Digby made an insightful point the other day about how Adam Smith was a moral philospher who believed in capitalism and a democratic took, while Ayn Rand thought of capitalism as a moral philosophy which exalted unbridled greed and selfishness as the ultimate virtue; and this is why the "achievers" who crashed the economy are able rationalize privatizing their profits at and socializing their costs onto the "parasites".

I borrowed her Rand quote and made the contrast sharper and more obvious:

http://dailydoubt.blogspot.com/2009/03/smith-vs-rand-redux.html

"All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book 3, Chapter IV

"The moral purpose of a man’s life is the achievement of his own happiness. This does not mean that he is indifferent to all men, that human life is of no value to him and that he has no reason to help others in an emergency. But it does mean that he does not subordinate his life to the welfare of others, that he does not sacrifice himself to their needs, that the relief of their suffering is not his primary concern, that any help he gives is an exception, not a rule, an act of generosity, not of moral duty, that it is marginal and incidental—as disasters are marginal and incidental in the course of human existence—and that values, not disasters, are the goal, the first concern and the motive power of his life." - Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

Or if anyone wants the most succint evidence possible that Rand's absolutist ideology can used to rationalize just about anything, here's Rand answering a question about the displacement/elimination of Native Americans as a result of Old World colonization after an address at West Point, March 6, 1974.

[The Native Americans] didn't have any rights to the land and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using.... What was it they were fighting for, if they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or maybe a few caves above it. Any white person who brought the element of civilization had the right to take over this continent.

"believed in capitalism as a democratic tool" that should have read

I've got a couple of Kevin Phillips from the early/mid 90s that I read a few years ago. In them he observed that the US gov't would be run into massive debt because their is a financial political elite that profits from doing so.

He's been calling this financial mercantilism, and I point this out because Phillips isn't exactly a left-winger, either.

http://www.bad-money.com/excerpt

"...Mark Danner's article demonstrating the similarities between standard Soviet torture techniques"

This was also apparent in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side. Forced sleep deprivation and standing for long periods of time were particular favorites of the Soviets. The memo that Rumsfield signed off on, the one that is one of the key reasons why that Spanish court is opening a criminal case, is the one where he made the sickening joke about how he stands for hours a day.

In other news, I just heard a caller to the Rush Limbaugh show. The caller was a self-identified veteran and a Republican who voted for McCain. He told Limbaugh that McCain lost because of Limbaugh's disgusting support for torture, calling Limbaugh a "brainwashed Nazi." Limbaugh responded that he doesn't know of anyone having died from torture (in other words, no one has died from torture) and that the caller is not really a Republican.