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Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Fine. Then couch your posts on it in those terms.
It's when you suggest that it eclipses or is on par with all the other issues regarding our foreign policy that you lose me.
Exploiting it for moral high ground and trying to make it more than it is in the bigger picture won't make your desire to see it on the front page every day a self fulfilling prophecy. You'll just come off like a person with limited big picture arguments trying to win the debate by hammering one little hot button issue.
You realize that's exactly what Bill O'Reilly does, don't you? He never speaks generally. He grabs one little thing where he can take the moral pedestal and rams it down his opponent's throat over and over.
Engage Slave on the totality of our foreign policy. You might even get me as an ally in that debate.
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You've lost me. When I post about torture, it's because I think torture is wrong. When I post about the outlandish theories of executive power, it's because I think that they're wrong, too. In both cases, the Bush Administration backs them, but I don't bring the issue up simply to to bash it. You may be that cynical -- I'm not. Actually, my fear is that the next Administration, Democrat or Republican, will fail to change things. For example, I suspect that Hillary is a big fan of executive branch power.
Now, in addition to thinking that torture is wrong, I think that this Administration has been particularly slippery about trying to normalize torture while denying that's what they're doing. There's a pattern of the Executive Branch just doing things that people don't know about, and using that secrecy to avoid discussion and review. This seems to me a particularly Bushian brand of gutlessness, and it's what those high-school students were calling him on. Slave at least is pro-torture. Bush lacks the courage of those convictions. This stuff is underground because -- on some level -- he knows that not even the outlandish theories of presidential power could save it from popular condemnation if it was all public.
