Still trying to catch up on the previous thread, but saw your post, Glenn.

Dark days.

As for the supporters of the monarchy, their justification reminds me of the clichéd, and yet appropos, statement by the archetypal mother to her child, "If your friend jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too?"

And "friend," in this case, is an appropriate word, I think, to describe the odd relationship between the monarchy apologists and al Qaeda. Surely there's is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Or, perhaps the close of Animal Farm is more apt, in this case: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Let us all, as a nation, not become the monstrosity we have seen so often in the past.

No kings,

Robert

Glenn's covered it all.

We were supposed to be better than the savages who attacked us on 9/11. Instead we've allowed ourselves to become exactly like them.

And the worst part is that this all seems perfectly acceptable to our leaders and lead opinion-makers, thus making it equally acceptable to the public at large.

How do you argue against or even counter a mindset like that?

First, they create some kind of demonic strawman to be the enemy, which justifies their pushing back, but then they use it, again, to justify doing the same things that merited demonizing in the first place. A pathological form of projection.

They did it with Clinton, and now with al-Qaeda.

It's also the same principle they apply to either business or politics, or both, when they are combined. "That's how it's always done... it's a dirty business. Get used to it... grow up."

So completely opposite of the Golden Rule, this one says "I better do something to hurt that other (person/business/country) before they do something to hurt me. In order to "stop" them."

We could call it the Leaden Rule. Toxic, impossible to transmute into gold.

"The more a candidate called defended torture and lawless detentions, the louder the cheers were." Needs fixin'.

Ben Nelson needs a Primary opponent.

al Qaeda practices torture? Dog bites man.

The U.S. practices torture? Man bites dog.

Post Bush: The U.S. practices torture? Dog bites man.

Bush and many in his administration are guilty of war crimes. They have the morality of dogs, not men.

Bamage - "Ben Nelson needs a Primary opponent."

It was Bill Nelson who voted with Republicans to kill the Feinstein/Whitehouse proposal, but it probably would have been Ben Nelson if he were on that Committee.

The U.S. public has been continually subjected to complimentary coverage of Al Qa'ida by the U.S. mainstream media. Where is the TV news program that would dare describe Al Qa'ida as "terrorists", or the movie which portrays Al Qa'ida members as anything less noble than human rights observers in benighted African nations?

It's time to break the positive PR spin on Al Qa'ida which fills U.S. mainstream discussion.

I also think we need to stop coddling Al Qa'ida. It's time to stop appealing to their sense of law & human rights, and there should be no more summits between Our President and the leaders of Al Qa'ida.

I'm almost starting to think that some people realize that Al Qa'ida are bad people, who are willing to do bad things whether or not we criticize them.

If only we had more of an ability to control the United States government, like through some system of laws, or a "constitution", or an election, than we were able to appeal to the moral and legal values of various illegal criminal groups operating out of stateless zones of warlord chaos.

That Al-Qaeda torturing people is not exactly news.

The wingnuts frankly ought to be relieved that we didn't find fatwas demanding jihadis adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

Glenn - you wrote:

"The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures and Al Qaeda does not is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, whereas the U.S. is supposed to be something different than that."

I think you meant something like:

"The reason that it is news that the US tortures, but not news that Al Qaeda does is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group..."

The real reason not to torture is because when we do we make our brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and friends and neighbors torturers.

That's the reason.

Whether or not it's effective, who else is doing it and to what degree, are secondary and pale in importance next to this fundamental truth.

Glenn,

Think this from today's blog needs re-wording:

The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures and Al Qaeda does not is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures and Al Qaeda does not is because Al Qaeda is a barbaric and savage terrorist group which operates with no limits, . . .

Guessing you meant "The reason that it is news that the U.S. tortures and not news that Al Qaeda does . . . "?

The justification that has been seized upon for the lowering of the standards of civilized conduct in this country is that our enemies' standards of conduct are much, much lower. It's like if we had cut off the toes of every German soldier captured in WWII and then said "hey, it's not like we gassed them to death and tossed them into ovens!"

Glenn says: "We have become a country that justifies whatever we do -- no matter how far it transgresses moral, ethical and legal limits -- by resorting to the third-grader mentality..."

I say: 'become?' We are simply returning to the glory days when Americans slaughtered the Native Americans and herded them into "reservations" that were little more than concentration camps before the term was used. What justifications were given for these actions? "They" were the "enemy," savage, barely human, vicious killers who tortured innocents and took their scalps as trophies. American policy was based on the "fact" that "they" were unable to coexist peacefully side-by-side with the "civilized" Americans and Europeans who truly deserved to own the land and make the rules. Every time America agreed to allow them to live freely in a certain territory, that right was unilaterally taken away as soon as gold or oil was discovered there.

Sound familiar?