Category: The Dish

You will notice the Bushies’ defensiveness and smears. As the call to rescue the GOP from big government at home and militaristic belligerence abroad resonates, especially with the next generation, you will hear Paul described as "nutty" and anti-Semitic and fringe and marginal and on and on. A classic anti-Paul post can be found on Powerline, the pro-torture, more-war-please Cheney faction of the blogosphere. Money quote:

Republicans should respond to voters who find Ron Paul appealing with a cold shoulder.

They don’t even want the voters and money that Paul is bringing into the GOP – because their power – and the big spending, war-mongering authoritarianism they favor – is threatened by this revival of grass roots conservatism. What I find energizing is how Paul has managed to talk many on the "left" into appreciating the benefits of smaller government and limiting executive power. What they now share with the paleocons and the crunchy cons and the conservatives of doubt is a resistance to and skepticism of the imperial impulse to control countries we do not understand and to indefinitely occupy whole regions of the world to defend ourselves against an enemy that knows no geographical boundaries. Here’s Greenwald today, emblematic of the way in which Paul has brought traditional conservative ideas into constituencies once reflexively hostile:

Individuals who historically may not have been attracted to "limited-government" rhetoric and all of the specifics it traditionally entails may find that ideal necessary now after six years of endless expansions of intrusive federal government power.

Regardless of one’s ideology, there is simply no denying certain attributes of Paul’s campaign which are highly laudable. There have been few serious campaigns that are more substantive — just purely focused on analyzing and solving the most vital political issues. There have been few candidates who more steadfastly avoid superficial gimmicks, cynical stunts, and manipulative tactics. There have been few candidates who espouse a more coherent, thoughtful, consistent ideology of politics, grounded in genuine convictions and crystal clear political values.

The fundamental realities of this election are two: we are in a war in Iraq that was clearly a mistake and that will be very hard to disentangle from; the American people overwhelmingly think we are on the wrong track both at home and abroad. There are only two candidates who effectively respond to this desire for change of direction abroad and repair at home. They are Barack Obama for the Democrats and Ron Paul for the Republicans. The voters most engaged with this campaign so far – as measured by fundraising and enthusiasm – are clearly favoring these two change agents. The question is simply whether a broader public will follow, or whether they will fall for the formica candidacies of Romney and Clinton or the neo-fascist option in Giuliani.

Know hope. America isn’t finished yet.

(Photo: Eric Thayer/Getty.)

I wrote a post on the Club For Growth and its report card on pork. You can read the summary here. I read the table wrong and it made my conclusions moot. It was up for a few minutes and then I realized I was wrong. So I took it down.  Apologies. This shit is live.

The Little Venice district in the Green Zone has some spectacular views.

"Ask about the candidates’ values.  Values matters.  And if candidates distort their lives or claim supporters they don’t have or achievements they didn’t do, MSM should call them on it.  What candidates say and do and said and did, are legitimate subjects for the political mill.  But demanding that they debate theology is agenda journalism at work –the sort designed to mock and distort, not illuminate and clarify.

But leave questions about theology –about revelation– out of politics," – Hugh Hewitt, today.

"If you know a Roman Catholic bishop or priest, please pass this along to him with a request for a response. If they don’t mind, ask them to copy me on the response at hhewitt@hughhewitt.com.

John Kerry is the second most visible American right now, and the most visible self-identified Roman Catholic in the country. The most influential newspaper in the world, the New York Times, reported on Tuesday that Kerry had issued the equivalent of a new catechism for the Roman Catholic Church. … The New York Times helpfully added that "Mr. Kerry apparently meant John XXIII, as there is no Pius XXIII." Too bad the paper couldn’t explain the rest of Kerry’s absurd statement, or add more detail to the new Kerry Catechism of Convenient Catholicism.

It will be interesting to see if the hierarchy of the American Roman Catholic Church allows this statement to go uncontradicted. If what Kerry says is true, then the Church really doesn’t care if its members advocate for wide-ranging abortion rights and receive Holy Communion, despite the bishop of St. Louis’ instruction to Kerry to refrain from the sacrament on that bishop’s turf.

I am not familiar with those documents of Vatican II to which Kerry refers, and would appreciate direction to them. Perhaps they are in the small volume of works by Pope Pius XXIII," – Hugh Hewitt, April 7, 2004.

A large majority believes the bleeding obvious. A smaller majority thinks the US should not torture. My own view at this point is that the Congress should debate whether to remain a party to the Geneva Conventions or not. We can withdraw from treaties if we want to. So let’s debate it, shall we? And let the Congress decide, as it is constitutionally empowered to do.

