2010 blogging

It has been a while. Christmas was a blur (as it always is) and here in Oklahoma we experienced a blizzard for the ages on Christmas Eve. It was beautiful, fun and scary and infuriating--all at the same time. My parents visited and I was so glad their drive avoided the bad storms on both legs.

Christmas was good. But then on New Years Eve, as SOF and I attended an Oklahoma City Thunder game, I realized that my congestion was more than that. I woke up New Years Day with a fever and grinding headache. That cold (or whatever) has persisted and hit me hard again yesterday. This morning, I feel like I might have pushed through toward the good side, or can see it in sight.

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So, what else is going on? During Christmas, I heard second-hand about the Christmas bomber on the flight headed to Detroit. I heard that security would make travel much harder on flyers and thought that the terrorists got just about exactly what they wanted. We often seem to forget that terrorism is not intended to destroy us in some kind of violent military strike, but to undermine our ability to function. In that vein, it has worked quite well.

But then, after Christmas, I read about the number of Republicans and conservatives calling for the bomber to be waterboarded or otherwise tortured to find out what else he knew. Rasmussen (a questionable pollster, btw) reports that some 58% of Americans support that view.

Everyone reading here knows that I consider the Bush administration one of the worst in American history--shockingly incompetent and destructive. And this is one of the by-products of that administration that shocks me to my core--that so many Americans embrace torture. And not just the bigoted and stupid--but the supposedly moral and churched--those most likely to report their political decisions based on "morality."

It still boggles that mind that people who rant about the torture of Christ, or even (as I noted before Christmas) will raise the specter of tortured Christian dissidents, see no disconnect between that sense of outrage and their endorsement of the torture of terrorists. That is how they see it, of course, that all of the people we tortured were actual terrorists. Never mind that the torture of terrorists is still immoral and counter to the teachings of Christ. Never mind that it is ineffective. (Never mind that we have tortured people to produce false confessions: see Andy Worthington: A Truly Shocking Guantanamo Story: Judge Confirms That an Innocent Man Was Tortured to Make False Confessions).

Terrorism may have won after all. It has turned our moral compass so much that we now make the same kind of moral judgements as the terrorists themselves--that it is ok to do evil things to people you consider to be evil.

This is not a new observation, but one that shows up in such amazing clarity when we watch our political discourse. When you see people who embrace torture and wiretapping then calling healthcare a form of "tyranny," then you see that our moral compass has had the indicator ripped off the base and thrown away.