The politics of torture and the sheer torture of politics:

The ominous part of the whole Abu Ghraib Affair is that back in the United States we are inevitably separating into pro and anti torture factions.
If Abraham Lincoln could just see us now!

This polarization process has been slowed and obscured somewhat by Nick Berg's horrific death by beheading in Iraq....but nonetheless battle lines are being drawn up.
There is that Imus in the Morning clown the bumptious Richard "Bo" Dietl and Senator James Imhofe (R. Oklahoma) both of whom find think torture stuff is jim-dandy and only as much as the scum deserves. Their only regrets are that the whole mess got found out.
***
The funny thing is, the pro-torture faction, bellicose patriots and loud apologists of the President to a man, are themselves at odds with the spirit of administration policy.
Bush "apologized" for the treatment of prisoners in Iraq and promised an investigation of the whole sordid mess.
Of the photos he said he was "horrified" and that these actions were not of the America "he knows".
The President's so called policy in Iraq, is to win Iraqi "hearts and minds" via various good works.
Ghoulish torture photos therefore undermine this policy.
The pro torture faction won't have anything to so with this goody-goody nonsense.
Yesterday, Senator Imhofe got the ball rolling, using a tried and true GOP play denouncing the so called liberal media's reaction to the torture and spewing hatred and venom towards "humanitarian do gooders".
This is an old trick designed to turn attention away from the mayhem perpetrated and instead focus on the vague undesirability of those who condemn said mayhem.
The late Spiro Agnew was the acknowledged master of this particular ploy.
***
Imhofe ranted on in this Agnewian vein to the effect that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were all terrorists murderers and crooks implying that they somehow deserved to be tortured.
Bo Dietl, said much the same on Imus today and was, if anything, even more preposterously belligerent.
So clearly the pro-torture faction's program is simple, the scum must be ruled by strength....be they liberals here in America or some Baathist paper-pusher picked up in a sweep.
The policy differences within the GOP couldn't be starker, Bush enunciates a soft line whilst Imhofe and Dietl scream for whips and punishment.
:)
I mean, clearly we are headed for a confrontation here, sooner or later the President's soft policy will get in the way of the movement conservatism's newfound taste for blood sports and sexual humiliation games.
***
To the extent that we have an "anti-torture" faction in the US, it is headed by such naive bleeding hearts as ex POW Senator John McCain and his senatorial colleague Lindsey Graham, himself a former Air Force Judge Advocate.
What good these men can do I don't know...it seems like the rest of the GOP is sublimating it's frustration with the occupation of Iraq into a gruesomely queer zest for sadistic interrogation techniques.

The fact that there are serious political playas out there, defending torture is itself a sign of the incremental decline in old time democratic values in the USA.


Sick
Demented
Typical