{"id":5497,"date":"2009-04-24T10:06:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T14:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5497"},"modified":"2009-04-24T10:06:02","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T14:06:02","slug":"defending-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=5497","title":{"rendered":"Defending Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan<\/a>:<\/p>\n

These people are not making a good faith argument. They are transparent defenders of the indefensible. Arianna is right: this is a defining moment for America. This is not now and never has been a question of right versus left. It is right vs wrong. It is a bright line which the black-and-white crowd has suddenly decided is oh-so-gray. But we have their testimony now. And history has it for ever.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, they are not making a good-faith argument. But really, this whole debate is<\/em> a right\/left issue. <\/p>\n

What you have is a group of people who are upset at America's use of torture, and a second group of people who have decided that the first group is a threat to the GOP. The latter group knows it will be a huge black mark on their party if anyone bigger than Lynndie England goes down over this, and they are trying everything they can to make sure that never happens. They're the right. And they're convinced that anyone who questions the GOP is a leftist<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So when they tell other people that what happened \u201cwasn\u2019t really torture\u201d, or that it only happened to the worst of the worst, or that the Dems were complicit too, they are simply trying to keep the uninformed from thinking so poorly of the GOP that they abandon the party. They need to maintain a mass of people who think questioning torture is some kind \"witch hunt\" in order to avoid mass exodus. It\u2019s 100% partisan.<\/p>\n

It's a right\/left issue, but only in the sense that the \"right' has decided that being tarnished by the prosecutions of Bush administration officials is a worse fate than allowing torture of a few people that nobody really liked anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan: These people are not making a good faith argument. They are transparent defenders of the indefensible. Arianna is right: this is a defining moment for America. This is not now and never has been a question of right versus left. It is right vs wrong. It is a bright line which the black-and-white […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}