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I don’t know how else to interpret this.
Under George Will’s logic, which relies on Fred Hiatt’s moral framework, if it could be established by an independent commission that the dissemination of Will’s immoral utilitarian views on torture could be discouraged, thus reducing the use of torture and the incidence of people being murdered through torture, by hiring someone to kidnap, torture and even assassinate George Will and other like-minded pundits who publicly propagated such views, it would be the moral thing to do.
How did it happen that it’s regarded as acceptable among America’s "serious" pundit class to argue that cruelty, torture, murder are all okay, if you can convince Sandra Day O’Connor they "worked"?
And the next question for Will and friends should be, "given what you said, what should a patriot do?"
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You have to ask this question? It is patently obvious as to the answer.
Yes. This has been another episode of short obvious answers…
How did it happen that the emerging consensus among America’s pundit class is that cruelty, torture, murder are all okay, if it’s useful.
Because George Will is an immoral man. Always has been. Always will be.
I read it as more of a rhetorical question.
And, did anyone else notice the Oh, brother, you’ve got to be kidding me look on Gwen Ifill’s face while li’l Ms. Cheney was spouting?
“Under George Will’s logic”…
2 + 2 can equal either 4 or 5, and George gets to choose
Must be all that liberal media bias I’ve heard so much about…
Ha! With liberals like them, who needs Fox?
the moral issue rests on its effectiveness?
ksm became “loquacious” after being waterboarded?
I thought he did most of his talking before. He WANTED to brag about what he had done.
why is it that Republican appointees to the Supreme Court are the only folks Will trusts to vet Replican crimes?
Will says “we ought to have a commission”.
Can’t figure out why we need a commission to determine if breaking the law is illegal. Torture is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Army Field Manual.
Don’t see the need for any more commissions. See the need for some Prosecutions.
“…what should a patriot do?”
Well, I suppose a patriot could do what the right has been doing successfully for 3 decades; buy and own a large media infrastucture.
The left might have tried this starting back at the same time, a time when the left actually had a leg up after Watergate, but they were busy trading in flourescent painted VW micro-buses for Oldsmobiles.
They would also support returning to chattel slavery if only someone they revere would assure them that it works.
For disclosure, I in fact used to own a ‘62 VW micro-bus, although no flourescent paint, in fact, hardly any paint at all. In between blown up engines, it could haul music gear…slowly.
FWIW, I believe Fact Free Fred Hiatt endorsed a “Commission” (to be headed by Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter), so I’d say George is probably a recent ‘convert’ to the idea of any type of investigation.
it has become pretty clear to me now that the reason the Goopers stalled health care reform is that there were AFRAID of what Kennedy would be able to do.
they knew he was sick and wanted to run the clock out on him.
Funny thing how an engine that worked just fine in a small car wasn’t worth a damn when trying to power a mini-bus.
“This Week-” always sucks, as do all the talking heads programs. It irritates me but I tend to watch it anyway. Not this week, I switched on the TV, saw Liz Cheney and switched it back off.
To note: they always put themselves in the position of the torturer. That tells you who they idenitify with. They make a false utilitarian argument. This is a moral issue. Where does their moral authority come from? Yoo? Cheney? Rummy? Ask them.
They have no moral authority. They only pretend to. Maybe the have no morals. They are there to make money. You cannot serve two masters.
Yes. see the link to “Hiatt’s moral framework.”
You forget: American exceptionalism, might makes right, the ends justify the means, and you can’t torture American WASP-y pundits. Simply not done.
Otherwise, go get’em.
Yeah, on the one hand the engines were easy enough to rebuild, but on the other hand, if they’d been up to the job in the first place, they probably wouldn’t have needed rebuilding. At least an oil filter would’ve been nice.
So then in the wiser old age of my late twenties, I later got a better powered van from a phone co auction.
I’ve never heard Gwen dispute conservative Beltway wisdom. Awhile back on Washington Week they ran clips of a Republican talking about death panels and Nancy Pelosi saying private insurance companies ration health care and then discussed it as if they were equally valid sides in the debate.