Tobago, 12.30 pm.

A reader writes:

Wow, very disturbing, even for JPod.  As I read his full post, two thoughts occurred to me.

First, he very much wants to draw a bright, bold line between mental and physical injury.  But that’s hopeless, since the psyche is in fact contained within a physical object – the brain.  If you monitored the brain while someone was undergoing some sort of psychological stress, you’d easily be able to measure physical effects.  Why would those effects not count?  How is passing a painful but non-skin-damaging current through the body any different from waterboarding from that perspective?  In both cases, the interrogator is causing the body to send severe distress signals to the brain, where they are experienced as agony.  Again, what the hell is the difference?

Second, I’d be interested to hear JPod’s answer to a hypothetical situation.  Let’s say that several years into the future, virtual reality technology takes off, and we arrive at the point where, instead of a primitive "physical" interrogation, we can simply attach a device to a detainee’s head and have that person experience the most brutal torture practices imaginable, all without even a tiny bit of "physical" injury.  Is that torture?  Should it be allowed?  If so, should there be any limits?   Why or why not?

It’s disgusting that we’re even having this debate.

Even more unnerving is that this debate is irrelevant. Bush and Cheney believe that they have a constitutional right to ignore the law, waive the Geneva Conventions, and authorize anything – including techniques that not even John Podhoretz (I hope) would deem non-torture, if they so wish. Here is John Yoo, a respectable member of the Republican establishment, in a debate on what the president can legally do with any person he seizes and deems, with no due process, an "enemy combatant":

Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that…

"No treaty." The president can do anything to anyone if he "thinks he needs to do that …"

A $4.3 million haul in 24 hours. Good enough to rattle Frum. Frum tries to belittle the achievement by comparing it to Ralph Nader’s $8 million fundraising in 2000. But over half that in mere hours? The Ron Paul phenomenon is real. The Christianists and neocons will decry it because it affects their power over the GOP. And because when a conservative stands for freedom again, it resonates and threatens them. Congrats, Congressmen – and everyone who is pulling for him. Whatever happens in this race, Paul’s candidacy has already provided a focus for all of those conservatives who despise the big-spending, unchecked executive, busy-body, Christianist wing of the GOP. And all those liberals who know that a new politics – centered around individual freedom and global peace – needs to be born.

(Photo: Gabirel Bouys/AFP/Getty.)

He concedes that he was factually wrong:

It is true that the law speaks of the “threatened infliction” of “severe physical pain and suffering.” But this is an extraordinarily broad phrase that could indicate that a nine-year-old bully who terrifies another kid on the playground by threatening to rip his arm off is guilty of torture.

Such statute language does not clarify; it muddies, as legal language often muddies. If someone says, “I am going to kill you,” and by so doing causes fear in the person to whom he says it, is that torture? Clearly not, though the fear experienced by the person might be severe.

Actually: with a couple of preconditions, the answer to this last question is clearly yes. The legal language does not muddy. It only muddies if you are trying to find loopholes around torture rather than reading the clear and broad interdiction of such practices by officials of any government.

If a government representative has another person completely in his control and threatens him with being killed – what is known as a "mock execution" – yes, it would be regarded as torture, as a violation of the Geneva Conventions and thus illegal, and unconstitutional, and subject to war crime prosecution. If, for example, you are a government official or soldier, blindfold a prisoner, hold an unloaded gun at their temple, tell them you are going to shoot them, and then don’t, it’s still torture. They’re physically unharmed – but it’s a war crime nonetheless. It’s severe mental suffering, used to extract a confession (usually false). That’s the definition of torture. Ditto with waterboarding, where the terror of forcing someone to drown, simulating the moments before death, and then rescuing them at the last moment and repeating – is unequivocally an act of torture. It is such an act of torture that prisoners routinely beg for mercy and will tell you anything – including, of course, untruths – to stop it. And if it were done to an American soldier, JPod would call it torture, as the law clearly does. But we are supposed to believe the blog postings of Podhoretz over the convictions of John McCain on the matter. The pretension would be funny were it not so disgusting.

The truth is that the law and the Conventions were indeed written broadly and their language is sweeping. But it is not unclear. And it is the law. It is just that the authors of the law and the Conventions never dreamed that one day, the president of the United States would be attempting to evade the plain interdiction of torture under US law, and twisting the Constitution and the English language to do so. Nor would they ever have believed that a vice-president of the United States, when referring to such torture, would not even wrestle with any moral or legal questions but regard the matter as a "no-brainer", and toss the question off as if he were speaking of the weather.

But that is where we are.

Greg Mankiw unpacks them.