that the only thing she didn't tolerate was intolerance. I get that. It's why I don't have a lot of tolerance for conservatives or the Left/liberals in this country. Neither actually respect diversity (after all, by definition egalitarianism hates diversity).
Okay Troy, so in a nutshell what's your point? That everything has to be tolerated by everyone in order for "growth, evolution and excellence" to occur? Yet you don't tolerate conservatives or liberals. Doesn't that make you intolerant? Wouldn't that upset your professor? Aren't intolerant conservatives and liberals *part* of the diversity in this country?
Just askin' :)
Well, it's more than just intolerance I don't much tolerate. I also don't tolerate violations of the rule of law, initiation of coercion, and violations of liberty. Arbitrary uses of power, in other words. Thus my intolerance for the Left and the Right in equal measure, as they are equal violators.
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