And it's no wonder! Look what we learned! In one post, Joan answered a concerned reader's question by actually admitting she would have let 3,000 Americans die on 9/11 rather than ruining a terrorist's day with the threat of drowning.

READER MIKES PACE ASKED HER: "What if we could have tortured one individual and uncovered the 9/11 plot? Do you (Joan) believe it is ethically permissible to torture one person to save the lives of over 3000?

JOAN'S RESPONSE:"(blah, blah, blah)...there is no scenario in which I'd say it's justified...(blah, blah, blah)"

So deep-thinking Joan would have lept to the defense of an Islamofacist terrorist and let 3,000 fellow Americans perish in the most vicious attack on American soil in our history. My God, I am SO glad I don't live in Joan's bizarre little cocoon.

Yes, it's true. Based on an article she wrote on waterboarding last week, Joan answered a readers question by actually admitting she would have let 3,000 Americans die on 9/11 rather than ruining a terrorist's day with the threat of drowning.

READER MIKES PACE ASKED HER: "What if we could have tortured one individual and uncovered the 9/11 plot? Do you (Joan) believe it is ethically permissible to torture one person to save the lives of over 3000?

AND JOAN'S ANSWER WAS:"(blah, blah, blah)...there is no scenario in which I'd say it's justified...(blah, blah, blah)"

So Joan would have lept to the defense of an Islamofacist terrorist and let 3,000 Americans die. So much for being realistic, gck4061. Ain't gonna happen here.

You're missing the point, Xrandadu. I'm not making stuff up. The question was a hypthetical. And it wasn't raised by me. It was raised by a reader named Mikes Pace. He posed this question to Joan:

"What if we could have tortured one individual and uncovered the 9/11 plot? Do you (Joan) believe it is ethically permissible to torture one person to save the lives of over 3000?

AND JOAN'S ANSWER WAS:"(blah, blah, blah)...there is no scenario in which I'd say it's justified...(blah, blah, blah)"

Try harder to actually comprehend what you read next time.

Nice to see that someone has a foothold in reality here.

Gawd, Joan is such a one-trick pony.

And, pah-leeze, Joan -- sucking up to 41 only when it's politically expedient to do so is so nauseatingly transparent.

Barf... barf... barf...

There is an excellent article at Real Clear Politics today entitled, ”Waterboarding and Hiroshima: Did the Allies in World War II "lower themselves to the level of their enemies"? It truly examines some of the hard realities of wartime decisions – like the fact that often one’s only choice is “a choice of evils.”

You can read the entire article at: realclearpolitics.com/ and it’s well worth it.

Here’s an edited version:

Essayist Algis Valiunas recounts that when war broke out in Europe in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt "issued a plea that all combatant nations do the decent thing and refrain from bombing." And yet, he continues, "President Roosevelt's high-mindedness did not count for much once the action was under way." The Nazis, for whom terror from the skies was no more anathema than every other form of terror they practiced, were the first to bomb civilian targets, beginning with Warsaw and moving on to Rotterdam and London.

Within a couple of years, the Allies were retaliating in kind, which in current parlance would be known as "lowering oneself to the level of one's enemies." At the Casablanca conference in January 1943, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill promised to undertake "the heaviest possible bomber offensive against the German war effort." Six months later that terrible promise was fulfilled over Hamburg by 700 British bombers. In Mr. Valiunas's telling, it was a scene from the Inferno: "Oxygen starvation and carbon monoxide poisoning killed many; bomb shelters turned into ovens and roasted the persons inside, so that rescue workers days later found the bodies seared together in an indistinguishable mass; the molten asphalt of the streets engulfed those who fled the burning buildings."

An estimated 45,000 people died this way in Hamburg. U.S. and British air forces would repeat the procedure over Dresden, Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima, Nagasaki--cities of real or at least arguable military significance. How can this be justified? Does it not greatly diminish Allied claims to moral superiority? Most people would also agree that the only compelling ethical defense that can be made for the bombing campaign is that it hastened Allied victory, spared at least as many lives (on both sides) as it cost, and created the conditions for a more peaceful postwar world. In other words, the question here isn't about the intrinsic morality of the bombing. It's about whether the good that flowed from the bombing outweighed the unmistakable evil of the act itself. In the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the evidence that the bombings ended the war and saved as many as a million Allied and Japanese lives is overwhelming.

Whatever side one takes here, the important point is that the debate fundamentally is about results. Note the difference with the current debate over waterboarding, where opponents argue that the technique is unconscionable and inadmissible under any circumstances, even in hypothetical cases where the alternative to waterboarding is terrorist attacks resulting in mass casualties among innocent civilians. According to this view, it is possible to wage war yet avoid the classic "choice of evils" dilemmas that confronted past statesmen such as Churchill and Roosevelt. Or, to put the argument more precisely, it is possible to avoid this choice if one is also prepared to pay for it in blood--if not in one's own, than in that of kith and kin and whoever else's life must be sacrificed to keep our consciences clear.

(I guess the point is: Never say never.)