Listening to the Administration: Torture or Aggressive Interrogation?

A campfire skit:

Performer #1 (let’s call him George) walks up waving his arms wildly. He stands in place waving his arms and jumping up and down.

Performer #2 (let’s call him American Public) walks up and asks “What are you doing?”

George says, “Scaring away dinosaurs.”

American Public says, “But there aren’t any dinosaurs!”

George says, “Well, then it’s working. I better keep doing it.”

The audience laughs because they all recognize the absurdity of George’s thinking.

Now, I’m not suggesting that there are no terrorists. Far from it. The issue is what has been done to destroy Al Qaeda. Sadly, the record is not good.

We’ve given them a country in which to train and fight. We’ve let their leadership escape. We’ve tied our military down on an unrelated adventure, allowing real threats (Iran and North Korea) to continue to develop.

I guess invading Iraq looked as easy as waving one’s arms in the air.

These days the administration’s position as I understand it goes like this:

We’ve kept you safe but you’re not safe because we’re fighting the war begun by 9-11 that had nothing to do with 9-11.

This is the ideological battle of the twenty-first century. Just like World War Two. And just as we went after Hitler with everything we had, Bin Laden will be ignored since we don’t spend much time thinking about him.

We must all pull together and sacrifice to fight this war by cutting taxes so we force the burden to future generations.

There are no secret prisons, but they work; we know because we’ve been using secret prisons. That don’t exist.

You’re a terrorist-loving traitor if this doesn’t make sense or if you wish we’d actually killed the terrorists who attacked us.

Now that I’ve gone through the exercise of typing it all out, it begins to make sense. Really it’s briliant. No one can beat these kinds of arguments.

You try. You try to understand, but then your brain starts to hurt…

You realize that reason is no match for irrationality…

You realize that facts are created if enough people repeat them…

Your head hurts…

You flip straight to the sports page, the only place where real reporting and real debate take place…

And somewhere a caterpillar sits on a mushroom smoking a hookah while a grin without a cat fades slowly into the moonlight….