I wonder if Philip Klein feels dirty when he writes sentences like these:

When I think of all of the lives that were shattered on 9/11, all of the fathers and sons and brothers and sisters who perished because of a deranged ideology that celebrates death, there’s no way in good conscience I could say that it’s worth suffering a repeat of that attack in order to protect a terrorist from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, or some of the other techniques that were employed.

He should. This is an irredeemably sentimental, emotionally manipulative and unhelpful argument. If this is Klein’s actual thinking on the issue, and not the finely-honed agitprop designed to enflame passions that I take it to be, he ought to take a big step back and go think about things in solitude for a while.

Put aside the ethical concerns if those don’t move you. Put aside the arguments (very convincing to me) that torture confessions are unreliable by their very nature. Why should we not allow our government to legally torture? Remember this? Remember domestic wiretapping? Yes, Malkin’s concerns of being persecuted are self-important and paranoid, but the lesson is clear: don’t give the government powers you’d never want turned against you. You’d think conservatives would have internalized this sentiment by now.

The sad fact of the matter is that even if torture was 100% reliable and ethically unproblematic, people would still die at the hands of terrorists. The world is too big and complex, the blindspots too many to count, and human ingenuity too great for any regime to prevent gruesome attacks on its populace. So in a world where the government cannot protect its citizens reliably, we have to ask ourselves whether we want to grant legal amnesty to an all too human, fallible and fickle institution to torture people.

I, for one, do not.

Here’s an elegantly-put provocative thought which I happen to agree with:

The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What’s different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations.

As Mr. Henley suggests, this newfound frankness is all to the bad. I’ve come to appreciate in the past eight years how important duplicitousness in foreign policy talk actually is.

Discuss.

Andrew Sullivan, amidst his regular shellacking of the Bush administration over torture, slips in the following:

Bush will rightly go down in history as the president who authorized the torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody. But whether he has any self-awareness in this regard is worth asking. I wonder sometimes just how deep the crisis in American government was these past eight years. The entire system, in the end, rested on a man who wasn’t there.

I disagree: it absolutely is not worth asking. Whether he is truly morally bankrupt or merely staggeringly incompetent and/or out to lunch, it happened during his presidency and is therefore his responsibility. The actual workings of his murky mind should be of no concern to anyone. End of story.

The most important thing Bush’s stonewalling and denial tell us is that he is less politically astute than Ronald Reagan. Reagan, faced with a nasty scandal of his own, at least had the sense to symbolically and publicly accept the responsibility for it:

First, let me say I take full responsibility for my own actions and for those of my administration. As angry as I may be about activities undertaken without my knowledge, I am still accountable for those activities. As disappointed as I may be in some who served me, I’m still the one who must answer to the American people for this behavior. And as personally distasteful as I find secret bank accounts and diverted funds — well, as the Navy would say, this happened on my watch.

More cynical people like my parents at the time thought it was a cheap, sentimental tactic to have the president own up to his ignorance and plead for forgiveness with the American people, thereby insulating himself from the fallout. I’m sure Reaganites like Andrew were perfectly happy to take the president at his word.

But then as now, the actual mental state of the president is completely immaterial. Crimes were committed during both presidencies, and both presidencies are forever tarred in the history books. Good enough for me!

Post coverage of Mukasey’s nomination getting through the Senate panel:

Schumer and Feinstein said they took solace in Mukasey’s assurances that he would enforce any future waterboarding ban passed by Congress. That argument prompted a robust retort from Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

“He will, in fact, enforce the laws that we pass in the future? Can our standards have really sunk so low?” Kennedy said. “Enforcing the law is the job of the attorney general. It’s a prerequisite, not a virtue.”

Best sound-byte in a long while. American politics sometimes surprises.