What's interesting to me about Kinsley's piece is that I'm certain he's what the Washington Post sees as their "liberal" voice, to balance out the really amazingly packed stable of extreme right wing columnists that include Michael Gerson, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will. Not to mention the other right wingers Jackson Diehl, and the editor Fred Hiatt, and then a raft of "centrist" conservatives like Broder, Applebaum, and on and on.

They "balance" this all out, in their view, I'm certain, by presenting Eugene Robinson and one or two other "liberals" including Michael Kinsley.

I don't suppose they're even in denial about it at this point, I mean you'd have to be publishing Chomsky and about a dozen others like him on a weekly basis to have any sort of balance to this crowd, considering that their writers include Bush's former chief speech writer, not one but two of the leading Neoconservative theorists, and then extremists like Krauthammer and the recently turned climate-change denier George Will.

In light of this, surely they know that they've just become a primarily right wing voice, bizarrely serving a hugely Democratic market in DC.

Being badly conceived and written is the least of the problems I have with Kinsley's piece, despite the fact that it's one of them. He's acting at this point basically as the Alan Colmes of the Washington Post.

I understood the hypocrisy of Reagan's pronouncements and the irony/sarcasm implicit in your piece. And I imagine most others did too, FWIW.

Trying to make any sense of and grapple seriously with what right wing extremists say is a fool's errand. Does anyone have any doubt that were they not defending the Bush administration that any of these people would be singing this tune? Just look at the extreme right's position on the Somalia pirate story: when hostages were already taken, were visibly in danger of being killed, then using deadly force against the perpetrators, who were visible and there was no doubt about their identity, was greeted by Rush Limbaugh and others as excessive, racist, you name it.

They did the same about Kosovo, when a President from the opposing party engaged in military action on a scale so small as to be microscopic compared to our invasion of Iraq. Which they later cheered.

During Democratic administrations, government action is invariably seen by the extreme right as Gestapo-like, overkill, jackbooted thuggery and all the rest of it. Unless it's being seen as limp-wristed submissiveness, in the case of actually speaking to disliked foriegn leaders rather than just tossing around cowboy slogans and readying the bombs.

In other words, it's disingenuous spinning, it has no center and no internal logic, except as a wholly partisan stance that will find fault with anything done by a non-right-wing administration. If that takes flipping from one stance ("They're Fascist thugs!") to its opposite ("They're conciliatory weaklings!) at the drop of a hat, for the extreme right that's a feature, not a bug.

That's not to say that all of this doesn't need to be countered, and repeated, and repeated again. It's just to say that if you get into logical sparring matches with the extreme right, which is to say most of the Republican party right now, which everyone except the Republicans themselves would agree is the case, don't be surprised that no headway will ever be made and it can drive you nuts if you try too hard.

Charles Krauthammer would be arguing precisely, exactly, the opposite were it a Democratic President and Vice President accused of ordering torture. Make no mistake about that for a second.

Greenwald is not saying that Reagan was a leftist, he's saying that Kruathammer is doing so.

By Krauthammer's criteria, Reagan would be a leftist.

Was the point.

Actually Reagan was a bit of a leftist as a young man, it seems to have all changed when he met Nancy. But that's another story.

The discussion of ends justifying the means is utterly ridiculous.

Sadaam Hussein used to torture children to extract confessions or other information from their fathers watching. Do any of you really think that the reason that we found that so repugnant, immoral, and loathsome is because "the information he was trying to get wasn't essential"?

I'm sure to him it was. He probably though it was absolutely essential to his survival, at the time, whatever information he was so determined to extract.

So those of you debating that it all depends on "the ends" would say that this was okay also, as long as the information being sought was deemed by the torturer to be important enough?

I've never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. And you can be absolutely certain that were a Democratic President being accused of this, Krauthammer and the rest of them would be arguing the same as I am right now. Have no doubt.

We say that certain things are against our laws, our moral codes, and we don't do them. No matter what. We don't get into these sick scenario building excercises about when to use the most vile and loathsome techniques, we just don't use them.

That's what our laws say too.

At least in terms of sheer fantasy.

Imagine one of the worst skeletons in your closet coming out and sitting next to you on the bench.

Just for the look on his face alone, it's almost worth taking seriously.

"Fiddly"

"Dell charge more than $150 for a replacement battery"

Dell do?

I spent my year living in London constantly amused and often truly, if temporarily, baffled by billboards like "Safeway think that you should save money" or "LLoyds bank have your best interest in mind" and so on.

One of the more interesting of the ways that we're "separated by our common language".

I have a friend there who was even nicknamed "fiddly".