These "outrageous Republicans" go beyond that honorific -- to despicable. The golden rule surely does not permit torture. With this group of s***s, the United States has left the table of the minimally mannered. They have become a Hobbesian gang of brutes. Some of these brutes have already been listed (gunner and shrubs). Their enablers must not be forgotten:
1. David Addington, Cheney's special lawyer and new chief of staff. The author of most of shrub's "signing statements", these unconstitutional instruments of fiction that attempt to overrule the laws of the land. He wrote the Christmas note that would allow Bush to torture.
2. Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general and shrub's special lawyer that would implement every wish of his master. The man who tried to extract the signature of a man, John Ashcroft, on an extreme sick bed, to permit abhorrent practices, a man whose job he would soon have.
3. John Woo, a former lawyer within the Justice [sic] Department that would manufacture legal opinions allowing all power to the Leviathan.
4. The nine senators who approved torture:
- Wayne Allard - Colorado
- Kit Bond *- Missouri
- Tom Coburn - Oklahoma
- Thad Cochran - Mississippi
- John Cornyn† - Texas
- James Inhofe - Oklahoma
- Pat Roberts - Kansas
- Jeff Sessions - Alabama
- Ted Stevens - Alaska
5b. Those other candidates who seemed to agree: Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Thompson and the rest who did not speak against it (all but McCain, the one who attempted to forbad torture, but still carries water for shrubs).
McCain had been tortured as a prisoner of war in Viet Nam, a place where most Republicans assiduously avoided by all measures. He saw the evil, he was the object of that evil, he knows it is of no good and does no good. He also knows that fellow serviceman of his nation may suffer. If America did not torture, then those who capture americans could say, "they would not do this to us". Now they know, that, yes America does do that and maybe worse. America has been made into the image of georgebushjr and that artister is Dick Cheney.
This administration has created many new national executive agencies and posts, perhaps they can bring back an old english position. Elizabeth Tudor (r.1558-1603), who has been, and still is, the beneficiary of creative and effective propaganda, had the office of official torturer. That position was held with great relish by Richard Topcliffe, a man who prided himself as one of the queen's lovers and a most fervent protestant. Perhaps gwbjr can make a recess appointment.
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*Postscriptum: broadcast on television 11 December 2007:
GWEN IFILL: Do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?
SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used.
† Postscriptum: 21 January 2009. Cornyn is holding up, for an additional week, the committee hearing vote on Eric Holder as Attorney-General. Cornyn is upset, that, Holder is against torture: in Cornyn’s judicial opinion (he was a judge in Tejas), torture is fine when done for the government, or by the government, and simulation of drowning, a.k.a. chinese water torture, water cure, waterboarding, is not to be called torture. On the 15th of January, he posed hypothetical questions, that were evaluated by Senator Richard Durbin as, “And I understand Senator Cornyn’s questions. They are questions that anyone who watches Jack Bauer on “24″ would ask.” Cornyn also obstructed, for a day Hillary Clinton’s appointment, and he is still obstructing the seating of Senator Alan Franken.
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