Digby on the cable news treatment of "the torture debate":
We are in big trouble when torture becomes just another political football. It's the kind of thing that turns powerful empires into pariah nations. Why anyone thinks it's good for America for the world to perceive us as violent, pants wetting, panic artists who could start WWIII at the least sign of threat is beyond me. I certainly don't feel safer.
Somehow a moral and legal absolute has been reshaped into something debatable.
All of the rationalizations by the Cheney torture people remind me of the pro-slavery fire eaters who argued that "slavery helps the economy!" and we need to maintain slavery or else we're all doomed! It shouldn't have mattered, though. Slavery was wrong, irrespective of the so-called economic upside. Torture is wrong, irrespective of the so-called "national security" upside.