The Weekly Standard Celebrates Its Own Cretinism
by digby
Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard is thrilled that torture is no longer taboo and he thanks “evunthelibrul” Richard Cohen for his perspicacity in understanding that Cheney is right:
One left-wing blogger feels it:
The argument against torture is slipping away from us. In fact, I’m getting the sinking feeling that it’s over. What was once taboo is now publicly acknowledged as completely acceptable by many people. Indeed, disapproval of torture is now being characterized as a strictly partisan issue, like welfare reform or taxes.
I presume that like welfare and taxes, any “strictly partisan issue” will favor Republicans, but this seems about right to me, particularly on a day that Richard Cohen takes to the Washington Post op-ed page to wonder aloud whether Dick Cheney was right — whether enhanced interrogation does work:
In some sense, this is an arcane point since the United States insists it will not torture anymore — not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it. Cheney, though, is adamant that the very measures that are now deemed illegal did work and that, furthermore, doing away with them has made the country less safe. Cheney said this most recently on Sunday, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Those policies were responsible for saving lives,” he told Bob Schieffer. In effect, Cheney poses a hard, hard question: Is it more immoral to torture than it is to fail to prevent the deaths of thousands?
This was always a hard moral question, but as Cohen says, for the left this was no question at all. Like Obama, they reject this as a false choice — and anyone who says otherwise is a moral cretin, a thug, a war criminal. Except these moral midgets seem to comprise some 60 percent of the voting public, maybe more. It’s one of a very few issues where the public is at odds with the current occupant of the White House and sympathetic to his predecessor. Dick Cheney, despite his 18 percent approval rating, is winning this argument against an incredibly popular president. Cohen offers one possible explanation for this the left might want to consider: he’s winning because he’s right.
Richard Cohen is a silly dolt, whose sinecure at the Washington Post is an embarrassment to liberals –Americans — everywhere. Case in point:
Cap [Weinberger], my Safeway buddy, walks, and that’s all right with me. As for the other five, they are not crooks in the conventional sense but Cold Warriors who, confident in the justice of their cause, were contemptuous of Congress. Because they thought they were right, they did not think they had to be accountable. This is the damage the Cold War did to our democracy.
The Weekly Standard, on the other hand, by defending torture, is morally bankrupt and intellectually incoherent. I think this article by Andrew Sullivan from 1998, tells the tale better than anything I could write about it today:
The centrality of this moralism to the Lewinsky saga was perhaps best put by David Frum, one of the brightest of the young conservative thinkers now writing. ”What’s at stake in the Lewinsky scandal,” Frum wrote candidly in the Feb. 16, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, ”is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it’s consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all.”
It would be hard to put better what was so surprising, and so dismaying, about the Starr report and the Republican Congress’s subsequent behavior. The report was driven, as the Republican leadership seems to be, not merely to prove perjury but to expose immorality. In this universe, privacy is immaterial, hence the gratuitous release of private telephone conversations, private correspondence and even details of the most private of human feelings. For these conservatives, there is only a right, as Starr revealingly wrote, to a ”private family life” (emphasis added). A private, nonfamily life is fair game for prosecution and exposure.
No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than William Kristol, best known for his urbane appearances on ”This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts,” and about as close as Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism. And no journal has done more to propagate, defend and advance this version of conservatism than the magazine Kristol edits, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch. Most of this year, Kristol and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade. As early as May — at a time when it seemed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal might dissipate — Kristol urged Republican Congressional candidates to forget other issues in the fall and campaign solely on the issue of the President’s morals. ”If [Republicans] do that,” he argued, ”they will win big in November. And their victory will be more than a rejection of Clinton. It will be a rejection of Clintonism — a rejection of defining the presidency, and our public morality, down.”
His magazine has been relentless in presenting the scandal as a moral crisis for the nation. … Perhaps no edition of The Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Starr report was made public. Its cover portrayed Starr as Mark McGwire, with the headline: ”Starr’s Home Run.” Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage, anchored by an essay by Kristol advocating a full House vote for impeachment of the President within a month, was followed by a long, surreal article by a reporter attending a four-day World Pornography Conference. Six pages of explicit sex, interspersed with coy condescension, followed. (The cover teased with the headline: ”Among the Pornographers.”) One of many graphic scenes in the article occurs in a ladies restroom: ”Unprompted, [Dr. Susan Block] removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up [her assistant] LaVonne’s dress, baring her derriere. Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos.” The article was so lurid that The Standard’s editors prefaced it with a note: ”Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.” The weird porno-puritanism of the Starr report does not exist, it seems, in a vacuum. It comes out of a degenerated conservative political and literary culture.
There you have it. I don’t think I have to spell out the utter moral vacuum that must exist in the minds of people who simultaneously leer at and moralize against pornography and presidential fellatio as a threat to the nation and now argue that torture is not only fine, it is popular and therefore to be righteously embraced.