On an unrelated note, I hope you and the other LA pups are far away from the wildfires.
Pope Benedict XVI “The prohibition against torture ‘ can not be contraviened under any circumstances’”
stances. ‘
“You cannot serve two masters.” Unless their two names happen to be Greed and Self-Righteous.
I can’t watch them either. I have to keep BP within measurable range.
D’oh. Skimmed right over it in the diary (actually read Fred’s drivel online yesterday).
There is only one problem. Murder is illegal. And supposedly NO ONE is above the law. So whether or not it worked is irrelevant. If lying about a blowjob is illegal I am pretty sure murder should be as well.
I did the same thing, as soon as I saw Liz f’ing cheney was going to be on I promptly changed the channel. It’s hard enough to take Will, but cheney I can’t do.
Clinton should have based his defense on the theory that blowjobs are vital to national security.
That may be so, and I wasn’t really paying attention, but I’m telling you she had Such a Look.
We are about 15 miles from the Station Fire. Terribly smokey and with the heat, it’s not a good day to be outside. After being at the beach for 4 days, with glorious air, coming home to this was not fun. It also brings back the anxieties of late last year when we were in the middle of a fire storm and had to evacuate.
I hope they can turn it around soon. Keeping my fingers crossed for you (and everybody else). Be safe.
Thanks. It seems to be staying up in the forest and not down towards us. I have a friend who just several weeks ago moved back into his house in the manufactured housing park near us which burned down last November. This must be giving him the heebee jeebies. 5% contained as of this morning, and this is day 5. The weather is not helping. But, at least we don’t have the gale force winds we had with the other fires.
George Will just endorsed abotions as moral in terms of its use in preventing unwanted births.
George Will just endorsed extermination as moral in terms of getting rid
of unwanted portions of the population.
George Will just endorsed death panels to cut helth care costs for the elderly.
All these things “work.”
He did not say torture was OK. He said whether it was immoral depends on whther or not it works. That is amazing. That the piddle heads around him did not rise up and say “WTF?” in unison is a testament to the supidity of the pundit class and ABC.
The classic rejoinder to this “utilitarian” argument is Jonathan Swift’s “A Reasonable Proposition” in which he argues that harvesting Irish children would solve two problems at once…the pesky Irish overpopulation problem and the food shortages in England.
Besides current British policy was doing essentially the same…by allowing the Irish to die of starvation…so why not place it on a more “rational economic” model, argued Swift.
Of course, a lot of people didn’t realize that this was Satire, intent on destroying the utilitarians as well as poking the English racists in the nose.
Didn’t power their pickup truck well, either. My father put a Corvair engine in our VW truck, and increased the horsepower enough that it could go uphill, with a load, faster than a speeding tortoise.
It’s nice if you don’t mind the smoke and the white fallout.
So what happens if Souter and O’Conner don’t happen to feel like heading any commission, because, you know, retirement is wonderful?
Would the second string heads of the commission be Hiatt and Murdoch?
And nobody bothered to remind them that it’s illegal?
The latest map of the evacuation areas.
Did the Corvair eliminate down-shifting for pot-holes? – a different kind of GM bailout.
Thanks PJ. I don’t see a legend that tells what that red and yellow shading mean. BTW, we are within that blue outline. Just to the right of the 210 sign, there are a few streets with the line. That’s us.
The Corvair increased Ralph Nader’s ability to climb the political mountain by circling noisily around the bottom.
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Jill Richardson’s Recipe for America hosted by Toby Wollin
All this shows the difference between a consevative and an authoritarian. Will, supposedly a conservative, seems corrupted by party loyalty authoritarianism to protect bush and his criminal gang, rather than adhere to the supposed intelligence and morality of conservatism. bush authoritainism tells us it’s ok to torture and kill, that bush was sent by god, that evolution is nonsense, that creationism is law. Somehow Will doesn’t have the intellectual depth to understand or is so corrupt that he won’t. But Will isn’t the only one. My lifelong friend Ted, a very smart individual, refuses to discuss “facts”, telling me that those facts come from the left wing, even though he can’t make individual counter arguments. These tactics are understandable if they came from the great unwashed ignorance that is the republican party. But Ted and Will don’t belong to that class.
