Good Bloggin': What Would Reagan Do (About Waterboarding)?; Torture Then & Now; the Great UK Experiment; Progressive Role Model of the Day; Ross Douthat, & Whither the GOP's Wretched Excesses?

photo "victoria" by addedsparkle (Jennifer), used pursuant to CC license

by Teh Nutroots | Great stuff, this.

WWRD?  Oy, Republicans!  Torture: What would Ronald Reagan do?  MEC at Mercury Rising says:

During the Reagan Administration, the Department of Justice prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three deputies for waterboarding suspects to obtain confessions, and won convictions. The sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison, and the deputies to 4 years.

The jury in the Texas case rejected the arguments that the torturers “didn’t know it was illegal” and were only following orders.

Zach W at Blogging Blue has a direct quote:

In fact, here’s what he said in his signing statement ratifying the UN Convention on Torture from 1984 (emphasis mine):

“The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention . It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called ‘universal jurisdiction.’ Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

That’s a pretty unambiguous statement.

Yes, it is.  But, as Zach W. goes on to remark, they don't think waterboarding is torture....ergo...  Eh, come on, you know the Gipper would have taken it for one of those newfangled sports the kids are into, and wouldn't have cared how many times it was done to any alleged terrorist.  I mean, come on:  Reagan, really?  Um, remember Ollie North?  The contras?  

Still, it does bring back wistful memories of a time when the executive wasn't interested in what the DoJ got up to in its spare time....

Accountability:  None.   That's because there wasn't any to start with.   The delightful yet misanthropic anarchist IOZ, responding to a quote from Hilzoy, doesn't buy the notion that holding Bush & Co. accountable for their war crimes will ever work. 

When people talk about "criminalizing policy differences", there's a crucial, question-begging assumption, namely: that no one actually broke the law.

-Hilzoy at the Washington Monthly

When liberals talk about "holding the Bush administration to account" and other colorful varieties of that species of songbird, there's a crucial, question-begging assumption, namely that "the Presidency is a public trust, not a license for criminality."....

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but the wagon train has long since rolled West on the circumscribed presidency. The train has left the station. The ship has sailed. The toothpaste has left the tube. If it comforts them, Democratic partisans can believe that their glorious leader "ended torture as one of his first acts in office," but the more realistic reading is that he codified a public policy whereby the United States tortures prisoners in extremis, during hot warfare or following terrorist attacks, but will not go all France-in-Algeria every time it commits resources to this or that colonial war around the world. The yet more realistic reading is that the United States returns to the status quo ante of keeping its torture private--distant Bagram the obvious counterpart to nearby Guantanamo and all that.

Tragically, it is true.  All the rest is posturing.  Posturing has its uses, but it's not going to solve Bagram.

Meanwhile, in the UK....  Doughty Brit blogger Alex Goodall is relieved that economist Paul Krugman (celebrated these days in song, in this song as well as in that) is a bit bullish in re: Blighty.  Well:  a bit.  It looks as if Britain is set to become the "perfect test case for the rival economic models of today's left and right."

The UK stimulus package and the dramatic fall in the value of the pound bode well for our economy, according to Paul Krugman. "Right now I'm actually quite hopeful about Britain," he says....

Whichever comes first - national bankruptcy or national recovery - we'll be able to content ourself at least that we're contributing to the stock of general knowledge about macroeconomic policy.

So that's alright then...!

Progressive Role Model of the Day:  Susie Madrak.  Krugman has explained how the self-styled "sensible" pundits helped piss away the country's dignity and freedom with their conventional wisdom and sitting on the fence talking out of both sides of their mouhts. 

But there are those who stood up to be counted, of whom he and Susie Madrak are two.

To illustrate, Susie recounts what she really said to Harry Reid on a certain occasion.

The fact that I’m not deferential to my betters has always been a problem in terms of career advancement. Oh well! It sucks to be Cassandra.

Here’s what Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2006 about the last Congressional-blogger conference call (with Harry Reid) to which I was ever invited. I wonder why?

There were numerous other questions on other topics, and Susie Madrak ended the call by underscoring the premise underlying most (if not all) of the questions posed to Sen. Reid, including mine — namely, that the Democrats’ greatest failing has been their failure to take real stands against the Bush administration and to convey to Americans that they are genuinely committed to fighting for their interests. She was appropriately insistent with that point, not allowing Sen. Reid to dismiss it away by claiming that he is sometimes accused of being too confrontational (it’s probably true that he is, just like journalists are “sometimes” accused of being too hostile to the Bush administration, but they’re both besides the point).

If you want to be technical, the first thing I said to Reid was, “What the fuck is wrong with you people?”

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

I wasn’t going to write about this because I get so damned depressed after these calls. I hope Glenn’s right, but I’ve seen the Democrats lie down so many times, I feel like Charlie Brown with the football.

The tone of these calls is always so deferential - and I’m not. That’s why I always feel like the turd in the punchbowl. I mean, I like Harry Reid, and he’s turned out to be really good at a lot of things, but my job is not to validate Harry Reid. My job, as I see it, is to give voice to the voiceless in this country.

I did my job.

She did, and those of us who were still watching from the sidelines will always remember that about her. 

Speaking of Doing One's Job, How About Ross Douthat's Big Move to The New York Times?  Over at Fire Meagan McArdle, NutellaonToast has an assessment.

Douthat has his debut over at the New York Times, whose motto seems to be "We're going to push newspapers into irrelevancy as fast as we can!" ...So glad Rossie's around. It makes the flailing death of the Republican Party that much more amusing..

The Last Word:  Mick Arran on the Church of Radical Capitalism.  And speaking of the GOP's slide off the cliff into irrelevancy, Mick Arran at Fact-esque knows what's wrong with the GOP, and in the course of critiquing certain naive progressives, sums it up:

The modern GOP is no longer a political party. The people who believed that were all purged long ago. The modern GOP is now the home of a religion called Radical Capitalism, an unabashed, take-no-prisoners adoration of $$$ and all that flows from it. In fact, if they're going to presume to change the name of the Democratic Party, we could do worse than change theirs to the Radical Capitalist Party. But even then we'd be dodging the fact. The Church of Radical Capitalism would be nearer the mark....

Look, why do you think they continue to fight for lower corporate taxes and more deregulation when the proof is all around them that those things a) don't work, and b) are completely anathema to a healthy economy? The facts have been in front of us for 100 years. Every time unrepentant, unchained capitalism has been tried it has been a disaster for everybody except the very rich. Yet conservatives continue to insist that any other economic system is tantamount to Satanism.

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