Salad days.
Yes, I know the Online Integrity signing statement is nothing more than a cudgel wielded by some particularly witless hypocrites, but nonetheless, I must take exception to Chris Bowers’ seemingly sensible initial reaction. “In 2006,” he says,
I have no plans to steal candy from children, or to take money from the collection plate at church. I do not plan to spit on people I pass on the sidewalk, nor do I plan to set fire to a school. I have no intention of committing insurance fraud, insider trading, bank robbery, sexual assault, murder, or genocide. I do not plan on doing any of these things, because I think they are ethically wrong. I also do not plan to sign a pledge indicating that I am not going to do any of these things.
Perhaps; perhaps. But: back in the late ’80s, tail-end of the Reagan years, orientation week or somesuch at Oberlin, and various student groups are proselytizing from card-table pulpits outside Wilder. And if I tell you no one would ever have been so tub-thumpingly stupid as to set up an affirmative action bake sale back then, well, maybe you’ll see where I’m going, but maybe not. —One of the organizations was of course Amnesty International, and one of the buttons they had for anyone to pick up and pin to their jacket (for this was the ’80s, after all) was a red one, I think, that said in big bold white block letters:
STOP TORTURE
And my friend’s rolling her eyes at this, my friend who’s written more than her share of letters to political prisoners. “Oh, that’s brave,” she says. “What, we’re celebrating basic human decency now? You really think someone’s ever going to come up and see that button and say to you, no, no, we need to torture more—”
(Ah, but Michelle Malkin was somewhere in that crowd. So you never know. —Even then, we never knew.)
Now, Kip, why be such an extremist? Somewhere between the “let’s torture” crowd and the “never torture” crowd, there has to be a compromise. That’s what democracy is all about. Push for a whole loaf, fine; but be prepared to accept half a loaf. All Malkin and the Administration are trying to do is present a moderate approach to the torture debate, a third way, if you will. Thus we can interrogate a prisoner knowing that our torture methods have been approved by a consensus-building process.
Whenever I hear candidates compete to prove they’ll be tough on crime, I’ve thought that the first time one steps forth to say they’re pro-crime will get my vote.
As regards Malkin, though, I certainly think we should ask Geneva to consider her columns a torture worth outlawing. She’s definitely a bigot as vocal as any backwards Southern redneck I’ve ever met.