Oh, they’ve been working on it for awhile. First step was to make bankruptcy harder, second step was to turn the screws on mortgage loans. The next step is to allow creditors to get their money back from mandatory indenture of the creditee. Then they’ll pass a law making any baby born to an indentured servent a chattel of the holder of the indenture. QED
I think red is the active burn area and yellow is where they think it’s going. They really ought to put a legend on it – they’ had whole pages with that in the margin on other fires.
(Power just glitched here!)
On a VW pickup? the potholes weren’t that big!
(Some of the stuff that got hauled with that truck: a 36-inch metal lathe, an iron cook stove, a one-cylinder gas engine (6hp at 450 rpm), firewood, 36 orange boxes of books.)
I just went out to get a pizza, ’cause you know. It sucks here. I ran into a Sheriff, he was parked in the pizza place, and he told me to stay put until they come knocking on my door. Last time, when the fire was racing towards us, I left 5 minutes before the police came through. I asked him what was the best way to follow where the fire was. He told me to watch the local news. There is none on. Seriously. What am I supposed to believe? The media, or my own lying eyes?
Swell. We’re cool. I just got back from gassing up the car, just in case, and picking up a sandwich and pizza. Still, it kind of sucks.
BTW…that ybnormal person is my husband. We’re trying to deflect right now.
But, thank you for all.
The unknown number of hundreds of thousands of American LIVES that were spared because a combatant KNEW that if he surrendered to AMERICA he would be ‘humanely’ treated is the part of the equation that is never mentioned.
The ‘blood’ of our kids that were attacked by those ‘potential’ POW’s who knew that we had become a torture-state, is on the hands of the American-torture-regime.
O/T
Speaking of untimely death ,has anyone seen this yet?
Homicide Division of Washington Police Confirms Frankel Death
A few minutes ago, the homicide division of the Washington, D.C. Police Department confirmed to me a rumor that the man found yesterday at 11:00 a.m. in the water at Rock Creek Park was indeed our friend Lawrence Evan Frankel, known to us all as Larry. The Washington Post ran a story online yesterday about the finding of the body.
The homicide division says that an autopsy will be done later today to determine the cause of his death. While the homicide division is investigating his death, they do not know at this time that his death was due to homicide. The timing of this autopsy may keep the story out of the papers until Monday or Tuesday.
http://youngphillypolitics.com/user/repmarkbcohen 8/30/09
(continued)
Longtime Pennsylvania ACLU lobbyist and Executive Director Larry Frankel, who in the last year or so has become the lobbyist for the national ACLU, has apparently been found dead in Washington under mysterious circumstances. Larry was 54. This is a breaking news story in which most key facts are still generally unknown.
Frankel was an outstanding lobbyist for the Pennsylvania ACLU in Harrisburg, taking positions on scores to hundreds of bills each year. He was a coalition builder reminiscent of Ted Kennedy in the U.S. Senate or William Brennan on the U.S. Supreme Court, who agressively reached out to unlikely allies like the National Rifle Association to help persuade members of the legislature that the ACLU was addressing broad concerns.
His aggressive outreach removed the ACLU from the fringes or margins of state policy and moved it toward the center of direct involvement.
http://youngphillypolitics.com…..ran…
I was some worried, seeing that blue line down in the valley. Hope it stays way out of your neighborhood.
Sure, but who is to say that Pope Benedict’s moral framework is superior to Fred Hiatt’s moral framework? Certainly not George Will or Liz Cheney and aren’t they the go to guys on the intersection of public policy and morality?
They already support it. It’s the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.
At what point does the American public rise up in righteous indignation and throw of the ancient and corrupt regime or are Americans waiting for liberation from the outside?
But would that work?
I think it would do what it was intended to do: solve the Servant Problem.