The perp and the accomplice

While the candidates—all the candidates—were showering us with fuzzy-warm TV spots of happy multiethnic crowds bursting with finely-tuned emotion and American flags waving in the breeze, the Bush White House was getting ready to go back on the offensive—something for which neither Obama nor Clinton really have the knack.

Not content with getting a pass from Senate Democrats on the loathesome Michael Mukasey, who refused to condemn torture when nominated to be the nation’s top legal officer, Bush went one better Thursday: he said torture’s just great.

But the best joke is the faux shock that followed.

There’s something brilliant about this counterintuitive strategy from someone who is allegedly on the political ropes. And yet it’s always Bush who determines the playing field and the terms of the debate. When pushed up against the wall by the Baker-Hamilton report on the war, for example, he told the wise-men coalition advising a prudent pullback in Iraq to wipe his thighs with it and announced he was going in deeper.

It’s a pity those in the misnamed ‘opposition’ camp don’t take a lesson from this eat-me-raw approach to politics. Instead, we get whiny outrage from the fully complicit Dianne Feinstein and other Demowimps. “This is a black mark on the United States,” moaned the California senator, pretending she had nothing to do with it. Recall that it was Feinstein and my own ophidian senator, Charles Schumer, who broke with the Democrats and handed Bush a success on Mukasey’s nomination despite all the grotesque waffling on torture.

Sorry, Deedee, they ain’t waffling no more.

Given the morally repugnant debate about when torture might be kinda okay—a debate that reached as far as the pages of The Nation magazine in 2001—it’s bracingly clarifying that Bush should demand to bring it back given the ‘right circumstances.’ After all, that’s what everyone argued at the time and many still do: that the thumbscrew and the rack should be allowed, along with neutron bombs and, hey, why not?—smallpox and anthrax cannisters, to stave off a hypothetical threat.

That’s because we don’t really love freedom, despite W’s rhetoric. We love safety.

Furthermore, we only object to weapons of mass destruction when they’re in the hands of our supposed enemies, which is why, my esteemed fellow bipeds, they’ll proliferate and persist forever.

The intellectual abetting of torture that dominated our polity from September 2001 onward is still with us. Bush is only the most egregious example, which is why his autistic refusal to live in our world remains perversely triumphant.