How can we honestly address anything that matters to us unless we can call the thing exactly what it is? Euphemism and newspeak are worse in this regard than lies. The lie merely points out the intentions of the liar; when the Bush administration tells the world America doesn’t torture and spends political capital to ensure no government agent or temporary mercenary is ever punished for drowning someone within an inch of their life, their active agency is clear.
However, when parties who claim to clear-eyed, serious and responsible use terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or call water-boarding “simulated drowning,” when the drowning is real and the goal is to simulate death (I believe it’s also called simulated drowning since to name it as it actually is means to define it as torture even under the savage, immoral reasoning of John Yoo), all we can discern is that those parties seek to deceive. Mainly, they seek to deceive themselves, to refute their own knowledge and awareness in favor o comfort and the security of being assured about one’s worldview.
Which all leads me to Nicholas Kristoff again. It’s not that I set out to beat him up, he just provides material that can’t be ignored. On opposite sides of the Op-Ed pages in The Week In Review section of the Times, I read the following statements:
Virtues requiring caveats are not virtues. Saying a man is honest is a compliment. Saying a man is “generally” honest or honest “quite often” means he lies. The mistreatment of detainees, like honesty, is all or nothing: We either do stuff like that or we do not.
Facing it is this:
It is true that Mr. McCain sometimes weaves and bobs. With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is. On Wednesday, for example, he retreated on his brave stand on torture by voting against a bill that would block the C.I.A. from using physical force in interrogations.
His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism,” he embraced it as “a symbol of heritage.” To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles.”
In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.
One of these writers is the former chief military prosecutor at Gitmo, the other is Kristoff. I won’t ask anyone to guess. If you can’t name the thing, you can’t do anything about it, except make sure it endures.
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