Tortured Logic
By John Amato Wednesday Jan 07, 2009 12:45pm
Chuck Todd seems to think that torture is A-OK and not something that is fundamentally disgusting, and opposing it just a crazy left-wing position.
Digby explains:
Did Chuck Todd recently attend a Mark Halperin seminar on how to be an insufferably obtuse purveyor of stale and useless insider conventional wisdom? (Or does he just have a natural talent for it?) Check this out:In the mind of a Villager, torture is a civilized practice that is both just and competent. That was very frightening to read. Bill O'Reilly would be proud.Competence And Ideology: One reason why intelligence has become such a tough nut for Obama to crack: There's a lot of Democratic rhetoric on intel from the presidential campaign, and it's something that Obama is allowing the intellectual left to have veto power over. Obama finds himself caught in this first intra-party vise between his instinct to pick competence over ideology. His first rumored choices for CIA were competent picks -- but both would have been eviscerated by the intellectual left because of their anger at Bush over interrogation practices. He's allowing ideology to trump competence for the first time in one of his major appointments. Now, the pick of Dennis Blair to be DNI is a tip toward competence, while the Obama folks hoped Panetta was a compromise between competence and ideology (Panetta was praised as a smart manager during the Clinton White House years). But it looks like it ain't being received that way...Apparently being against torture is now a crazed left-wing ideological position built on "anger" at George Bush. And it's incompetent, to boot. I don't know how many times people have to make this point, but when it comes to torture it is not a matter of being mad at bush or even simple human decency. It is a matter of competence as well. Not only does torture not work as an intelligence tool, the sincere and public repudiation of torture is essential to the success of Obama's foreign policy. If he were to choose someone who was implicated in or associated with Bush's torture regime, his credibility around the world would be damaged before he even begins. It would be dramatically incompetent for him not to make a clear distinction both to the intelligence community and the rest of the world between his policies and the Bush administration's...read on
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got closed by accident...Have fun....
… ;-)
the barbarians are amongst us.
Hey Chuckie, there's a hole under your soul, and it all leaked out.
Only after 8 years of Bush could anyone seriously think that "pick competence over ideology" is a valid conflict.
Would you expect anything smarter or more insightful from Chuck Todd... or any of the other Washington pundits? It's all a big circle jerk. They all read each other and watch each other on TV and then they all regurgitate each other's opinions. None of them has any perspective on reality.
DiFi even said as much in an interview in the New York Times.
When she had her butt handed to her, of course she backtracked and said she was misquoted.
I wonder if "Chuckie" will also have to backtrack???
Funny isn't it.
'He's allowing ideology to trump competence'
and it isn't a statement about Bush!
if Chuckles thought that George HW Bush was qualified when he was named as head of the CIA? I have a funny feeling that this would have fallen under IOKIYAR if his fevered, feeble mind.
Screw Chuck Todd, Mark Halperin, David Gregory and their "Republicans are my Daddy!" obsession.
Maybe we should go wake up the head of OSHA and ask him if he thinks Panetta's qualified.
No, Mr. Todd, it's called IDEALS, which this country once had and which it might return to. Once this country actually followed the Geneva Convention accords, which outlawed torture. That's an ideal, and a treaty the US signed, not an ideology. Where in the world does the MSM get these so-called pundits, and can we have more of the BBC commentators, who actually have consciences and the willingness to speak out on them? Apparently Mr. Todd has never read the op-ed piece of an intelligence agent who stated unequivocally that in his experience, taking a friendly approach actually resulted in more and better information than torture, where the information is suspect because it is obtained under duress.
There's nothing ideological about torture for the person that's being inflicted with torture.
That's a pretty basic test of the truth here.
Who are these idiots that say torture is ideological and who are these TV Idiots that repeat it to us as if it's a legitimate point of view to consider?
"We can build on this."
Yes, let all talk of torture be betrayed as anger towards bush.
Torture is bad. bush promoted torture.
Torture = bush.
bush = torture.
Just like the republicans did with Saddam and 9-11. Let the constant connection sink in to the collective conscience until it becomes widely accepted as true.
I like it.
Damn that Geneva Convention. You just know they made all those decisions about acceptable treatment of prisoners in order to foil Bush, and he was only three years old at the time!
What are they, some kind of bully gang, going after a toddler like that? Bastards. Damn liberal, Bush-hating bastards.
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