“Nothing matters if we aren’t safe”
by digby
Marco Rubio was too busy campaigning yesterday to vote on it, but just in case anyone worried that he might not be depraved enough to be a Republican president he issued a statement strongly supporting the use of torture :
As for the amendment, Rubio said in a statement: “I would have voted no on this amendment. I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won’t use.” He added that he doesn’t want to deny “future commanders in chief and intelligence officials important tools for protecting the American people and the U.S. homeland.”
If that doesn’t spell out the fact that any future president who feels like it will use torture secure in the knowledge that nothing will happen if they do it. There were laws against torture in place before they did it and there are more laws in place now. it means nothing if there is no enforcement mechanism. And there isn’t.
Simon Maloy spells out what you can expect if a Republican returns to the White House:
This pro-torture stance is part of Rubio’s broader campaign to be the new president of the new century that revives literally every bad foreign policy and national security decision from the Bush administration. It’s also in keeping with Rubio’s very Bush-like focus on “security” as being the first and only determining factor in what American policy should be – “Nothing Matters If We Aren’t Safe,” as the Rubio campaign slogan puts it.
“Nothing matter is we aren’t safe…” There you go. That excuses any breach of human decency, law and norm. Because I hate to break the news to people, you will never be perfectly safe. We used to be a mature enough society to understand that. But now that we have the Daddy Party infantilizing us, a whole lot of Americans are so easily frightened they just want to suck their thumbs and hear a nice bedtime story about what good girls and boys they are.
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