HRC and HRC

I feared there had to be a catch – and there is. The Human Rights Campaign may have rigged that candidates’ report-card to cater to the Clinton campaign:

Your criticism of HRC and HRC omitted one very important piece of evidence regards to their mutual fellatio. They have re-worded "Repeal of DOMA" into several different categories: 1. Domestic Partner Benefits for Federal Employees, 2. Equal Tax Treatment for Same Sex Couples, 3. Access to Survivor Benefits, 4. Coverage under FMLA, 5. Federal Benefits for Same-Sex Couples, 6. Federal Recognition of State Level Same Sex Unions. All this because Edwards and Obama are for the repeal of DOMA but Hillary isn’t!

I’ll leave it to you to guess why while one HRC keeps ignoring the fact that civil marriage is available in Massachusetts, the other HRC is opposed to repealing the law that allows for federal recognition of those marriages.

You have to double-check everything that comes out of an organization like the Human Rights/Hillary Clinton Campaign. There’s always an agenda. And it usually isn’t gay rights. (By the way, I don’t think "mutual fellatio" is strictly speaking possible between Clinton and HRC. On either side.)

A Definition of Evil

The issue of presidentially authorized torture is beginning to permeate the MSM. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

The embarrassing truth for me, as I read Lagouranis’ book, is that I never saw him as a torturer.

He never used a cattle prod on anybody, never personally beat anybody or condoned a beating, never resorted to waterboarding – the infamous technique, said to be used by the CIA, during which a victim is made to feel like he is drowning.

Lagouranis’ methods were usually technically legalc- making a prisoner stand for long periods of time, for example, or forcing him into a "stress position," such as making him put his back against a wall and bend his legs, as if sitting without a chair.

In the last six years, I’ve probably read dozens of news stories about the debate over acceptable interrogation techniques. And at some point along the line, I apparently bought in to the Pentagon’s disturbing mind-set that "torture" is a matter of what’s legal, not what’s moral.

At the California Clipper, that’s what I told Lagouranis: "I don’t think of you as a torturer."

We had been sitting in the front window of the bar, looking out on California Avenue, talking in normal voices. But now his voice rose. "If you keep a man awake for a month, that’s torture," he said, standing up. "If you subject a man to hypothermia, that’s torture. If you keep him on his knees off and on for a month, that’s torture."

"If you don’t include torturing helpless prisoners in your definition of evil … your definition of evil is meaningless."

More here.

Deconstructing Hiatt

Matt has a go:

In essence, [Fred] Hiatt is under assault from straw men of his own devising. Having mischaracterized the opponents of the Bush foreign policy, he’s now confronted with what such opponents actually think and concluded that they don’t oppose Bush’s policy at all. But there’s obviously a huge difference between the Bush/Romney approach of defining the United States as locked in endless combat with an amorphous and endlessly-growing set of frightening Muslims and saying you’re going to dedicate serious energy to focusing on and targeting al-Qaeda. These aren’t just different things, they’re opposing sentiments.

Pure Reihan

I don’t know anyone else who can write a sincere sentence like this one:

It’s easy to imagine (and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this) how we can use IP reform to revive free trade and what Lawrence Lessig calls "free culture" in a manner that is congenial to recognizably conservative ends, and that can build a coalition with new liberals interested in participatory culture and global development.

Too statist, though.