But in reading that excerpt, you can certainly see why the Weekly Standard would claim torture as a moral value. They’ve long had an … ahem … unusual fascination in that regard. Much like Limbaugh with his vocal support for the Abu Ghraib guards “blowing off steam” and acting out something you’d see at a Madonna concert, the Standard’s puerile, psycho-sexual fascination with S&M and torture both arouses and confuses them. And the reason it confuses is them is that they consistently miss (as with so many issues) the concept of consent, of which, for all their obsession with liberty, they seem to have absolutely no comprehension. So torture, which is horrifying not only because of pain, which is bad enough, but because of the total helplessness of the person whose life is completely out of their control is something they can’t differentiate from “torture.” That combination of pain and total helplessness is what makes torture so terrible that until quite recently it was something we would taught our children was an absolute taboo. (That is also why the SERE training, which the torture apologists use to excuse their sadism, bears as little resemblance to actual torture as that Susan Block anecdote bears to a violent rape.)
As for the alleged popularity of torture being a good reason to support it, I would just point out that the vast majority of the American people were against the Lewinsky impeachment. And at that time the Weekly Standard and other conservatives insisted that the American people’s opinion on the matter was actually a reflection of how horrible the American people actually were. Sullivan noted in the piece linked above:
As public indifference to the scandal has continued, and as Clinton’s approval ratings have remained buoyant despite a pitiless series of embarrassments, the new conservatives have had little alternative but to blame Americans for their lack of judgment.
Hence the title of William Bennett’s latest book, ”The Death of Outrage.” Hence the religious-right icon James Dobson’s recent statement of disappointment in the American people in a letter to his group, Focus on the Family. ”What has alarmed me throughout this episode,” Dobson wrote, ”has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior even as they suspected, and later knew, he was lying. I am left to conclude that our greatest problem is not in the Oval Office. It is with the people of this land.”
Perhaps we lefties have a career opportunity ahead of us writing angry screeds, “blaming American’s first” for torture. But right now, most of us are concentrating on a small handful of Americans — the highest levels on the Bush administration — who actually ordered it.
In my piece that Goldfarb links from yesterday, I did write:
If everyone but the “Democratic Base” has so lost all sense of decency that they think torture is a-ok, then I’m sure they won’t mind if it turns out that the torture didn’t work. They have bought into Cheney’s “one percent solution” which holds that even if there’s only a one percent chance that an America could be harmed the government must prevent it by any means necessary. It might not turn out to be real, and it could result in a terrible catastrophic blowback down the road, but nobody ever said we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. And today, we have the head of the Democratic Leadership Council endorsing the logic behind it.
One hopes this will make a difference, but I doubt it. Since polls are showing that half the country thinks torture is justified, mealy mouthed politicians everywhere will be rushing to join them. There’s nothing they hate more than being categorized with the DFHs.
In my zeal to show how the village was beginning to congeal around the idea that being against torture was a kooky, left wing notion, I mischaracterized the poll a bit and I regret it. It’s more complicated than that:
Six in 10 people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Wednesday believe that some of the procedures, such as waterboarding, were a form of torture, with 36 percent disagreeing. But half the public approves of the Bush administration’s decision to use of those techniques during the questioning of suspected terrorists, with 50 percent in approval and 46 percent opposed. “Roughly one in five Americans believe those techniques were torture but nonetheless approve of the decision to use those procedures against suspected terrorists,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
So for most people the question really revolves around whether or not they believe that what the Bush administration did was actually torture. (I would guess that a fair number of those people who think waterboarding and the rest aren’t torture are former Bush supporters who simply can’t fathom that the man could do anything so blatantly immoral, lest they implicate themselves in the immorality.) This is why you have Liz Cheney sounding like an automaton on Morning Joe today saying “we didn’t torture” over and over again and soulless hacks like Cliff May saying this on Ed Shultz this afternoon:
Here’s where we agree. You think torture is wrong, I think torture is wrong. Let me tell you, the CIA intelligence officers who conducted the intelligence interrogations and the lawyers from the justice department, they all thought torture was wrong. If you’re going to prosecute them because you disagree with their opinion, you are establishing a tyranny you will come to regret.
The point all along, with Bush and Cheney (and now, unfortunately, Obama) saying “America doesn’t torture” is to keep up the fiction that what they did was not illegal or immoral. I find it pretty depressing that only half the country can see clearly that it was. But perhaps I’m just being too much of a glass half empty kind of person. Many people don’t want to believe their country could torture and so they simply choose to take the torturers at their word — and the torturers are relying on what’s left of the conservative intelligentsia to soothe and reassure them that they should believe them instead of their own eyes:
I do believe the argument is slipping away, but mainly because of self-serving politicians like Dick Cheney and Harold Ford and the failure of the Obama administration to take an unequivocal stand. Why should the majority of the public condemn torture when the leadership of both parties are trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug? Maybe they just don’t want to know. But that doesn’t make it right … or legal. If all we had to consider was popular sentiment, we wouldn’t need a constitution or a legal system at all.
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