But I’m very, very afraid that for wingnuts everywhere – be they best-selling wingnut-welfare recips doling out bigot truisms; or reactionary judges and law-school profs (not just at Regent U.!); or corporate execs/GOP mega-donors; or just plain dirty rednecks – the Constitution is to be more honored in the breach than the observance. There is a primitive, quasi-spiritual Constitution sitting hot & restive in the wingnut heart, which can’t hold a candle to the parchment in the Archives; and the spiritual Constitution – “24″-like, Minuteman-like, provides *immediate* and unambiguous counsel and authority. The *true* Constitution is like the Coliseum, to these people: site of the eternal agon, messy with common blood & sweat. The fight over restraint and rights and all that seems to them never to end, and they feel as if each victory *for the People* is actually a loss. They’re cheated if the cops can’t summarily shoot down “perps,” or if abortion providers can’t be hounded away or even lynched, or if gays can “flaunt” their “lifestyle” on Main Street without threat of beating; or especially if dirty furriners can move around the U.S. speaking and dressing as they wish.

Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” was in its time a nasty little exploitation movie riffing on Nixonian “Silent Majority” resentments; but at this point Harry’s no longer “dirty” – he’s the motherfucking man, he runs things with proud thuggishness in the form of Cheney or Scalia…or, certainly, Giuliani.

Even Hillary Clinton is far more careful to take a “stand” on the possibility of committing horrific mass murder via nuking Iran – a sovereign country which hasn’t attacked us – than standing strong on maintaining Constitutional protections for parties most in need of it.

Non-Yanks? Come now, everybody knows the Yanks are a baseball team, and that’s a whole other kettle of fish. They still aren’t necessarily traitors, unless, of course, they’ve never seen the Superbowl. Since the World Series and the Superbowl are brilliantly scheduled to not coincide, baseball fans can manage quite easily to not fall prey to traitorous behavior.

What is this “whole world” of which you speak?

I don’t think you’re disagreeing at all. Humiliating sociopaths *is* hurting them.

Hurting people is so much more than smacking them in the head. As mikey notes, for example, hurting people–some people anyway–is making them smack someone else in the head. But that wouldn’t hurt a conscienceless sociopath anymore than threatening the family of someone who hasn’t got one.

Oddly enough, I think waterboarding these assholes would serve the dual purpose of terrifying/hurting them and humiliating/hurting them. But I doubt it’d work on most of them anyway, since having been freshly humiliated by circumstances, they’re not going to be eager to humiliate themselves by explaining to their fellow assholes that they were wrong. They’d know all too well how much humiliation that would involve, and I doubt they’d risk it.

I’d like to hope it would shut some of them up, though, so rational people could be heard.

I’ll disagree. Many bullies are sociopaths. The only way to make sociopaths think is to humiliate them and also punish them for their actions. Social standing and prestige are often the most important things to sociopaths. Humilation/mocking and imprisonment are the biggest threats to that prestige.

As far as I can tell, prestige to them functions like love to us. It’s something they will do almost anything to achieve and defend.

There are plenty of law-abiding sociopaths out there — they behave legally because their fear of getting caught kind of substitutes for a conscience. It keeps their baser instincts under control.

Sadly, this administration has given even the law-abiding sociopaths the excuse to act badly. Defining torture and saying it’s o.k. to plead self-defense has opened the door to every bully and sociopath out there to go wild. Because that is the other thing about sociopaths — they are empty inside unless they are feeding off other people’s strong emotions – emotions such as pain, fear, anxiety, anger…

That is one of the many reason why the Bush-league administration has been so bad for our country — he’s given free rein to sociopaths to get that emotional food they crave without any punishment.

And that is why punishment is going to be so important. No telecomm immunity for spying, for exampe. Impeaching Cheney and Bush for any number of high crimes and misdemeanors for another.

Screw that — everybody knows waterboarding is torture, that torture is not just “bad,” it’s evil. You see, this is why the Right-wingers win so many arguments with the Center (let’s face it, nothing “leftist” about the Democratic Party). They turn every obviously-wrong thing they want to do into a great debate, and we obligingly play of the field they choose.

Torture is evil and waterboarding is torture, full stop. Condemn it loudly for what it is, don’t beg people to accept what is obvious in the first place.

Believe me, I do know what you’re saying though I won’t get into it here. But I’ve seen too many people gleefully take up the role of abuser or torturer, not giving the slightest damn about losing whatever humanity they had to begin with, to believe that most of the assholes currently advocating waterboarding would be bothered by it at all. They’re bullies, and you don’t make bullies think by making them hurt others. You make bullies think–if at all–by hurting them.

But I guess that’s where this road is supposed to lead in the long run.

1. There is the “CERTAINTY OF GUILT” imposed on the victim.
2. There is “NO INTENTION OF MURDER” presumed in the process.

All of the apologist cling desperately to those two attributes.

Its like they believe ‘Christ’ himself is preforming the torture.

It literally turned my stomach.

I suppose you have to be Dick Cheney or George Bush to avoid any detrimental impact. After all, they issue the orders others follow.

Frantz Fanon wrote about this, as several of his psychiatric patients during the Algerian war were torturers who suffered from migraines and other physical ailments. They didn’t connect the dots between the symptoms and their “work”, but he did.

I’d WAY rather BE tortured than be the torturer.

There is NOTHING more dehumanizing, more likely to wreck your humanity and steal your soul, like being forced to participate in a torture session. Whether you brought the poor fucker in, or you were the scared asshole that thought that a mock “execution”, a pistol to the head under an empty chamber, beatings, c’mon now, REAL beatings where the teeth all fly out in a spray of mucous and blood, where the rifle butt breaks the nose and the cheekbones, and sometimes it goes on ’til the forehead cracks and the grey matter starts leaking out, and still the poor good-as-dead guy is trying to please you, tell you what you wanna hear, because he believes he might still walk away, when everybody else in the bunker knows he’s gonna die in the next hour. Hard.

It’s not fair. That’s the thing. You exercise that kind of power, but you don’t actually CONTROL that kind of power, you’re just a thug for the power structure, it tears up your insides.

You think PTSD is all about what you saw, what you experienced.

Sometimes, guys come home wrecked for the simple reason that they were asked/told/forced to sacrifice their most basic humanity in the name of survival. They had to do things they KNEW were evil, and then they had to spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out if THEY were evil for it.

It’s a fucked up system. And it hurts a whole bunch of people…

mikey

That’s really all you needed to say… putting “Gates of Vagina Vienna” in a blog post is kind of like a big green Mr. Yuck sticker for teh Interwebs.

“Hi! I’m a moronic wanker who stole my name from Jack Vance and now I’ll tell you all about the evil Mooslims about to destroy Western Civilization! Nyeeeyow! Gotta keep an eye on those rural compounds! They’re comin’ to get us! Gimme three wilsons for a bee, I gotta go tie an onion to my belt!”

“Michelle Malkin’s Left Testicle”…..ROFL….that name needed usage. Many thanks.

Because you can generally endure anything when you know it’s going to end, but as others have noted, it’s a vastly different thing when you think you might be going to die.