Left Behinds: McCain on Torture

Sunday, September 24, 2006

McCain on Torture

Whereas This Week with George Stephanopoulos just ignored the whole torture debate (clearly the biggest story this week), and on Fox News Sunday Brit Hume yelled at Juan Williams for even using the word 'torture,' on Face the Nation they have John McCain on and are actually grilling him.

Q: Do these techniques even work?

John McCain: They work to an extent, but we have to be very careful because we have many examples of if you torture someone they'll tell you anything [to make you stop].

Q: But can you give a specific example of when torture has ever resulted in valuable information?

JM: Only what the president talked about in his speech. There has been some valuable info gained. What techniques were used i don't know. But we have to have the moral high ground and we cant' violate the Geneva Conventions, which we've stuck to for 50 years. That's why we didn't touch the Geneva Conventions.

Didn't touch them? Does he really buy his own BS? Maybe in the sense of "we no longer have to adhere to them" we didn't touch them, true.

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The War on Empiricism In a prelude to the risk posts above, AO argues that more people believe in haunted houses than in the scientific method. Somewhere in this post there must be some Dick Cheney jokes.

Why I am a Liberal, or, Napkins are a Stupid Place to Make Government Policy AO and the Congressional Budget Office force small-government conservatives to "defend low taxation on its merits: either taxes and government are evil and immoral in themselves (the idea the right-wing noise machine has been trying to cram down our throats for 25 years or so), or in utilitarian terms less government and lower taxes benefits everyone more than high taxes and more government."

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Left Behinds Gets Spanked Our greatest honor of 2005 was a takedown in the very popular MILBlogging.com, where the man behind the milblogs (a man who SG had called "unnecessary and annoying" in a previous post) noted graciously that LB "looks like some third-grade school project written by some Marilyn Manson-looking blogger named Solomon Grundy, a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan, and a few other contributors." And that was just in his first paragraph. But by the end of the bashing we were not just friends, we were lovers.

Left Behinds

Sunday, September 24, 2006

McCain on Torture

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