I really get a kick out of evangelical crazies who claim the bible is Absolute, the Word of God, opine about the dangers of Moral Relativism, and then proceed to split biblical hairs when it comes to immoral acts of aggression (e.g. war and torture) committed by those they perceive as "good" (because one's actions don't define one's goodness in theses particular cases, one is inherently good). Cognitive dissonance must be a bitch when you're an insecure closet case policymaker like Bauer.

And you just had to go mention him and I had to go check out his wiki page. Thankfully I haven't eaten lunch yet:

He also serves on the Executive Board of Christians United for Israel, a lobby group headed by John Hagee. Gary Bauer was one of the signers of the Statement of Principles of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) on June 3, 1997.

EWWWWW!!!! A neocon PNAC signatory defending torture? I'M SHOCKED, GOOD SIR! SHOCKED!

People like Gary Bauer represent everything that is wrong with evangelical fanatics. I know lots of good Christians who don't have to tie themselves up in ideological knots defending war and torture because they reject it outright instead of cherry picking and obfuscating after the fact.

Oh, it may indeed be a bit shrill, but your transgression is far worse than that.

You're committing what every sane, reasonable, sensible person considers a Deadly Sin.

It has many names: exaggeration; going too far; taking things to extremes.

Yes, I'm afraid so: you are guilty of resorting to hyperbole.

You little devil you.

=:-)

What Glenn just described used to belong to regimes like the Argentina of the Colonels, Somoza, Stalin and successors etc.

We used to be the good guys. Hell! We still want to think we're the good guys.th How do you reconcile this image with the crude reality?

It's hard...but it has to be done, for our own sake. To learn from our mistakes, the first one being the complete abandonment of critical thinking in the name of "safety" after 9/11.

Henry Kissinger might think it shrill.

Let's see...harshest penalty? 5 Months.

Bernie Madoff gets 150 years.

Priorities people, priorities. $$$$$$$$$$$$ trumps human life.

We were the "good guys"? Really? When we didn't enter WWII even though we were aware of what the Germans were not too secretly doing? When we proudly nuked Japan, knowingly killing how many civilians? In Vietnam? In Gulf War I when we rejected Saddam's offers to evacuate Kuwait--remember, he felt he had the green light from the U.S. to invade due to his border/oil gripes about Kuwait--and instead Bush I opted to start a war?

These are just the obvious examples. Of course I'm skipping all the other hundreds or thousands of "little things," like bombing Khadafi's home, killing his adopted daughter and our interventions in Latin America, to name a couple.

I guess it depends on how you define "good."

that evangelicals love Israel, is because they believe Biblical prophecy will be fulfilled by Jesus returning to earth and slaughtering all but 144,000 Christ-believing Jews. They have no love for individual Jews, in fact they are disposed to think of them in terms of their being as heretical as Arabs. But it helps them feel superior to think that God is coming to wreak vengeance on all of us who fail to believe "His Word." Sad, but true...I used to be one of them...a minister even!

What made you change your mind, if I may ask?

It's gonna take an ocean

Of calamine lotion...

I should have been more precise. I meant to write "we used to think of ourselves as the good guys." You definitely do not build empires by heading a committee, but by using brute force whenever it is deemed, ahem, necessary.

Couple of observations about the examples you brought:

1) Should we have intervened sooner during WWII? In retrospect, sure. But remember that there was a very strong isolationist sentiment at home when Hitler invaded Poland. not easy to mobilize for a war in a democracy. Let's not forget that it still took an almost perfect storm to help Dumbya to embark us in the Iraq folly.

2) The atomic bomb? Well, I don't know about the first one. IIRC, Truman was receiving estimates of 1/2 million deaths among American soldiers if we were to conquer Japan by conventional means. Is it true? If so, were said estimates reasonable? What's a President to do faced with such alternatives? On the other hand, I know about the 2nd one; in a word, gratuitous and cruel, whatever anyone can say.

3) As for the dirty wars in Latin America, it is even worse than you think. Toppling regimes for the sake of protecting the interests of a goddamned FRUIT CORPORATION deserves tons of scorn and despise, no doubt about that. The very idea that South America was "our backyard" was plain idiocy. Furthermore, the justification of "we were fighting the spread of Communism" was a laughable (if it wouldn't have been so tragic) imbecility. The surefire way to fight extreme ideologies is to promote social justice and economic fairness. But try to make the only American native criminal class addicted to legalized bribery that is Congress to understand such a simple concept.

Thank you for using the term "we" in assigning responsibility. "The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished."

=Eric

just like it's not just waterboarding, that are at issue here.

It is the fundamental underlying cruelty and brutality of American and allied military and CIA actions in the Middle East that eventually we're going to have to come to grips with.

Our Forces have behaved with consistently vicious and often murderous cruelty and brutality toward entire populations, not just "suspects" under interrogation. This has been so throughout the so-called War On Terror, and the various invasions, occupations, round-ups and exterminations involved with it.

We will have to deal with the consequences.

I'm not sure that torture is all that important an issue compared to the overall level of contempt and cruelty toward the victims of our Conquests demonstrated by Our Forces pretty much every day from the beginning of the War.

I'm sure that someone who knows more about the Middle East than I do will correct me if I'm wrong, but it is my understanding that all governments in the Middle East, both prior to and since the American and allied invasions and conquests use torture routinely. Americans did not innovate its use in the Middle East. Citizens and subjects of the various nations, kingdoms and statelets of the region are very familiar with the official use of torture to extract information and confessions.

While American interrogators have said that al Qaeda and various resistance efforts in the region used the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse images as recruiting posters for the resistance, it's always seemed a little odd to me that torture and abuse by Americans would inspire this kind of response whereas torture and abuse by -- say -- the Saudi and Jordanian authorities (among many others) doesn't seem to give rise to significant armed resistance.

I suspect it's not the torture by Americans that inspires so much resistance; it's the fact of the invasion and occupation itself, and the overall levels of cruelty and contempt with which the American forces regard the Natives.

We'll have to focus on torture and abuse by Our Forces in any case. Hopefully it will lead to a National Conversation about just how cruel and murderous -- and how ultimately counterproductive -- our latest efforts at Empire have been and are.