Musings

I was listening to the news while I ate my lunch. Foolish perhaps, it just adds to indigestion, but I was catching up on the political coverage on this primary day. The talking heads were alternating between the Democrats and the Republican race, and trying to make the Old White Guy party seem interesting. They kept talking about how John McCain was a man of principle, a man who would risk losing an election because he wouldn’t shift his positions to do the expedient thing.

So, I lost it. Did nobody notice McCain’s vote on the waterboard/torture bill a few days ago? While I oppose McCain on almost every level, I found his stand against torture to be brave and principled since he was a member of a party that seems to embrace this abandonment of our American values. And then came this vote. Which can only be viewed as pandering to the extreme right wing of his party, and proves he is not a man of principle, but just a politician. And a particularly sleazy one as well. If you are considering voting for this man please, please look at this one issue and see if you really want to be represented by someone who seems ready to make you and every other American a party to torture.

McCain was tortured. He knows the dangers it presents to our soldiers in the field when they are captured. And putting aside what might be done to our people while they are prisoners, let’s take a look back through history. The German soldiers during WWII stopped fighting sooner when they knew they were going to fall into the hands of the British and the Americans. Faced with the Russians they continued to fight like badgers. How many more Russian soldiers died because of those last ditch efforts, and the fact the Germans had no incentive to surrender?

It makes my skin crawl that I carry the citizenship and passport of a country that now tortures people as a matter of American policy. The image of our Attorney General making the Nuremberg Defense before Congress was a new low. “The CIA interrogators were just following the protocols handed down by the Justice Department ie we were just following orders.” While I wouldn’t like to give a pass to the CIA agents I could live with that if we at least prosecuted the lawyers who wrote these decisions authorizing torture. They have no excuse. They know the treaties we’ve signed, they know American case law where we prosecuted Japanese who used waterboarding against our soldiers.

Faagh, I can’t continue. Just even writing about this makes me feel like I’ve been eating excrement.

Melinda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.