I mean, okay: you’ve been tortured. During torture, which I assume wasn’t fun, you broke down and gave names of the Green Bay Packers, so you know it doesn’t work. During torture, you both wished you were dead and you wished to see your family again. You had to wonder how someone could do this to another someone: torture is all about your humanity being stripped away.

And then, years later, you have to listen to chowderhead mealymouthed morons who are ostensibly your allies talking trash about getting all testosterone “enhanced”. Little pencil pusher types swinging their packages around.

Even if these persons were my ideological allies, I’d have trouble coping with it. And in liberal circles, at least, people don’t just cope: I can think of many issues of race, class, sexuality, and gender that get hashed and rehashed on DailyKos. There is some shit up with which people generally do not put; and if I were McCain, I’d be getting awfully itchy about my teammates.

So how does he deal with it?

The race I’d like to see is Hagel/Paul vs Obama/Edwards in ‘08.

America needs a cool headed leader that will bring the country together again. Of course this will never happen… but one can dream, eh?

Ron Paul and Lieberman for the Republicans!!!

In Tuesday’s debate, only John McCain and Ron Paul bucked the collective swooning over enhanced interrogation. Paul mused about the way that torture has become “enhanced interrogation technique. It sounds like newspeak,” he noted, referring to George Orwell’s term for totalitarian doubletalk in his novel “1984.” Paul obviously never got the memo. For most of the Republican primary candidates, “1984″ isn’t a cautionary tale, it’s a how-to manual.

Only McCain reminded the audience that “it’s not about the terrorists, it’s about us. It’s about what kind of country we are.”

(emphasis mine)

Torture, as a tactic, has been legitimized in the US simply by renaming it.